Navigating Mind: Four Tips For Enhancing Meditation
First of all. this post isn’t just for people who meditate although those who do can more readily make use of the information provided. These same principles can be used in many places and in many different ways but ultimately, I want to and am going to keep as simple as I can, so that you easily, effortlessly and automatically understand the principles and ideas inherent in the work before even realizing how you may or may not have already begun to implement them now. I want to assure you it’s a no brainer as I share with you these four what you can call principles, or at the very least, useful tips for how to have a more fulfilling experience in the land of meditation. I’m not going to stray too far off topic in this post so if you’re ready, let’s begin.
The first of the four I’m sharing with you is, “Shut out outside sensory inputs.”
Another way of saying this is make it so that what steals your attention goes away for a little while from your experience. This could mean you go into the bathroom, shut off the lights and focus on the meditation from there so that outside visuals don’t draw your attention as much. It could mean, if you’re in a public space and want to meditate, picking a spot on the floor. You don’t want to close your eyes for long periods of times in the open public spaces because you want to remain aware of your surroundings, but you can pick a spot on the floor and focus on that. While everything around you is moving, conduct your meditation with your eyes painted on that spot on the floor and let the noise and everything else keep going without your interruption.The second I want to play with is, “Don’t beat yourself up.”
Just because it doesn’t go the way you want it to doesn’t mean you did it wrong. Perhaps this is an awareness exercise and you’re learning how you are being led astray from your own inner experience. The world is constantly moving and happening, if you will, and the idea isn’t to make yourself wrong because you supposedly didn’t do it right. You do it whatever way it plays out and next time, if you do it again, it becomes again its own unique experience. In this way you aren’t judging yourself for doing whatever you do … even if whatever you end up doing is judging yourself.
A meditation that can help with this, also found in Mindfulness no less, is known as “watching your thoughts” which Alan Watts speaks to at great length in his many talks. You can sit somewhere eyes open or closed or pick a spot to stare into, and you simply … give attention to your thoughts. Attention without action. Inactive attention outside of the activity of solely watching. A thought comes up, you observe it and let it go. You say something mean about yourself, you observe it and you let it go. You say this is a waste of time, you observe it, you let it go. This consistency builds up over time creating a separation between the I that thinks it is having the thoughts and the I that thinks it is the thoughts and the watcher that doesn’t try and make that connection.
This can be done with the imagination as well. Pretend the thoughts are inside of balloons or are clouds. Just watch each thought as it comes up float away. Don’t worry, you can always have them back if you really want them.The third useful tip I’m introducing is, “Stop pulling back.”
Whatever exercise you are going to do, do it fully. Whatever the meditation is go so fully into it that what is on the outside doesn’t matter in that space. This is more or less about not doing anything halfway. This doesn’t mean if you’re in public, ignore the public. It means the meditation you choose to do in the public, if done in a safe way, you are able to explore it in all its capacities and if it’s dangerous to do there, don’t. I’ll give you an example of how this principle operates. This meditation comes out of acting classes and a previous mentor of mine shared with me some time ago. It’s called polarity drills or polarity exercises.
Sit in a chair. Go fully into an emotion whether that be happy, or sad or angry or curious or mischievous or whatever. That’s one pole. Once you’ve gone as far into it as you can go, go into it’s opposite. So the opposite of curious might be disinterested, of the opposite of angry could be indifferent. That’s the second pole of the polarity exercise and you work through the spectrum of emotions in this way. Stopping pulling back means not letting yourself fully go into the meditation you are trying to work on and the polarity exercise, among its other results, can help you get this principle.Lastly, “Let yourself have the experience.”
Many times, we go into a particular exercise already with presumptions about how it will play out. I heard a man once say that if you went into a movie already having expectations about how the movie will be, you’re keeping yourself from having the experience the director is trying to create for you. When you go into the meditation without ideas in place about how it will play out or what is going to happen, you give yourself a chance to just get what you get. That is, you accept the way things are. So many times we are trying to change how we feel or fix something that’s wrong or rearrange something that’s out of place or heal something that’s hurting when the necessary thing to do may in fact be to stop trying at all and to let what happens happens in those situations where trying to do something makes it worse and not trying to do something will give you the best outcome.
This is the act of doing nothing and the action that comes from this place of doing nothing refers to what happens of itself, another Buddhist principle Alan Watts speaks on and what Abraham Hicks references in speaking on when you stop holding the bobber underwater, it will naturally rise to the surface. To practice this principle, the meditation is in connection with the world happening around you. Next time you want to do something, try and do nothing instead. The action that comes from this space may in fact be the same action or may just be a different action entirely but you at least now give yourself a choice in the matter instead of reacting to impulse.
There you have it. This list in NO way is all encompassing and does not contain everything you can learn about how to make meditation work for you. Reems of books, whole entire libraries, can and have been written on the subject so to let you know, this blog post in no way is comprehensive and does not do the whole subject justice as there are far more principles that one can draw upon in the subject in one session.
That being said, these four Principles and how to enact them in your life around the meditations you choose to perform are a great starting point if you want to learn more about it and dive deeper into the subject. They can help you to learn about yourself as well as others or how you think about others in that they provide opportunities for your own self-awareness to grow which means you put yourself in a position to do more good than harm, rather than the other way around when entering the story of your life.
Then again, I will add, life, I’m told, is a meditation in and of itself so regardless, just notice how these principles can be used overall in ways you couldn’t before predict, as where life will have taken you might bring in the future new thoughts and understandings naturally presenting them to you in new and exciting ways unconceivable by the mind you once had and the person you once were. And that’s something to think about!
