Meditation is a practice in which an individual trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness, either to realize some benefit or as an end in itself.
The term meditation refers to a broad variety of practices (much like the term sports) that includes techniques designed to promote relaxation, build internal energy or life force (qi, ki, prana, etc.) and develop compassion, love, patience, generosity and forgiveness. A particularly ambitious form of meditation aims at effortlessly sustained single-pointed concentration single-pointed analysis, meant to enable its practitioner to enjoy anindestructible sense of well-being while engaging in any life activity.
~Wikipedia
There are so many forms of meditation, I can’t even begin to address them all here. But, I would like to talk about some of the amazing (and powerful) things it can do, and a few of the methods that I have found and enjoyed. I’m also going to talk about some of the negative thoughts on meditation some people hold.
Your subconscious can sabotage you in major ways, from throwing a tantrum about the monkeys tearing apart the circuitry, to making you forget and lose things, to taking away your ability to walk. Meditation facilitates communication between the different parts of your mind, and allows you to deal with the monkeys and other problems that inevitably come throughout your life, and makes you a happier person, such as this monk. (I’m linking that one twice in this article because it is just that interesting.)
I am going to concentrate on what is done during meditation, rather than where the methods originated from. This is partially because I’m not sure where the came from exactly, and partially because I am more interested in the affects of meditation on the mind and body than I am in it’s history.
Why Does it Work
Meditation seems to allow the brain to communicate with itself more easily, and allows it to come to terms with and make decisions or chances more effectively. Essentially, most people are running around with 90% of their brain shouting about what is going on, with their conscious (the 10%) sitting in a sound-proofed cockpit going “What was that? Couldn’t hear you. Oh, by the way, we’re going this way now 😀 keep us from crashing, would you?” In that analogy, meditation is the conscious getting up for a minute, opening the door and saying, “Hey, so how is the plane going, and are there any problems or anything I should know about?”
This is really important. Especially considering that the rest of this “plane” includes everything from your medical health, to traumas you’ve suffered, to the angst you’re feeling about that ex girlfriend. It’s also very important because –as intelligent, big, and powerful as your subconscious is– it can throw tantrums like a 3-year old, and will sabotage you if you don’t listen to it for long enough.
A really common example of this sabotage is when your subconscious starts hiding things from you. In general, your subconscious remembers everything you see, hear, touch, or learn. It knows exactly where your keys are in the morning, where you left your glasses, that you were supposed to wake up at 6 (and knows when that is without an alarm), and that you were supposed to call her back. If your subconscious can’t see the point in reminding you, if it’s mad at you, if it is throwing a tantrum because you’re ignoring how helpful it’s been, or if it just really doesn’t want to do something: it will just make you forget and laugh at you while you try to figure it out.
After all, how helpful you would feel if you were in this situation? You run the plane, you keep it flying and make sure it doesn’t hit things or run our of fuel, and you make the steering wheel actually do something. But there are rabid monkeys running amok and half the plane is on fire, and you need the pilot to do something about it. Instead of listening or helping, the pilot turns the music up and starts singing along.
Meditation opens the lines of communication between the conscious and subconscious, allowing the you to hear about all the issues, calm the subconscious down, and make it feel appreciated. After all, it only controls everything from your memory to, to walking, to breathing, to your heartbeat, not to mention that it is the foundation of nearly all of your emotions.
I can’t find the article now, but there was a mormon boy who lost his ability to walk while on a mission trip. Nothing was wrong with his legs and no one was quite sure what wrong with him. Eventually he talked with a therapist, and it turned out that he had a few rather major problems with what he was preaching (if memory serves, issues with his parents and he was gay). Once he realized what his issue was and faced it, he was able to walk again. His subconscious couldn’t find anything else to get the kid’s attention, so it turned off his ability to walk. Things like this happen very regularly, especially in the job environment, religion, and occasionally in problematic relationships.
On the other hand, monks (who frequently meditate, and focus on becoming happier, more calm and loving people) are some of the most happy people on earth. I highly recommend you all go read this article. Buddhist Monk, Happiest Man On Earth
No one is really sure what meditation does scientifically, they are still studying it, and are making some very interesting discoveries. A little odd to think that it has been around for thousands of years, that many people make use of it every day, and scientists still aren’t quite sure what they’re doing. But perhaps that isn’t surprising, we still don’t “know” most of what our own brains do every day for us, and much of the human body is still a mystery even as we learn more every year.
I’m not going to summaries the article I just linked to, because I really want you all to read it, but essentially: even if scientists don’t know everything about what meditation does, they do know that it makes a measurable change to the brain, and makes people happier and healthier.
Negative Stereotypes
I’ve heard people assume that meditation was new-age BS, or something only for pagans. I’ve heard people be skeptical that meditation does anything, and I’ve heard saying that they thought it was somehow evil or of the devil. I’ve also heard people be afraid of meditation.
To begin with: YES, meditation does work if you put the time and effort into it, and there are many people who have had (frankly) amazing results with the things they were able to accomplish through it. People have kicked habits, improved their health, fought off illness, temporarily stopped their hearts, and have discovered a wide range of things about their own brains. This is all aside from the emotional benefits and self-happiness that it can help you achieve.
Second: Meditation has been around for thousands of years, and was in-fact part of christianity and many other religions for a very long time. I am not certain what led to the current separation between (at least most) versions of christianity and meditation, but meditation was once considered a form of prayer and a way to understand god. I suspect that the divide came about when eastern meditation was introduced. Since christians and meditation have been one of the larger sticking points I’ve found, I would encourage you all to check out this section of the Wikipedia article referenced at the beginning of this post.
