Learning Meditation Through Focused Attention

If you're just starting off to learn meditation, either as part of a guided meditation group or on your own, you try for five or ten minutes each session; try to sit daily at the same time, morning or evening, whatever suits you best. You allow the daily five to ten minutes to extend to fifteen or twenty minutes as the weeks go by, but you certainly don't try and push the pace.

Meditation isn't about gritting the teeth in tenacity. It's about sitting calmly with yourself, and although it requires its own kind of control this has less to do with toughness than with compliant and letting go.

When the unavoidable thoughts or emotions come up, you permit them to pass into and out of awareness like clouds pass in water. You don't try to push them away, but leave them to pass on their own harmony. No matter how 'important' the thinking seem to be or how compelling or disturbing the emotions, you don't cling to them or let one thought or emotion to set off another and another till you are off on a wool-gathering track that takes you far away from the simple matter of the in-breath and the out-breath.

If, however, you do get carried away, gently but firmly go back to your breathing the instant you realize this has happened. Avoid being irritated with yourself or persuading yourself you'll never learn how to meditate. Your wandering mind is simply pointing out to you just how much you have to practice your meditation techniques. It is assisting you, prompting you, showing you how little control you have over your own thinking. The right response is gratitude, appreciation towards that part of your mind that has realized you are wool-gathering and that has reminded you to return to your point of focus.

I cannot overstress how important this attitude of gratitude is. If you make upset yourself each time you become aware you are disoriented in thought, you will not only be arousing the unwelcome emotion of self-disgust, you will be taming your mind not to remind you when it is wandering in the future. You are in effect punishing it each time for reminding you, and certainly it doesn't like being punished. So it will prompt you less and less often, and you will find concentration becomes harder and harder. In response to the frustration that this brings, your mind will then start whispering conveniently to you that meditation is a total waste of effort, and that you would be well advised to find something greater to do with your time.

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Getting rid of stress is one of the main benefits of meditation. After you have read this article, you will be able to realize the exposed truth about stress, and how meditation can take it all away from you.

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