Oakville Zen Meditation
Meditation: Tips & Tricks while meditating
About yourself:
Prioritize. We always find time for priorities, never enough time for what we perceive as “non priorities”. Make your sitting a priority like your day-to day routine stuff. Minimize the excuses.
Pick a doable amount of time to sit. Even five minutes are enough to activate those neural pathways.
Be flexible. If you miss your daily session, be creative rather than been pissed off. Walk at work.
Don’t throw in the towel just because your daily routine got screwed-up.
Don’t judge negatively:
Yourself. If you think you’re a failure to meditate properly, meditation becomes stress , frustration and another excuse for self-hatred. Look, meditation training is like swimming upstream, doable, but takes constant effort. Be compassionate and forgiving with yourself; yet keep practicing as it is.
Self- acceptance and self-forgiveness will help you to carry on your practice and also to learn to accept and forgive others.
The quality of your meditation because this is a trick used by your mind to force you to quite. Meditation is to be mindful to the present and concrete reality: your posture and your breathing. Instead, your mind wants to wander and be in control as he always does.
Your breath is your leach controlling the beast. It is not easy and will never be. Trust your meditation practice whatever its quality.
Each time you notice that your mind is wandering as it always does, this is not failure but mindfulness in action. This is also an opportunity for insight into your mind habit patterns
Consider each sitting as a new and unknown adventure. Any kind of new stuff is often exciting such as new car, job, partner, hobby, vacations. etc.
By doing so, the feeling of routine daily practice such as “ déjà vu” will be minimized .
About your meditation & its benefits on the quality of your life:
Once a while, review your motivations to meditate.
For few seconds ask yourself as you sit down, “why am I meditating today”?
See what is emerging. Then ask yourself, what are my deepest reasons for practice? Return to these motivations when the meditation is difficult and the mind restless. A liberated mind takes work and reminders.
Allow meditation to become a discipline. Try to do it at the same time in the same place everyday. The way to cultivate a habit is to actually do it. The more consistent you can be, the easier it is for the new pathways to be born into your brain. Meditating only when you feel like it will take you nowhere except the exit.
Sometimes sitting feels impossible. Then use your designated time for some kind of spiritually supportive practice: read a book, listen to a tape, go for a walk, and write in your journal.
Each time you focus on your anchor, even few seconds, you are building up serenity and neuroplasticity.
If all of these fail, don’t get mad. Take three deep breaths, reposition yourself and start again.
It is not a failure, it is rebooting.
Always keep in mind that the benefits of meditating cannot be found on the quality of your practice but on the quality of your life that is how you are dealing with your emotions and life in general. Meditation will always remain a battle against your mind, but life will become less and less of a struggle since the benefits of mindfulness meditation are cumulative even if you don’t feel it over time. Just trust your practice.
After more than 81 years of daily meditation, the Dalai Lama said:
" If I am not struggling while meditating, here is something wrong in my session".
