Meditation Styles

[QueenCatherine]

Hey Guys!

I was introduced to mindfulness meditation many years ago as a part of my treatment for mental health issues. However, I didn't start to practice any type of meditation regularly until several years later. I didn't see or understand the value of developing a regular meditation practice until I became so miserable that I was willing to really try out some of the suggestions others had made to me over the years.

At first, guided sleep meditations on YouTube were very helpful. I didn't want to be alone in my head, so I continued to seek out guided meditations. I found them to be tremendously helpful, may they be streaming online, or available through apps.

Today, I use apps for guided meditations: every workday for the second half of my lunch break, and every night to help me fall asleep. I also utilize a type of meditation that is called "do nothing meditation" every evening before I go to bed. In this meditation, I sit upright with my eyes open and the lights on, and practice Doing. Nothing. for twenty minutes. I've found that these practices have tremendously improved the quality of my sleep, as well as my level of anxiousness. This is especially apparent when I look at my decreased discomfort during "dead time," like while waiting in a long line. I also fidget with my phone less. I can stand to just look around the room for a few minutes while I wait for something now, rather than needing to be constantly occupied.

I'm curious about what your journey of developing a meditation practice was like. Have you found meditation to be helpful? How do you like to meditate?

Many thanks,

Catherine

I started with mindfulness of breathe/calm abiding back in 2009 and maybe 4 or 5 years later began to add in choiceless awareness/resting in awareness which is much like Do Nothing except I keep my eyes closed. The difference between the two is one is focused on an object of attention (breathe but it could be virtually anything) while the other is open or not focused on anything. More recently I've been doing some metta practice but it's a small slice of my sitting time.

For me choiceless awareness/resting in awareness has been a game-changer. I don't know if you've ever heard the phrase "observer trap" but that's often the result of any focused practice and open awareness techniques are a way out of it, and that is to experience non-dual awareness free of mind (and ego). It's true presence without the mind as mediator of experience.

Okay, so here's a rather unique style.

I just finished sorting a cup of Goya 16 bean mix for soup. I cook that on Sundays and add a couple of tablespoons to salads and vegetables during the week. I sort them because if cooked together the lentils and split peas turn to mush, so they go in for the last 15 minutes.

Anyway I empty a cup of the mix on a large plate and sort them. It takes at least 15 minutes but it's undivided focus and presence. Funny but true, it is in fact a form of mindfulness.

[QueenCatherine]

I love your bean sorting meditation. Is that similar Flow? It seems like it to me.

I'll have to research some of the other types of meditation you mentioned.

I forgot to include focusing on your breath. I find it remarkable how effective intentional breathing is. Breathing happens constantly without any input at all from me, yet when I do want to consciously control it, it's extremely powerful and always available. It seems counter intuitive to me that such a potent force goes on in the background entirely separate from my awareness, yet I can have complete control over at will. Hmm, I've never spent this much time thinking about it, but it truly is en empowering phenomena.

C.

[Starman]

QueenCatherine, my personal journey of settling on a particular meditation style took many years. I have been doing quiet meditation now fairly regularly for more than 40-years. It has done, and continues to do, wonders for me. I have tried lots of different techniques; meditated, and slept, in a 6-ft. pyramid for a couple of years which I had erected over my bed, pyramid meditation is a unique experience.

I tried relaxation techniques early in my search. Even though I really did not know what I was searching for. I guess it was sanity, or peace, or sane-ness. I was looking for and oasis that would help me develop my deeper intrinsic nature, acquire some answers to my own existence, etc.

The style a person chooses usually has a lot to do with why they want to do it in the first place. There are certain styles and techniques that are better for some things than they are others. So the motivation often determines what style is embraced. Styles and techniques are tools that we acquire for us in doing a particular kind of work.

The efficiency of the work will only be as good as the tools that are used, and how often and diligently they are used. I surveyed a number of styles and techniques, looked into “guided imagery,” and learned about trance induction while studying transpersonal psychology. I think it is great to have as many useful tools in your tool box as you can embrace. But this fits my attitude and personality.

