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Meditation and Quieting the Mind

Written by: John Toomey

Article Overview: Time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had. It is what you live in. You can drift in its current, or you can try to swim against it. Can you deliberately slow time down? Maybe you can...

Meditation and Quieting the Mind

Thoughts, Noise, Confusion and Remote Controls
“A journey through the quieting of the Mind”



Meditation – “To engage in quite Contemplation or Reflection”

Your Mind

Your mind exists on three levels. They are:

The Conscious Mind – This can best be described as your current thought patterns, decision making and information processing centre. Most of us relate it to our brain.

The Subconscious Mind – On a deeper level, it contains all our memories and a record of all we have seen, heard, felt and sensed in our lives. This information is stored throughout the cells of the body, not just in the brain. This has been proven scientifically by cases like the little girl who had a heart transplant and experienced the memories of the heart donor. Many cases of this are depicted in the book “The Heart Math Solution” by Doc Childre and Howard Martin.

The Universal Consciousness – Whether you like it or not, you are tuned into the Universe. Just like a Mobile phone can transmit across the planet with no wires, you too can transmit and receive. It is often hard to accept this and often easier to deny it. But again, gut instincts, de-ja-vu, synchronicity, dreams that come true and many other events are living proof.

However, most of the time we are so consumed by the noise in the Conscious Mind that we cannot take advantage of the Universal Mind or to draw from the experience stored in the Subconscious mind.

If we can still the mind, we can open up a whole new world.

Stress and Thoughts
Stress comes from thoughts. The human mind processes thousands of thoughts every day, some useful, most useless. To achieve true peace and clarity requires mastery over the mind, a capacity to sit back and watch what is happening in the mind, in order to select the useful thoughts and to be amused by the useless.

So many of our life habits such as television and glossy magazines simply add to the useless thoughts and make clarity more difficult to achieve.

Part of Mastery over the Mind is to watch your thoughts whilst you are alone, for example, while you are driving. Watch what your mind does. As my friend Neil Hoptman a Melbourne based Yogi, says, “Be a silent witness to your own mind”.


Stop Your Mind

Meditation is really about stopping your mind. There is a range of different methods from Transcendental Meditation to Raja Yoga. However, in essence, they are all geared to achieve one common goal – a peaceful mind.

A simple Meditation is to sit quietly, upright in a comfortable posture. Close your eyes, breathe deeply for a few minutes and make a commitment to clearing your mind. If there are any thoughts running around inside your head, simply look at each one, acknowledge it and let it pass by.

When you are ready, take at least 20 and/or up to 200 deep slow breathes, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. As you do, count backwards toward zero, one count for each breath. Whilst doing that, visualise the number you are counting out in front of you in the darkness. Focus on that number. If any thoughts come into your mind, push them away. If your mind wanders off, pull it back.

Remember, the Journey is the destination. By this, I mean that it is the act of recognising your wandering mind and errant thoughts that create a “successful” meditation. It means you are becoming skilled in the art of watching your mind. Please do not sit there expecting to find Nirvana. You may well do so one day, but you may not. Meditate with no expectation.

Once you are meditating regularly, your Conscious Mind will become more calm. At this time, you will tune into the Subconscious Mind and the Universal Consciousness more readily and more frequently. You will notice that you are becoming more aware and you will begin to see signs in your life. It is an amazing experience. For example, a minor problem may be sitting somewhere back in your mind when you get into your car one day. When you turn on the engine a song will be playing and the first words in the song that you hear will be the answer to the problem. Watch it happen – don’t expect it, just be mindful.

The High Performance Mind
Stress and pressure are not the problem for sports people. Stress has always been around and always will be…. and pressure …… it creates diamonds. The key is your ability to deal with both as they happen, in a way that it does not impair your performance, but improves it. Success is achieved or lost through the workings of the Mind.

Using the Performance Mind technique, or meditation, simply triggers the Relaxation Response in the body i.e. your body’s natural in-built mechanism for relaxation and rejuvenation, as what happens when you rest or sleep.

Brief Background
Since the 1950’s there has been widespread research carried out into the functioning of the mind. Key findings have been that the brain continually emits electrical impulses that are called brainwaves. There are Four key brainwaves, each of which have specific functioning. Through practice you can learn to generate specific brainwaves to best suit your needs at any given time.


Snapshot of these Brainwaves
The waves are determined by their frequency per second and the amplitude of energy in the wave.

