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.

Related posts:

1. Mindfulness Meditation: My Path
2. Learn the programming language of your mind: Learn to meditate
3. How To Meditate Better Than Your Guru: The Feedback Solution

Fear is a cruel tyrant and we all know it. It debilitates us and immobilizes us, by restricting our possible responses to life and thus severely limiting it.

It effectively sabotages us from succeeding in reaching a goal or achieving happiness and peace of mind.

Fear can make us reject an opportunity to make a public speech, hold us from applying for that perfect job, keep us back from making that fantastic trip or keep us awake at night worrying what might happen to our loved ones when they are out of our sight. The examples are endless and I don’t need to illustrate further – I’m sure you get the gist of it.

Some people live in constant fear; some others face fear from time to time when it creeps out from some hidden corner and surfaces to haunt their days and nights.

The fact is that fear is a form of feedback about potential or real danger in our environment. Physically it is associated with a part of our brain called the ‘amygdala’ situated at the tip of the temporal lobe.

It is the part of our brain responsible for the flight, fight or freeze response to dangerous situations. No doubt, such instinctive responses were greatly helpful to the survival of our ancestors in the past. Yet as societies grew increasingly more complex and human lifestyles changed radically, this primordial survival instinct started sometimes coming at odds with everyday life situations that do not require such drastic responses.

The effect of that was an embedded sense of fear that manifests itself in many forms such as anxiety, worry, lack of sleep, nervousness and uneasiness, etc.

There are several types of fears we all face in modern life scenarios:

There is fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of loneliness, fear of mediocrity, fear of change and the unknown, fear of getting old, fear of something bad happening, fear of embarrassment, etc. The list is very long.

How do we overcome these fears if at all possible? How can we control them or stir them away? How can we turn fear into love and happiness?

1. Awareness: The biggest and most effective step to overcome fear is being aware of it. First, you have to identify it, recognize it in any situation, name it and spot it out from other emotions. If you can’t identify it, it will pass by unnoticed and play its game without rules. Secondly be aware of subtle inner feelings that give rise to, or accompany, fear. These could be bodily feelings in the chest, throat or abdomen. They can also be non-bodily feelings such as feeling stuck or imprisoned and limiting and self-defeating thoughts.

2. Calm down: The second step that comes after being aware that you are in a state of fear is calming yourself down. Ideally it is someone else that should calm us down since the other person would normally be in a less subjective and emotional state. In the absence of another person we have to remind ourselves to calm down. This is crucial. By being aware that you are in an irrational state of fear, you can observe yourself. The observer in you is important for it helps you observe things more objectively, without judgment, from an almost ‘third-person’ point of view. If we lose that self-awareness, we practically lose everything including our sanity.

3. Burst the irrational bubble – ask analytical and rational questions: The third step to get out of the subjective and irrational state of fear is by asking ourselves rational questions. This is like someone snapping the finger in our face, trying to wake us up from a state of trance. “How real is this fear?”, “How can it help me?”, “Is it justified or is it blown out of proportion?”

4. Meditate regularly: The reason why me and other people writing about personal development, make very frequent reference to meditation (and awareness and mindfulness) is because it is such a fundamental key to mental health, balance and overall well being. It is never enough to stress its importance. Meditating regularly helps us keep in balance, in perspective and in a calm state of mind, hence in the best possible gear to overcome, or better, prevent fear.

5. Stop feeding fear with your energy – break the habit cycle: Fear does not survive on its own – it needs you – specifically it needs your negative energy to grow. By implementing the previous four steps, you are breaking the cycle that forms chronic fear and anxiety. Being aware, calming down, being analytical and meditating regularly together help you form the opposite habit – that of living fearlessly.

Click here to transform fear into love

Related posts:

1. Self-Sabotage & the Subconscious Mind:Overcoming self-sabotaging behavior
2. How to Survive the ‘Negativity Pandemic’
3. The Strength of Non-Resistance

Photo by Faungg

I think one of the most fundamental questions we come to ask in our lives is “what is the purpose of my life?” which can be transcribed into “How meaningful is the life I am living at the moment?” This is a personalization of the more general and philosophical question “What is the meaning of life and everything?”

These questions often arise when we are going through major life transitions or y-points in our lives where crucial decisions and drastic changes have to be made. When we go through big changes our reality bends and shifts because we are breaking away from our old worldview and leaping into a new one. Big changes and moments of temporary crisis often bring with them deep questions about the meaning of life and our role and identity with the changing world around us.

It is not easy to answer such questions for the simple reasons that the answer to such questions lie exclusively within us and not outside of us. Things and situations in our lives have meaning because we attribute meaning to them. They do not have meaning by themselves but depend on our perspective, reality and system of beliefs. The same thing may have deep meaning for me but can be meaningless to you or it may have different meaning to one person at different times in her life depending on her experiences, motivations, beliefs and perspectives.

But how can we give more meaning to our lives? I’m sure we all asked ourselves this question at one point whether explicitly or otherwise.