Another person may settle on a path right away, from their childhood, or they know someone who practices a particular path, which they want to learn. It seems most people stick to one style or path. A lot of people believe that you should not dabble in a bunch of stuff. The thing is that works for them, and investigating different approaches worked for me.

I am eclectic and value diversity. There are more than a hundred schools of psychological thought but most people are heavily influenced by the concepts of Freudian psychology. You can develop your own program. Everyone is programmed anyway, so you just as well develop your own program. What we give to each other is the work, or lack of work, which we have done on ourselves.

P.S. Style is on the surface, substance is below the surface. There is a whole lot more below the surface then there is on the surface.

[ocean breeze]

My style is the art of meditating without meditating.

Originally Posted by ocean breeze

My style is the art of meditating without meditating.

There's the practice of meditation and the resulting meditative state of mind. The practice takes advantage of neuroplasticity to effect beneficial change.

Even if one attains a level of proficiency where one is always in a meditative state one should still maintain a practice because of neuroplasticity. That is neuroplasticity will slowly begin to undo what the practice of meditation did if left unattended.

[QueenCatherine]

Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy

There's the practice of meditation and the resulting meditative state of mind. The practice takes advantage of neuroplasticity to effect beneficial change.

Even if one attains a level of proficiency where one is always in a meditative state one should still maintain a practice because of neuroplasticity. That is neuroplasticity will slowly begin to undo what the practice of meditation did if left unattended.

Interesting point about neuroplasticity. I've always thought of it as a major advantage for retraining our brains (especially after a traumatic brain injury or the like). But now I see that it can also work against us. Brilliant!

Catherine

Originally Posted by QueenCatherine

Interesting point about neuroplasticity. I've always thought of it as a major advantage for retraining our brains (especially after a traumatic brain injury or the like). But now I see that it can also work against us. Brilliant!

Catherine

Yup! This video made a huge impression on me when I found it many years back. It really gave me incentive to maintain a consistent practice even though I still had lapses, however I always came back.

https://youtu.be/5TeWvf-nfpA?list=PL...ydVp1WpVnPNokg

[A human Being]

Wonderful that you're experiencing the positive effects of meditation, I've come to think of it as being one of the best practices we can engage in for our own health and well-being if practised effectively, so it's great to hear that you're experiencing decreased levels of anxiety and that you're sleeping better

In my case, I've been meditating (or attempting to, at least) for about seven years now, but it's really only in the past 2-3 years that I've learnt how to meditate in a way that I would consider to be effective. It was really only a very painful and traumatic period in my personal life that helped me to learn, I was experiencing what I consider to be severe anxiety and depression and it forced me to pay very close attention to my inner workings, to how I was essentially causing my own suffering.

What I discovered was that it was my attempts to control my present experience, to keep painful thoughts and feelings at bay, that caused me to suffer, and so my meditation practice became about letting go of control. I was familiar with Adyashanti's instruction to 'allow everything to be as it is,' but I still hadn't figured out how to do that; up to that point, my meditation practice had been all about control - controlling my mind, controlling my emotional state, trying to have a particular experience. But what I found through this very difficult part of my life is that I really didn't have control, and that my attempts at control were causing me to suffer.

I think the thing that really helped me was to shift the focus of my attention from my mind to my body, because up until that point I'd been very head-centred (looking back, it's little surprise that my third eye started to become active so soon into my practice), basically because I didn't really understand the purpose of meditation. As much as anything, my meditation practice over the past two years or so has been geared towards simply allowing my body to breathe and relax; I'd always been very much in my head, very introverted, and my body had become very tight and tense as a result. What I didn't fully appreciate at first was that my body was so contracted because it was instinctively trying to keep emotional pain at bay, deep wounds from my childhood (maybe even from past lives, though I don't think it ultimately much matters) that had never been healed, and as my body relaxed, all that pain came into my conscious awareness. So learning how to take care of my needs also became important, as what had previously been repressed started to arise (and that might also mean taking it easy with the meditation at times, too).

Anyway, not to ramble - glad to hear your practice is going well, keep it up