Meditation

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Meditation

There are many different types of meditation used for many different purposes. One common type of meditation is to sit quietly and concentrate on one thing such as a pleasant feeling of relaxation, or on various sensations in your body, or by repeating a mantra possibly in rhythm with your breath. You focus your attention in one of these ways, and when you notice your mind wandering, you bring it back to the focus of attention.

If you notice an unpleasant thought or emotion during meditation, it is important not to push it away, otherwise you may develop the habit of repressing thoughts and feelings by your practice of meditation. Instead of pushing away unpleasant thoughts and emotions, relax, open yourself to them, observe them, allow yourself to feel the emotional pain, and notice the feelings in your body associated with them. If you experience very strong unpleasant emotions you can go back to concentrating until you feel relaxed again. Each person must find their own correct balance between observing emotions and concentrating. There is more on this subject in the section on Releasing Unpleasant Thoughts and Emotions. (It is not unusual for strong emotions to arise during meditation. Some people may not want to deal with them and might prefer to practice relaxation exercises instead of meditation.)

Serenity (Samatha) Meditation

Spiritual Meditation

Research shows that deep breathing can produce a relaxation response in the mind and body. If you take a deep breath and exhale you can experience this as a feeling of relaxation. It is possible to produce this relaxed feeling without very deep breathing but through a more normal depth and rate of breathing. When you learn breathe this way and use it in the meditation technique described here, you can become very peaceful and relaxed. This state is so pleasant it might make you want to smile. When that happens, focusing your attention on the pleasant feelings can set up a feedback loop in the brain where the pleasant feelings feel nice and that produces a pleasure resonse which feels nice which produces a pleasure response etc. When you first learn to do this, you might experiment with very intense states of spiritual feelings including compassion, love and joy, but as you become familiar with it, you may prefer to turn down the intensity of these feelings and settle into a benevolent, peaceful, and contented state.

The relaxed feeling and other pleasant emotions produced by this type of meditation can help alleviate some of the psychological discomfort that comes from letting go of emotional pain. Unpleasant emotions sometimes come up during meditation and letting go of them as they arise is one way meditation can help improve your psychological well-being.

Here are the sections below that explain the meditation technique. You can skip right to the simplified instructions and get started but you should also read the introduction and warning.

Introduction: A Variation on Observing The Breath

This form of serenity meditation is derived from a very easy and popular meditation technique that involves repeating a mantra while observing the breath. A small modification, observing the pleasant feeling of relaxation while breathing in a relaxed way, makes it more effective at producing a relaxed state of mind and positive feelings of happiness and well-being. This meditation should also make you smile which causes the brain to release dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin, molecules that will elevate your mood. Smiling also reduces levels of the anxiety causing stress hormone cortisol. The beginner should notice feeling more relaxed and calmer after meditating. After practicing for a while, the meditator should notice increased feelings of happiness and a reduction in worrying. With more practice, the feelings experienced may include unconditional love, a connectedness to all things, and those who are religious may feel a closer connection to God. With continued practice, the meditator may experience a feeling of deeply peaceful serenity. This meditation can also be done in daily life and it is truly life enhancing to be able to experience life through the emotions of happiness, connectedness, and love.

It is suggested that the beginner meditate twenty to thirty minutes once or twice a day to develop facility with the technique and develop the habit of daily meditation. This amount of time is suggested to produce results that will encourage the beginner to continue the practice, but any amount of time is better than none. You may also practice for a longer time and more than twice a day if you like, and you can use the technique in daily life (see below). You will get better results faster if you meditate more. Once you experience the pleasant enjoyable effects of this meditation, you may naturally want to practice more.

While you are meditating, sometimes you will become distracted by stray thoughts. Don't worry about this, it is to be expected. Just go back to meditating. If unpleasant thoughts or emotions arise during meditation you shouldn't push them away. The section on Releasing Unpleasant Thoughts and Emotions explains how to deal with unpleasant thoughts and emotions that arise during meditation.

This type of meditation does not require the super-intense 100% concentration which is the goal of some other types of meditation. However, you do need a moderate level of mental focus.

