I am sure you must have read/heard people talking about the numerous benefits of meditation and if you have tried it, you also know it is easier said than done. When it is so difficult to concentrate on your breath and get rid of the continuous thoughts that never leave us alone, then why do we need to do it at the first place? In this article I will share my personal experience and thoughts on meditation as I understand it.
Our mind is continuously producing thoughts, good, bad or neutral and it is most of the time runs between past and future. Take a pause and focus on the thoughts for a minute and you’ll notice that you're constantly either thinking about some past event or a future possibility, which means you are living in either past or future but rarely living in the moment. Most of the time this is the cause of our misery, because we get sad or worried about something which doesn’t even exist at that moment. We get sad thinking about a tragic experience in our life and start identifying ourselves with it or live in fear of an imaginative dreadful future about which we actually know nothing.
Like sound or light, our thoughts also produce vibrations which gets manifested as our reality. Anything we see around us or experience has its origin in the mind. I thought about writing this article, you thought to travel to some place, or take that job, or cook something today, it was always first a simple thought which became our reality.
So, if our mind is under our control and we can direct it to only think good, it can also do us wonders. That doesn’t mean that you sit and meditate about having a cake and the cake appears. Like when you thought about reading this article, you clicked on the link to open it. When we think about something our actions start aligning unconsciously or consciously in that direction.
How does Mediation helps do that?
While meditating, we focus on an object, it can be anything, a mantra, a particular sound or song, a candle flame, an affirmation or breath. Most important and beneficial of them is focusing on our breath because when we focus on our breath we are focusing on the present, something that is real at that moment. This way we start training our mind to focus on the present moment instead of jumping back and forth between past and future.
By training our mind to do so regularly we get the control over our mind, which means we also can control our thoughts. When we control our thoughts, we control our reactions, we get better control over our emotions, we understand better not only ourselves but also people around us which results in more empathy and love towards each other. We gain perspective.
Meditation helps us gaining control over our life.
Like we get our body healthy by working out every day and eating healthy, we make our mind healthy by regularly doing this exercise called meditation.
