There's lots of meditation techniques, enough to confuse anyone. Meditation is as natural to the human body as eating or sleeping, but through a busy life packed with interruptions and an out of control mind we have drifted apart from this awareness. Meditations is as simple as shutting your eyes and focusing on your breathing, or something else, but paying attention on a unique thing like a mantra, numbers, a dot on the wall, a candle light, etc. The key thing is to concentrate on something with the purpose of clearing your mind of all thoughts. If you can reach this, even for 2 or three minutes at a time you are meditating. With practice you can prolong the periods of time you stay in meditative state and this is when you will start to obtain the advantages of this practice.
Some of the advantages of meditation are:
- Increases your consciousness
- Increases your happiness
- Speeds up the healing process
- Slows down the aging process
- Creates a condition of deep relaxation.
- Eliminates stress and suffering
- Heightens concentration and strengthens the mind
- Boosts your creativeness.
- Generates a general feeling of well being
Fortifies your instinct.
Wikipedia's definition of meditation is:a holistic discipline by which the practitioner attempts to get beyond the reflexive, "thinking" mind into a deeper state of relaxation or awareness. Different meditative disciplines encompass a wide range of spiritual goals—from achievement of a higher state of consciousness, compassion and loving-kindness, to greater focus, creativity or self-awareness, or simply a more relaxed and peaceful frame of mind.
There are four factors to bear in mind before starting your meditation practice:
Posture: Sit down in the traditional cross-legged posture or in any other position that is comfortable. If you like, you can sit in a chair. The key thing is to keep your back straight to prevent your mind from becoming sleepy or lethargic.
Location: Select a peaceful, nicely ventilated place where nobody can disrupt you and turn your cell phone off.
Breathing: Always keep in mind that while meditating you ought to breathe normally as you do when you are sleeping, breathe through your nose and don't try to manage your breath.
Your mind:At first, your mind ıs going to be very busy, and you may even believe that the meditation is making your mind busier; but in reality you are just becoming more conscious of how busy your mind really is. There will be a great temptation to follow the various thoughts as they come up, but you need to fight this and continue being concentrated on the feeling of the breath or what ever you have chosen to concentrate on. If you realize that your mind has wandered off and is following your thoughts, you need to promptly return it to the breath. You need to repeat this as many times as required till the mind settles on the breath.
Like everything worthwhile meditation requires practice to master, but when you do the rewards of are enormous.. It is my opinion that meditation is a great shortcut on the road to enlightenment and spiritual awakening
Meditation is a big part of the Buddhist religion. Buddha said "Meditation brings wisdom; lack of mediation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom"
