032 – Introduction to Meditation & Meditation Hindrances

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www.mindfulnessonlinetraining.org
Introduction to meditation covering definition, technique, practice, teacher / teachings, posture, duration, location, energy, frequency and managing hindrances. Helpful for beginners and advanced practitioners.
Notes from the talk
- Good to remind yourself of the meditation basics – can be easy to become complacent or get into bad habits
- Some of the many benefits:
- Meditation is training the mind to achieve higher states of consciousness. Darren Cockburn’s definition from book Being Present
- Meditation is a practice that’s designed to transform the mind
- Helps to move the mind from being lost in thought to being more concentrated
- Raises our level of consciousness
- Allows us to become more compassionate
- Ultimately, meditation can take you all the way to enlightening or awakening – it can take many lifetimes to achieve this
- Even just a short period of time meditating each day leads to positive changes
- Meditation isn’t for everybody, but it works well for most people
- Two types of meditation:
- Planned meditation – There’s a plan to do it. E.g. I’ll meditate for fifteen minutes after breakfast tomorrow
- Spontaneous meditation
- Happens on its own
- A severe amount of suffering could trigger this
- Can also be triggered by beauty
- Creates a very still or concentrated state of mind
- Technique
- Good to shop around and try different meditation techniques. Then settle on one or two of them
- You may want to combine a breathing meditation with a loving kindness meditation
- The well analogy. If you dig one well deeply, you’ll be far more likely to get water than if you’re digging here there and everywhere
- Looking to balance your state so that you’re both relaxed and alert concurrently
- Too relaxed might make you sleepy
- Overly alert might make you anxious
- Posture:
- Back straight
- Head evenly balanced
- Eyes forward, possibly with gaze down
- Eyes closed ideally, but you can meditate with eyes open
- Sitting somewhere where you’re comfortable
- Yoga physical practice can help strengthen the body to help sit longer in meditation
- You might start 5-10 minutes per day to begin with
- You can set a goal for your meditation and frequency
- Fine if you skip a day – we need to be able to cope OK if we don’t meditate
- Select a location with no major distractions. Minor non-discursive distractions like the humming of a fridge can be OK. Avoid areas where there is stimulus that might cause you to become lost in your thoughts
- Teachers
- Good to shop around before settling with one teacher
- You may work with them in person or view their content online
- It can be helpful if you get to talk to the teacher
- Simple breathing meditation (5 minutes)
- Focus attention on the breath
- Breath is the object of the meditation
- Notice the different characteristics of the breath
- Texture: Is it rough or smooth
- Frequency
- Speed – slow or fast
- Where does the breath start and finish
- Watching the breath as a whole process
- We can feel the breath and listen to the breath
- In-between the in-breaths and out-breaths there are small gaps – we can focus on these
- We’re allowing the breath to flow naturally – not controlling the breath
- For most people, the mind does wander off during meditation. This is normal. If the mind wanders off, we bring it back to the breath
- The aim is to keep the concentration pinned to the breath for as long as possible
- Five Hindrances
- These hindrances also apply outside of meditation and cause us to become lost in thought
- Working with these hindrances allows you to gain more control over the mind – or to allow the mind to be guided by the higher consciousness
Copyright © 2019 Darren Cockburn. All Rights Reserved