Many carry through their lives the mis-belief that meditation is something that takes either an immense amount of time, or an uncanny discipline thus enabling the person to transcend the more common aspects to ones consciousness. Nothing is further from the truth! Meditation can be practiced in both long personal sessions of ten to sixty minutes, or in short bursts of anywhere from thirty seconds to several minutes. The prime factor involved is one's willingness to perceive one's inner self, one's inner sensations and feelings instead of endlessly running from them. This is one of the prime keys to reaching beyond the simple sensations of the tactile, the olfactory and the auditory senses. What comes beyond this is worth the practice!
Resources that I personally have found helpful in the early days of my own attempts at meditation spoke clearly of the usual difficulties that halt most people at the onset of the practice of meditation. Most of these include a naturally racey mind due to the usual demands that life and family and friends tend to kick in our directions. Others include the natural and understandable fears that people have connected to visualizing ones own thoughts and forbid having to face any of the dark corners that might exist in the mind. I've personally had them all and like everyone else, I still do.
The best suggestion I read was to visualize the early meditative state as a simple process of attending to ones own thoughts and later, of the feelings and reactions that are elicited from these very thoughts. Once these roadblocks were understood and moved beyond, the self-imposed mountainous blockages to deeper and more intimate levels of meditation can come all the easier.
They did!
Nothing exists in the mind except what everyone already knows is there. What seems to terrify the most is in the recognition itself. This over many years of life has been practiced as a great mechanism of self-denial which in time becomes a complex network of self-deceit that moves into a great amount of self-imposed anxiety, which of course doesn't have to be the case. It all just becomes an accepted axiom of life that these fears are always going to be there so why ever think on them, when in fact everyone does and never ever wants to acknowledge them in any way whatsoever. The trick is to accept that these are only feelings and thoughts and once placed in their relative perspective, much more inner and intimate levels of meditation can be practiced. Say an hour plus worth's at a time should one wish to spend that period in meditation. If not, five or ten minutes is fine also!
The action of doing it is the important procession to the product that one seeks.
As Always,
WD
