Meeting Your Mind During Meditation

The mind constantly plays tricks on us and has many strategies for distracting our attention, setting us on the wrong path, deceiving us and leading us astray. This trickster may appear in the form of negative thoughts that try to prevent us from achieving a goal, the harder we try to succeed, the more obstructive our thoughts might become.

Take note of the tactics your mind adopts to pull you away from your chosen path. Your mind may intervene during meditation to tell you that you are wasting your time or that the practise is not working, it could do anything to divert you from your mental goal.

Obstructive thoughts stem from the unconscious mind, that part of ourselves which determines much of what motivates us: our desires, impulses and instincts.

If we fail to engage with our unconscious, then we are ignoring a fundamental part of our inner most being. The unconscious contains both negative and positive aspects: but while these remain unconscious, they can be neither encouraged nor discouraged.

The conscious mind is like a light, which can be shone into the unconscious to reveal the mind's hidden contents. Meditation teaches us how gradually to become better acquainted with the mechanisms of our unconscious mind and how to make our unconscious thoughts conscious, for our own eventual benefit. It is through this marriage of opposites, a communion of the conscious and unconscious minds, that we are able to enhance our self-knowledge and self-awareness.

One of the first things to take into account when encountering your mind is that the people are all different. Although we all have similar needs (such as the need for food, warmth and shelter) and experience similar emotions (for example, love, hate, fear and desire) our individual histories and psychological make-up diverge and widely and define our characters in different ways.

In meditation, this means that what may be effective for one person may not work for another. Bear this in mind when choosing and practising your meditation exercises, experiment to find out what works best for you and what you feel most comfortable with.

Mindfulness

Western culture tends to place great value on individual wealth and the outward signs of �â'¬Å"success�â'¬ï¿½ without recognizing the value of a rich inner, spiritual life. It has created a frenzied, goal-driven environment in which it is increasingly difficult to find the opportunity to focus on individual thoughts, feelings and actions or to contemplate our relationship with the world around us.

Eastern tradition offers a radical alternative to the materialism of the modern age and has much to teach us about the nature of �â'¬Å"being�â'¬ï¿½. When subtly adapted to suit our modern lives, Eastern philosophy can help us to rediscover the spiritual values sadly lacking in our modern Western lifestyles.

The full awareness of our movements and sensations, our actions, emotions and thoughts is referred to in Zen Buddhism as �â'¬Å"mindfulness�â'¬ï¿½. It is the process of placing the mind firmly in the present and keeping it totally absorbed in the task that is being performed.

Meditation, in which the mind becomes fully alert, is itself a mindful activity. As adults, one of the skills we tend to lose is that of giving our experiences our full attention. As we walk along, wrapped up in our thoughts, our senses seem often to be only half awake to our surroundings, to the sights, sounds and smells that bombard us from all directions.

We also tend to forget the ways our breath and our body feel to us, and we may not even be fully aware of our thoughts or our emotions. To be wholly engaged in every aspect of our physical, mental and emotional existence is to be mindful.

The concept of mindfulness takes on an even greater relevance when we learn, perhaps contrary to the traditional approach to meditation, not to vanquish the contents of our minds, but to observe them, to shine the light of awareness on them and illuminate their significance.

A major stumbling block for many people who try to follow the teachings of traditional meditation is that they find it impossible top empty their minds. But to empty the mind is to deny its reality, only when we encounter it fully and take heed of its contents, can we begin to experience the richness of life to the full.