What is meditation?

What is Meditation?

Meditation can mean many things to different people. We could see meditation as a process for training the mind. Why would we want to train our mind? There are many different ways we might want to train our mind, perhaps we want to be able to concentrate more, or feel less stressed about things, situations, people. Perhaps we want to develop quality of kindness or we want to find out more about who or what we really are or about the reality of things. Whichever meaning meditation has for you, practising it can be very rewarding and very fascinating.

Per se, meditation is a very simple thing as we are not trying to achieve anything during its practice. All the changes that we might want to obtain will just come with time, on their own accord. We are not forcing anything, on the contrary, we are allowing these changes to take place, to establish their presence within us, very gently, very naturally. You will just start noticing certain changes in yourself, you will start noticing that certain things which used to upset you don’t upset you anymore. In meditation, we just sit and observe. Just imagine for a moment that you are sitting opposite a mirror, what you would see is your face. When you sit to meditate, you are basically sitting opposite a mirror and on this mirror, you see the reflection of all your thoughts, emotions, memories and so on. Practising meditation is to observe and experience what appears in the mirror without judging it, without running away from it and without suppressing it. Simply watching the movie of your mind. That might seem daunting at the beginning, however, if you stick with the practice for some time, something magical will occur. You might start having more control of how you react to the movie. The way you experience yourself, other people and situations will change. The movie might shift from being drama to be more of a comedy, from being a thriller to simply be a mystery to be enjoyed; the choice becomes yours.