How to Meditate while Being Active

When we hear about meditation most of us think of a person sitting down in a traditional meditative posture such as the half lotus position with a straight back, closed eyes and a very still body.

Of course the above picture is a very common one and it is a correct one too. This is one of the best ways to meditate and still the mind – with a still body and a quiet mind in a tranquil ambience. But this is not the only way to meditate either. In fact the concept of meditation can be practically stretched to include other forms which do not involve a sitting still posture.

Some meditations are done when the body is active such as when walking or doing some physical activity. In Zen Buddhism, walking meditation is a well known and established form of meditation.

Is it possible to meditate while walking, running or being active?

Yes it is. Meditation is not about switching off your mind but about switching it on. It is about opening up your awareness to your surroundings and inner body. It is about tuning in to the present moment and living the freshness of it instead of blurring in to hazy thoughts and daydreaming.

So it is possible to be more mindful and aware while walking, cycling or running because your mind becomes engaged in the awareness of the surroundings. The body would be moving but the mind would be defragmenting and settling into stillness.

How to do meditation while active?

There are many different ways to do active meditation but all methods depends on directing your awareness into the activity you are doing irrespective of what that activity is. It is about opening up your perceptual awareness and letting your mind flow in sync with your activity.

Here are a few tips to practice mindfulness meditation while in activity:

1. Before engaging the activity stop for a few minutes to prepare your mind on the objectives you want to reach. This is like affirming to your self what you want to achieve. This is an important step for it directs your mind to stay on that track instead of wandering about distractively. I call it the warming up of the mind. Before we start a physical activity or sport we stretch our muscles and warm up our bodies. Same thing with the mind.

2. When you start the activity take some time to direct you awareness to your body. How does your body feel in general? Are your energy levels high or low? How do your muscles feel? Is your breathing deep or shallow? How do your feet feel? What is your general mood? Are you feeling any subtle energies changing in yourself as you do the activity?

3. Now turn your attention to your surroundings. If for example you are walking, enlarge your observation window to include those details that usually go by unnoticed. Patterns in buildings and stone, colors, shapes, sights, smells and sounds. This is mindfulness meditation in action. Your perceptual awareness expands until your mind opens up to a new dimension and everything becomes alive.

4. When your activity is over, take some time to observe how your mind feels different now. Are you more relaxed and focused? Are your thoughts more coherent? Is your general state of being more peaceful and calm? This exercise is important to extend your awareness also into the benefits of the meditation itself so that it becomes reinforced into our mind.

How to be a mindful parent

Mindfulness, the practice of focusing on just one thing, means to simply experience the moment while excluding worries, self-doubts and distractions.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society together with his wife Myla, apply the concept of mindfulness to parenting. According to Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness allows us to see past surface appearances and understand our children clearly. It allows parents to be less reactive and more conscious of their actions and choices.

Understand Your Child’s Point-of-View

1. Imagine the world from your child’s point-of-view. Imagine how you appear to your child. Think about what type of parent you are to your child.
2. Be mindful of your expectations of your child. Consider whether they are truly in your child’s best interest.
3. Practice putting the needs of your child above your own needs. Find times when both your child’s needs and your own needs can be met simultaneously.

Practice Self-Awareness

1. When you are unsure or lost, practice bringing your full attention to the situation. Remember that sometimes it is good to remain silent until you become more sure of what is called for in the situation.
2. Make quiet time and practice mindfulness for yourself. Focus on continuing to grow in self-knowledge and awareness.
3. Practice accepting even difficult moments without trying to change them. Let go of attempts to achieve a specific outcome. Practice seeing whatever comes up as “workable.”

Build a Relationship with your Child

1. Apologize when you are in the wrong or have betrayed a trust. Apologies demonstrate that you have thought about a situation. However, they lose effectiveness if they are overused.
2. Think about how your child is unique and notice your child’s special needs.
3. Be clear, strong and unequivocal when the situation calls for it. Let your limits come from awareness and judgment rather than fear and a need to control.

This is a republished article written by Christy Matta for ehow.com under Creative Commons license

10 ways to improve your meditation significantly

photo by h.koppdelaney

Since I started practising meditation, I have been trying out different things – little changes here and there – that although may sound small and petty, they have improved my meditation significantly and consistently.

I have written this article especially for people who have started doing meditation, take the practice at heart and are keen on improving it and taking it to the next level.

Does this describe your present situation? Have you started enjoying and feeling the benefits of meditation but would eagerly try out a few simple tips to significantly improve it?

Learning how to meditate takes a lot of time and patience in the beginning. It’s a slow and gradual progress because we have to learn new things that our mind and body are not accustomed to and unlearn old habits that we have been conditioned to for many years.

Yet there are ways to make this learning process more efficient and effective. (more…)

Learn the programming language of your mind: Learn to meditate

Photo by premasagar

Your brain is the most precious and advanced thing you’ll ever own. Unfortunately it does not come with an owner’s manual. Nobody has one and it is nowhere to be found or purchased.

