Meditate always, with these simple steps.
Do you have the time or patience to meditate twice a day for two hours? Most of us just don’t have that kind of time, energy, or focus. So how the heck will we ever become the perfect person we can be if we can’t meditate daily? In this podcast we learn a few things about meditating while on our feet, doing our job, eating our lunch and brushing our teeth. How can that enlighten us? You’d be surprised. Why not try these few little steps and see what happens for yourself.
- Today when you brush your teeth, just brush your teeth.
- Whenever the phone rings, treat it as a meditation bell. Take three deep breaths before you answer and relax.
- When passing through doorways notice them.
- Walk with mindfulness to your car, the bus or from the couch to the fridge.
- Be gracious for something or someone in your life.
- Help a stranger.
- Give yourself some approval.
The interest for me in this podcast is how it begins to touch on the different practices/teachings out there, and begins to question which way to go. Take the teaching of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, wherein he says continual mindfulness (the attempt to preserve the effects of meditation outside meditation) has no place. Let the natural cycles of living occur, and outside mediation don’t think about meditation. A time eventually comes when one’s consciousness changes so that transcendental awareness and activity can occur simultaneously.
On the other hand, there are the be-mindful-at-every-moment sort of teachers. The book The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh comes to mind. As he writes continual mindfulness is easy to talk of, but not to practice, so coming up with rituals like when the phone rings can help to start the process. I don’t have an particular rituals, but I mainly try to use this sort of everyday mindfulness to fight the languor I have with life. This can be understood in his words, “the presence of mindfulness means the presence of life”.
In any case, mental development seems to take many forms, so I feel free to try different things out and see what works.
the continuous meditation idea is interesting………..for me there is a feeling or place or presence that i connect to when i meditate and it is this presence that i hope to maintain all day long. when i am lucky or blessed or whatever this sense of presence might be with me for a large part of the day………..other days it will scarcely show itself……none the less………with time (years) it has become easier to evoke it simply by stopping what im doing and calling it forth……….
i have to mention that 30 years ago i tried meditating……………
the idea seemed to make alot of sense and i was a very disciplined person
i meditated twice a day for 2 years without fail
next to nothing happened and i eventually gave it up as useless
then after 30 years something happened…………there was a dramatic event in my life………
and bam………..there it is…………that connnected place that i can reach with relative ease…….i meditate often now and it is a feeling of deep purpose and inspiration and it drives every important thing that happens in my life now………………….in my case (for very specific reasons that i’ve not mentioned) i believe that i was led there as an act of grace……………i dont think that i would have ever found it on my own………..as a result of that experience (which is still ongoing) i recommend without reservation that one has
as much humility as one can muster and asks for help in finding a deep inner connection. when the time is right, they will take you there
may gods grace be with you
ted
Quiet mindfulness hasn’t become, for me, an automatic experience (yet). But each night when I lay down in bed, and then again each morning as I’m waking up, I take time to empty my head and connect with my true Self. It’s my personal form of meditation. It helps me to unload at night and start my mornings with a higher intention. Lately, during the day, I am finding myself “waking up” to why I might be doing something or feeling a certain way, and I then attempt a little quiet time (or Quiet Mind time) to re-center … I guess these are mini-meditation moments.
Of course, we all know the goal. But I’ve heard that can take a lifetime. Someday I hope to be in constant meditation. For now, I take it one day at a time, and I don’t judge or admonish myself (Robert’s Rules).
Lilly