What if I said that you could actually meditate in a state of anger to learn how to loosen its hold on your mind? Does that sound impossible or difficult? Actually, that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do. But, before we begin with that…
Seven Common Emotional Obstacles in Meditation and How to Melt Them Away When you set out to learn meditation, your emotional patterns will delightfully come along. In fact, they will probably be your first and fiercest obstacles to overcome. While you may consistently falter due to their incessant influence, you may not even notice given how unconscious and instantaneous these responses have become.
The "effortless" part of learning to meditate comes from getting to know your meditative mind, again and again. And that comes more frequently when you let go of all of the ways that you think you should meditate.
Meditation is a process of gradually coming to know your own mind, coming to rest in a state of non-distraction where you release all sense of hope and fear, cease to alter your mind with thoughts, sensations and emotions, and learn to simply be, mindful, aware and spacious.
For many of us, when we begin to meditate (or even if we've meditated for a while), we can experience a certain amount of "failure" while trying to meditate. Even if we've been successful in the past, our efforts may be met with what we believe to be failure. But, what if failure weren't an option? What if there was no such thing as "failing" at meditation? What if meditation included failing to meditate?
What is most wonderful about this whole process is that even when you find yourself getting swept away and coming back to your meditation after what seems like hours, you can use that "coming back" as your meditation practice. That is, the practice of meditation means getting used to practicing even as your thoughts and emotions arise and you find yourself getting distracted.
Do your feelings and emotions rule you? If you're like me or if...you're human, then you've probably experienced anger, sadness, jealousy (or envy?), or emotional exhaustion. And, if you're like me, you're happy and grateful when those emotional states and feelings go away, right?! What do you do when you experience strong emotions? How do you deal with difficult feelings that just won't go away? What do you do when these experiences persist even when you try to push them away?
What is meditation anyway? (Do you get tired of me asking this?) Do people even know what meditation is? What I hear when I talk with people in my day-to-day life are things like, "Learning to meditate takes too long," and, "I tried but couldn't stop thinking," and, "I'm not religious." Yikes! People don't know what the hell meditation is! Here are a few things meditation isn't. If any of them are familiar to you, welcome to the club. If some of these seem obvious, read on. Most people get hung up on what they believe meditation is and never [...]
Do You Get Caught Up In Emotions? How often do you find yourself caught up in an emotion, seemingly stuck in a box with no way out? How often do you wish with all of your might that you could free yourself from the grips of strong emotions? Can meditation help you to deal with emotions? What you formally practice in meditation should prepare you for everything that you encounter in your daily life...shouldn't it? Despite many hours of practice, many meditators - myself very much included - find that although their meditation feels stable, when a sudden, unexpected and [...]
t's funny but there are so many concepts and ideas about what meditation is that we can get caught up in the definition of it all while forgetting to practice. Does it matter what you call it if you're doing it? Or, do you need to have a word for it to understand what you're doing?