Still, even if we don’t have a technical manual explaining in detail how it works and how to maintain it in optimal condition, there are still ways to access it and reprogram it.

I am using computer-related metaphors here not because I am upholding the mind-computer analogy. That is so 70s and 80s. Yet the metaphor rather serves to  remind us that most of our beliefs, ideas, attitudes, perspectives and reasoning have been conditioned or programmed by our immediate experiences, society and circumstances. A good part of this programming might have taken place without an intention or design and some of it might be of no benefit for us but on the contrary limiting and hindering us from authentically growing.

Meditation is and has always been the best available method for reprogramming the human mind. It has been proven to work for thousands of years. Moreover it is free, always available, requires no resources and is highly effective.

The benefits are numerous and varied ranging from reducing stress, improving health, memory and concentration to enhancing creativity, curing depression and expanding one’s consciousness into higher states of being.

It always really boggles my mind how in our day and age meditation is not that wildly diffused in the western world and around the globe. It strikes me as so out of sync with our times that meditation is not universally recognized by humans as one of the most fundamental practices for a healthy society. Imagine every single individual on this planet learning meditation at school from a young age. Imagine the benefit on a planetary scale. How there would be balanced emotions, harmony, creativity and peace on a collective level. No more wars, atrocities, greed, famine, crime, domestic violence, over-spending in health, law and order. The possibilities are infinite.

Anyway let me stop here before I get too idealistic. I just wanted to express my personal opinion on how important meditation is. If you wish to start learning meditation or if you have already you might find the following resources useful. I have sifted through tonnes of material to select what I think is technically good quality material.

I hope you find them interesting and helpful. Please send me your thoughts and comments on whether you found the material useful or if you want to suggest more. Thanks!

(more…)

The Power of Gratitude (and why it always works wonders)

Have you ever been grateful about something small or big that happened unexpectedly but has made a difference to your day, your mood or your life in general?

Go back to it with your mind and remember how it feels. How would you define it?  For me it’s a warm comforting feeling of love, reward, appreciation and happiness. You know those moments in our lives where we count our blessings and feel happy to be in the knowledge that life has been kind and good to us no matter how small or large that blessing was.

Just the awareness and recognition of it confers a moment of serenity and pleasure that brightens up our day and enlivens our souls.  It is like a brief opening in our hearts where for a moment we stop and peep outside of ourselves and realize that life is abundantly blissful and generous but we often obscure this fact with our everyday hectic routines, by giving more attention to negative thoughts and by being too sucked by our needs and wanting. (more…)

Be Free, Take Responsibility

Photo by Rosh PR

We are brought up to conceive of freedom and responsibility as being two mutually exclusive concepts. In our mind they can’t quite sit happily side by side within the same sentence, let alone having one logically entailing the other.

Yet as many other notions taken for granted in life, it is just another preconception to be broken. In this article, I would like to talk about how I see them as compatible and inseparable.

What Responsibility and Freedom are not

Let’s be honest, we always think of responsibility as an undesirable civic and moral obligation that we have to take in order to be good citizens, friends, parents, employees, students, leaders, whatever. Responsibility is like an extra burden or weight that is laid on our shoulder and even though we may be proud and honored by taking that responsibility we still sometimes feel that it requires effort, discipline, will, courage and most of all, lack of our own personal freedom.

In fact we see responsibility as taking away from us that ‘freedom’ of thought or being that so much characterizes youth. We see responsibility as coming down on us as we grow older and our days when we were young, mindless and ‘free’ turns into a whole world of restrictions, obligations, consequences, protocol and limitations. It’s like responsibility is actually inversely proportional to ‘freedom’. (more…)

Mindfulness Meditation: My Path

There is a lot of literature to read about the subject of Meditation, its spiritual and practical aspects or the different ways it is practiced throughout different traditions and for different ends. There are tonnes of information and I feel that I would be adding little value if I add more of what is already available and write articles about the subject per se.

I think it is more suitable in this context for me to write about Meditation through my own experiences and point of view on the subject. After all, there are no strict objective rules and know how on the matter. It is much more like a personal journey that one enters or walks along in his own particular path.

Of course there are general guidelines and valuable clues one has to pick up and learn. For example, one introductory book which I’d always suggest is ‘Meditation for Dummies’ – which I think the title betrays the fact that it is a very comprehensive and well written guide which has lots of valuable information for both beginners and even seasoned Meditators. Those of you who have read some of the ‘For Dummies’ series know that most of them have very good editorial quality.

There are also genuine and highly experienced teachers and Masters and it is always highly recommended to be guided by them.  I am not a student of any Meditation teacher. I have chosen to go out for the path on my own. It’s not that I disagree or dislike the idea, it’s just the way I set it out to be. This is my account of it. (more…)