There are three primary secrets for successful meditation. Here are the three secrets:
1. Never fight against your thoughts for you will never win. You must stop the battle immediately and call a truce with your thoughts. The next step is to make friends with your thoughts and simply watch them as spurts and surges of energy. Have you ever considered your thoughts as spurts and surges of energy? Positive thoughts flow in a finer tighter frequency while negative thoughts surge in a wider, thicker and heavier band of energy.
As you consider watching your thoughts, you will at first have a habit of watching the topic of each thought. As you continue to notice the topic of each thought, you can begin to notice them in yet a different manner. As you watch your personal thoughts, notice each of them more as spurts or even surges of energy. Some move quite rapidly and some thoughts move quite gently. Notice that you are not attempting to stop your thoughts but in fact, you are deepening your awareness of them and allowing them to continue to flow on in and flow on by. As the flow continues watch and feel it as a fascinated observer, not a frustrated observer. Feel the difference?
2. Most people who are new to meditating try to sit for half an hour or even a full hour. They become restless and easily distracted and sense their failure as a result. The second secret for successful meditation is: dramatically shorten the time that you sit in meditation. People cannot go from their hectic, over-stimulated day, then suddenly sit down and expect to slide into a different consciousness for long periods of time.
As beginners, we need to take it more slowly, more gently, and more lovingly. Give yourself some time to slow down and just begin to think about meditating and how you will be doing that very soon in the next few minutes. Thinking about meditating for a few minutes will give your brain time to adjust from frenzied activity to a calmer, quieter experience. Then, when you sit down to actually meditate, your body and mind have had a chance to acclimate to the experience. This is key. Plan to sit for only 3-5 minutes at a time. Anything more is too long. If you try to push beyond five minutes you are openly setting yourself up for failure.
3. Most books on meditation ask that you set aside a time to meditate and those same books ask you to create a space in your home, usually with an altar, that is your meditation space. If you have been able to do that and it is working for you, then for goodness sakes continue to do that for yourself. If, however, you never find yourself in that space or have not even created that space yet, here is a different idea: incorporate meditation into your day, wherever you are and whatever you are doing.
Think about your daily life as it is now and look for three minute segments within your day. What do you notice and when do those three minute segments occur? You might realize that booting up your computer takes a few minutes. It takes a few minutes when you get caught by that long train on the way to work. You might realize that you stand in the grocery even longer than five minutes, and what about waiting in the doctor’s office? Have you noticed that when you awake in the morning you usually lie there for a few minutes?
These are only a few examples of quiet time that each of us has within our hectic day. Bring meditation into your life by integrating it into your current schedule. Bring meditation into your life today and incorporate it into your rhythm.
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