What I use in my practice and the meditations I record are part of a Mindfulness and Meditation practice that focuses on compassion, is much more loosely constructed, and allows you to learn formally or use the parts that work for you without any structured teaching. Recent research shows there is significant benefit to using tools and information offered from trained professionals online, just like you would receive in person.
Meditation refers to a family of techniques which have in common a conscious attempt to focus attention in a non-analytical way, and then attempt not to dwell on the intrusive ruminating thoughts.
The first dimension of meditation is that it refers to a family of techniques. This is very important. We tend to think of meditation as this one thing, a particular activity, a particular technique that I follow, and then I meditate. In reality, there’s a very large family of techniques. More than that, any moment could be meditation. If we bring our full attention to the moment, whatever the activity is, we could be meditating, right? So if we take a shower and every bit of our attention is on the meeting point between the water and our body and we feel the heat and we feel the sensations in the body and we’re really present, we’re really there, then we’re meditating as we take a shower. When we run, for example, what most of us do is we run while thinking about other things, which obviously isn’t meditating, but if we would have run while fully focusing on the movement of the muscles, feeling the muscles, feeling the body, feeling the connection with the ground, feeling the wind touching your face, feeling the sweat dripping. If every bit of your attention was right there with these sensations, with these experiences of the moment, the experiences of running, you would have been meditating. That’s the meditation of running.
As long as you are fully present within the experience, you could be meditating.
There are many different options. What do they all have in common? First of all, they have a conscious attempt, right? So this is something that Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn emphasizes, the fact that that meditation is a conscious choice. We choose to let everything else fall away, bring our attention to the moment. It’s a conscious choice we’re making and by doing that we shift into this state of meditation. What do we consciously choose to do? What are the actual aspects of meditation when it comes to the experience of it?
There are two important things we need to pinpoint. The first is focus of attention, and the second is a non-analytical relationship with whatever it is that we focus on. First; you bring your attention to a certain focal point and you keep there without wandering somewhere else.
The best example for focus is breathing. This is why breathing meditation is so popular. So you can bring your attention to your breath and feel your breath as it goes in and out, and that is your focal point. This is where your focus is held. If your mind wanders, you bring it back to that focal point.
If we focus on that focal point, it’s not enough because we need to do it with a particular quality in our mind. The second part is an equality of openness, equality of acceptance, a non-analytical relationship with the focal point, which means that we’re not analyzing it. We’re not thinking about it, we’re not judging it, we’re just being with it. If we bring our attention to the blue sky and we breathe air, observing the sky, breathing and seeing the beauty of the sky, that’s the entire experience. If the mind interferes and moves into the analytical relationship with the sky, which means for example, start thinking about the sky’s so beautiful and I wish the sky was like that every day, and I hope the sky will be the same tomorrow because I’m walking in nature tomorrow and then you’re somewhere else. You’re not with the sky anymore because you moved into that analytical relationship with your focal point.
So meditation is all about the experience of bringing your attention to that focal point, say your breath, and having that open, accepting, non-reactive relationship with that focal point where there are no thoughts about it, but simply the experience of it, the focus and then non-analytical relationship with it. We need both of these aspects in order for our meditation to be able to soar and fly.
We talk about meditation as retraining of attention. This is very, very important. Meditation is simply the re-training of attention. If attention is normally conditioned to fluctuate or it’s hard for it to focus, and it’s also a reactive attention because it’s referring in an analytical way to whatever it engages with, we are retraining it. When you are breathing within the breathing meditation and your mind wanders, you are retraining your attention because you immediately bring your attention back to your focal point. You do it again and again in a single meditation. If you practice daily, within a week, you’ll do it hundreds of times. If you practice for a month, you’ll be doing it thousands of times. And if there’s one thing we know about our mind, is that it’s like plastic. Anything we do regularly will change our cognition. It also changes our brain.
Therefore, we are choosing to involve ourselves with an activity that changes the quality of our attention from a fluctuating reactive all over the place attention, to one that sits still with a certain focal point. That’s what you do when you meditate, you are retraining your attention. It’s a very simple way to think about meditation.