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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

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Copyright © 2019 Darren Cockburn. All Rights Reserved

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