Methods of Meditation
The main methods of meditation that I have experienced are mainly: Basics, Breathing Exercises / Visualizations, Study, House Mind, Exploratory, Focus / Subconscious Focus. The experiences here are mostly my own. I do not claim to be an expert on this, but I have been using various forms of meditation for 6+ years, and I dabbled in it before that.
Basics –
The closest thing to a “base” to meditation that I have found is simply calming and centering yourself. There isn’t a special way of sitting needed to meditate, and you don’t need to hum or repeat phrases endlessly. The closest thing to a core of meditation seems to be making yourself and mind still, and concentrating inward on yourself.
Early on, it is often very difficult for people to calm their mind, to stop thinking about the dishes that need to be done, how your nose itches and you really should get another cup of coffee and walk the dog. Or to keep from thinking about who might have just closed a door down the hall, and if the text your heard was the one you were waiting for. Because of this, it is helpful to start off in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed, and at a time when you can turn your phone off. It can also be very difficult to focus on nothing and to keep your mind entirely blank, which is why it can be so useful to concentrate on your breathing. Breathing is very central to each of us, and it turns your thoughts away from the outside world, and back to what you are doing.
Calming yourself and turning your attention away from the outside world is something I’ve found to be a useful starting block for the other exercises.
Breathing Exercises / Visualizations –
This form of meditation seems to be very popular on the internet lately, and it is one of the easier methods in my experience. In it, you begin by focusing on your breathing, and then visualize various things moving through your body, around you, or in you. What the visualization is of changes the affect it will have on you. Most of these seem to have fairly mild effects in my opinion, but they can be very relaxing and can make you feel much better, and they can be relatively quick and useful tools. This form is one that I’ve heard referred to as mindfulness meditation
Study –
This is a method used quite a lot traditionally, and which I suspect would be very useful for all levels of education, though it isn’t one that I have personally explored much. This is a form of concentrative meditation. The idea behind this form is to read about whatever you wish to study, and then to meditate on what you have read. Essentially you spend some time being still and either thinking intensively about what you just learned, or focusing on one particular point or phrase you learned, to engrain it in your mind and to gain a better understanding of the material. This technique has been used by several religions, including christianity. (Which I only point out in particular because of how much I’ve seen that particular group reject meditation lately.)
House Mind –
This is the method that I use most. In it, you have an internal visualized landscape with some form of house/manor/castle. The building represents your mind, along with everything in it. This method relies heavily on symbology, which takes time to learn and get used to “translating” to allow you to figure out what exactly you are seeing. The symbology here is NOT something that can be looked up in a book, it is made up of things your particular brain relates to other things.
So for instance: if you found a room with a globe on a desk, it probably doesn’t mean much that it is on a desk because globes are often on desks. The globe itself might mean something about travel, if you used to plot plane flights on them as a child with your parents, because you associate globes with travel. But then, maybe you mostly remember globes from a boring history class and it’s meaning has something to do with that. Maybe an ornately folded napkin would remind you of travel, from a restaurant that did that when you were traveling. Every meaning depends on your personal experiences and what you thought was important, and most of the really big associations happen when you are young (under 18, at least).
This method can be very versatile and very powerful, because it allows for such direct communication with the subconscious. You can change something in the house representing your mind, and (if you keep reinforcing it at least) it will tell your mind that you want that part of your mind (or even body) to change in a particular way.
Perhaps I find a room filled with workout weights and equipment, but everything is damaged, dark, and covered in spider webs. My mind associates workout equipment with working out and getting in shape, but the state of decay in the room would suggest that my mind had forgotten about it or no longer thought it was important. I could change that by mentally going around the room, cleaning everything and getting it working again. By changing the room like that, I am asking my subconscious to give a higher priority to working out, and saying that I think it is a good and important thing. By giving my subconscious that message, it will be more likely to remind me to work out, and to make me enjoy it more than I would have otherwise.
Exploratory –
This method is more for understanding rather than changing yourself. Meditation is generally an active thing, where you are constantly directing your mind and keeping focused on task (It’s really easy to fall asleep by accident if you lose focus). This form of meditation is still active, however it allows your subconscious to direct you more. I’ve also found that this method can spill over into lucid dreaming fairly easily if you do not keep yourself focused, or if you are too tired when attempting it.
Focus / Subconscious Focus –
The principle here is to get your subconscious to take the form of your choosing as another entity in your mindscape that you can talk to and interact with. In theory, this allows for a very direct method of communication between your conscious and subconscious. This is supposed to be a very difficult technique, and one that takes a lot of practice and focus. I personally haven’t found it to be terribly hard to do, but I’ve been at this for a while and my brain seems to be more connected and self-aware than most. I would like to note that I haven’t found this method to be particularly relaxing, or terribly helpful/informative. For the most part, my subconscious seems to like teasing my conscious when I do this. The subconscious has access to a lot more information than the conscious, and in some ways is quite a bit smarter, however it doesn’t get to “talk” very often, and mine at least likes showing off and playing games. haha
This method is fairly different from the others, and I include it mostly out of my own curiosity about it, and as a demonstration of how diverse meditation can be.
In Summary
Meditation is good for everyone. It opens the lines of communication between different parts of the brain, allows you to find and begin to deal with whatever things are problems in your life, and helps to make you a happier person, more compassionate person. Meditation has been used for centuries by all different cultures and religions, and is something that I believe is fundamental and critical for our mental and physical health. It is easy to start and to learn, and can take as little or as much time as you want it to.
The subconscious isn’t very well understood yet, but it is a huge part of your mind, and it deserves your attention, even if you never get get into the more tricky aspects of meditation.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Mind Tendrils 