Happiness and self-realization depend on how much our lives are enriched with meaning and purpose. A meaningless existence is certainly not a wholesome and happy one.

Unfolding the bigger picture

Very often meaning is equated with knowing our true purpose, our mission and goals in life. This is true at some level. By knowing and embracing our role in the big picture of life, we find a lot of what we experience as more meaningful.

Our purpose however is not always clear to us at all times because it is sometimes cluttered and hindered by negative emotions, misconceptions and wrong sorts of habits and beliefs.

Here are a few approaches that help us deepen and enrich our connections with ourselves and with others, align ourselves with our inner purpose and open our hearts for the joys of living a meaningful and happy life:

1. Pop the question

When things go against plan and unexpected or unwanted situations happen ask yourself these questions: “How can this relate to the purpose of my life?” “How can it help me?” or “How can I create harmony from it?”

By asking these questions we are pointing our awareness to that situation in a way that stimulates answers and solutions as to how it can align itself and be in harmony with the general momentum of our lives instead of letting it stall our motivation. In simple words, it is making a seemingly adverse and meaningless situation into a positive and helpful one, hence meaningful.

Very often, because our actions are not aligned to our purpose and intentions they become aimless, rudderless, unintentional and without power.

Effectively this strips away meaning from our interactions with the world because by being stuck in repetitive patterns of behavior we become like automata instead of consciously creating our lives with intention.

Living consciously and having our actions aligned to our intentions is what ultimately vests our lives with meaning. Hence, when faced by situations that appear meaningless or full of friction, ask yourself the questions above and this will help you consciously direct it to another angle that can bring forward those elements that are in harmony with your mission in life and discard those that are irrelevant or unhelpful.

It might not be the easiest thing at first but as most other things being aware of it and practicing it helps.

2. Get in touch with your Spiritual Side

The Spiritual dimension of the Self is very often neglected, doubted, trivialized and cynically debunked. Our present way of thinking is a historical by-product of a generally materialistic and reductionist era where mind, consciousness and spirit are reduced and flattened to some material process or mechanism.

This has disenchanted our world by rejecting our beliefs in the cosmic forces beyond our current observation and disconnected ourselves from the microcosm of our inner spiritual realities.  But the truth is that we are more than we think we are.

We occasionally get glimpses and insights of our spiritual selves through life changing experiences, deep contemplation or brief moments of clarity but we then forget about it in our day-to-day life.

When we face our spiritual side with attention, courage and acceptance, the extra dimension of our spiritual awareness brings with it a totally new depth and meaning into our lives.

This doesn’t mean we have to turn into monks or ascetics. We just need to at least do something that gets us in touch with this dimension.

Walk in nature, meditate, pray, look at the stars in awe, contemplate, be inspired, practice Tai Chi, forgive and let go of your emotional attachments – are all things one can do to touch the spirit and expand consciousness beyond the seemingly flat world of appearances.

3. See objects as objects

We are deeply attached to things. In our worldview we see things and situations around us as concrete reference points of our reality. Our reality is constructed around the world of objects.  They have meaning to us in varying degrees of depth but this meaning fluctuates over time according to our changing viewpoints on their value and importance.

What we think as an inseparable part of our reality today is only a flash of memory another day. Hence the meaning we attribute and attach to things is volatile, perishable and relative.

This often has the effect of making us lose perspective of the deeper meaning in life. By attaching ourselves to things we anchor our reality to them but since they are always changing their value we sometimes lose our bearing on what is really meaningful in life.

The bottom line is see things and objects as what they really are: things that come and go. Your path in life has a more permanent existence hence more meaning.

4. Say Hi to the Universal “I”

We all have a concept of the self, the “I”. Most of us identify the self with our thoughts which is separate from our environment.

Thoughts however can be fleeting, fragmented, distorted, aimless and self-destructive at times. By identifying ourselves with thought we fail to see the whole picture of ourselves.  In reality the self goes beyond thought. It transcends thought. We get a hint of this in moments of clarity or mindfulness when we can perceive an undercurrent of still awareness – a glimpse of our true being outside of thought.

Also, the conception of self as separate from the universe around us forces us to view life with suspicion and judgment. When things go wrong something or someone is to blame.  The universe seems to be conspiring against us.

Actually the opposite belief should be held that the universe is conspiring to help us because we are an integral part of it. We are an extended reality of the universal consciousness.

When we think that we have the power and the responsibility to change things because we are active participants in the expansion of life and the universe then we will perceive our life with greater meaning and purpose.

5. Love, love and love more

Love yourself, love others, love life. Love is the biggest creator of meaning in our lives. There can be no meaning in life without love. Love enriches our experiences and connections with the world by giving strong emotional significance to all our endeavors.

6. Play hard

Play with things and ideas – be enchanted by the world around you. Do something different each day. Create personal space for your creativity and play. This can have many forms – visual and performing arts, physical expression, childlike games, poetry, music, pottery, crafts, just observing nature, collect items which inspire meaning to you (pebbles, leaves, flowers, whatever), or just silly fun!

Related posts:

1. 10 Mistakes that hold you from creating the Life you want