Beta
These predominate in our normal working day and are necessary for logical thinking, multitasking of activities and general managing of the day. Can be excessive and stressful where your head gets full of competing thoughts all vying for your attention.

Alpha
Are generated where there is a single point of focus and outside distractions do not disturb this singularity of focus.

Theta
Theta is the zone of the most creative thoughts. This is the Brainwave most associated with inspirational thinking and creativity. Where the aha’s are generated.

Delta
These are our deepest brainwaves and are in the unconscious mind. They bring us that sense of intuition, sixth sense and also empathy. This is where that ‘gut feeling’ , that often proves to be correct , comes from. N.B. you need to generate Alpha to fully bring this awareness to your conscious mind.

Mindfulness
What is Intellect? The ability to watch your thoughts come and go. Exercise your mind control to build your intellect. That way, you will be able to more clearly watch your thoughts and you will be able to distinguish the good and useful from the bad and wasteful.

Meditation or quiet contemplation is great tools for this.

What is Intellect?
Thought Filtration. What is useful? What is Distraction?
Where is the root of a feeling?
What are the messages?
Where is the lesson?
Sharpen Your Intellect with Meditation.

Try speaking less and listening more. When you get the urge to speak, don’t. Wait, be patient – observe. There is plenty of time.


The Benefits of Meditation

Regular Meditation practice produces a number of startling results. Consider the following:

 Calms the Mind
 Slows the Mind
 Cultivates the Witness
 Eases Heart Rate
 Eases Respiration
 Calms the Senses
 Slows Adrenaline secretions
 Slows Gastric Acids secretions
 Relaxes the entire body
 Helps you to become more aware and mindful

Trust and Intent

These are two very powerful terms. Let’s look at them.

Trust
First, to really embrace the concept of a peaceful mind, you must train yourself to Trust the flow of life. Everything will be ok. Stop worrying about the future. You see, the future is not here yet. In fact, your vision of the future may never arrive. It is no good to you until it arrives. So, forget about it. Absolute effectiveness and happiness arise out of how well you do “NOW”.

This does not mean you cannot make plans. Go for it, make your plans. When you are done, forget about what the plan requires of tomorrow. Focus on what must be done today.

Often, a looming problem sits in your mind, causing you stress. One of the great rules of synchronicity is this. For every problem, there is a solution. And, the solution appears at the same time the problem arrives. Most of the time, however, we do not see the solution because we are so clouded by stress and anxiety around the problem.

Trust that the solution will be there for you and you will see it. It is never blunt, always subtle. To quote an old Buddhist saying, “God created the perfect food for birds, but he stopped short of throwing it into their nests”.

Intent
This is a word of great power. This is what you put out to the Universe. What you put out, you will attract. If you put out events that you fear, you will draw them to you. If you put out that you are a calm, peaceful person, you will draw that to you. Try it and see.

When you start the day with a meditation, you will ground yourself and then be able to lock in your intent for the day. This is the deeper aspect of what some call a positive mental attitude.


Other Meditative Activities
There are a range of activities you can “take up” to supplement your meditation. These are effective as they provide you with a focus for intense concentration, which tends to stop the mind wandering all over the place. These activities include:

 Jigsaw Puzzles
 Building small Models
 Art and Craft work (if you are rushing to finish it then it doesn’t count)
 Crossword Puzzles (As long as you don’t get stressed by them)
 Cooking for Pleasure
 Listening to music (I mean really listening and getting inside it)

In Closing
In his book, The Art of Happiness” his Holiness the Dalai Lama states, “The Purpose of Life is to be happy”. Happiness can be found:

In a calm, peaceful mind
When the Heart is Strong and the Ego under Control
When you are strong in discipline
When you step back to the basics of survival and clearly define the difference between your wants and your needs.
When you Trust the Flow of Life
When you make it your clear intention to be Happy
When acting out of Love as opposed to Fear.

Remember, Meditating regularly requires discipline.

“Don’t just do something. Sit there!” Osho

Related Articles
  Meditation Can Change Your Life
  Meditation for Focus and Productivity
  Meditation as a Goal Achievement Strategy
  OVERCOMING STRESS-- MEDITATION
  Purposeful Meditation

Article Tags: cells of the body, conscious mind, de ja vu, doc childre, glossy magazines, gut instincts, heart math, heart transplant, information processing centre, life habits, living proof, math solution, memories of the heart, mind processes, remote controls, subconscious mind, thought patterns, true peace, universal consciousness, universal mind



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