Some people may try this meditation technique because they have a mood disorder such as depression or anxiety. If such a condition is caused by psychological factors, meditation could be more helpful than if the condition is caused by biochemical factors. If you have a condition such as depression or anxiety and find this meditation does not help you relax, feel calm, and produce feelings of happiness and other positive emotions, you may find that if you can address any underlying biochemical issues, the meditation will then begin to work. (The subject of how biochemistry influences moods is complex and beyond the scope of this article. If you want to know more about this subject, search the internet for information on how diet can affect serotonin and cortisol levels.)

WARNING: This type of meditation can produce very pleasant psychological states. This might tempt you to do this meditation for long periods of time or use the technique extensively in daily life. If this happens, please see the section The Dangers of Meditation so that you can make an informed decision about how much of this meditation to do. It is possible that for some people this form of meditation could be addicting. You should stop using the technique and allow yourself to come out of these states periodically to ensure that you will always be able to do so if you choose.

Some people believe that producing intense blissful emotions can cause a depletion of neurotransmitters causing a feeling of depression afterwards. If you suspect this might be happening to you, you may try Neutral Meditation. Another alternative is doing the meditation described below but not raising the pleasant emotions to a high level. That is what many people do regardless, after they have gained more experience with the technique. The intense emotions are interesting but ultimately the real benefit from this meditation is that it can help you cultivate a pleasant relaxed mood where forgiveness, compassion, and good will naturally arise. The intense emotions help you recognize when you are doing the technique correctly but they are not absolutely necessary.

* * *

If something doesn't work for you exactly as described in the instructions below, don't worry about it, just try to follow the instruction as closely as you can. Don't "try too hard", and try not to have expectations about what will happen during your meditation session. If you try too hard or you try to produce a certain type of experience it, will create stress and that will defeat the purpose of the meditation and the meditation will not work as well. Just try to be relaxed and don't worry about what else might or might not happen.


To do this form of meditation:

Simplified Instructions

Sit comfortably in whatever way you prefer, in a chair or on the floor. No special meditation posture is needed. Close your eyes. Notice how you feel throughout your body. Do you feel anxious or tense? Try to relax your whole body. Take a deep breath and relax your whole body as you exhale. Notice the pleasant feeling of relaxation? Now breathe normally and relax your whole body as you exhale. Notice the same feeling of relaxation. Relax your whole body as you inhale and notice a similar feeling of relaxation. It might help you to relax if you slow down your breathing somewhat. Continue to relax your whole body as you inhale and exhale and notice the pleasant feelings of relaxation. Your whole body may begin feel heavy as you become more and more relaxed. While you meditate this way, also say to yourself, (inwardly not aloud) "in" as you inhale, and "out" as you exhale. Notice the absence of mental chatter as you focus your attention on the words "in" an "out". Meditate this way with the understanding that you are trying to have a pleasant, relaxing, calming meditation session. Cultivate a state of relaxed alertness, relaxed awareness, not relaxed sleepiness. After a while, observing the pleasant feeling of relaxation as you inhale and exhale might make you want to smile.

If you feel like it, go ahead and smile, even if it's just a little bit, and notice the pleasant emotions that accompany smiling as you continue to meditate. Sometimes noticing any sensations or tingling you might feel in the lips as you meditate can help bring on a smile. If your mind wanders don't worry about it, it's normal. If you like, you can take a few seconds to notice what thoughts or emotions distracted you, and any sensations they produced in your body. Then return to meditating, relax your whole body as you inhale and exhale, notice the pleasant feelings of relaxation and peace, and smile if you feel like it.

That's it. You should do this as a form of sitting meditation but you can also do it during daily activities. When you start a session, it can be helpful if you remind yourself how the technique works by thinking:

Relax as you inhale, relax as you exhale, notice the pleasant feeling of relaxation, and smile if you feel like it.

After practicing this type of meditation for some time, you might find that you can maintain a relaxed and happy state at times when you are not sitting in meditation. This can produce a very stable equanimity.

I described this meditation technique on an internet discussion form in approximately this way:

I meditate by counting the breath, trying to notice a pleasant feeling of relaxation as I inhale and exhale and I notice the pleasant feelings released when I let myself half-smile. It may start out as a very faint feeling barely noticeable, but it increases gradually during the meditation session so I take a patient attitude and trust the technique. Worrying "am I happy now?" just creates stress which is counterproductive.

...

I would describe the practice as cultivating a state of relaxed happiness by various means in order to develop equanimity. I draw on relaxation techniques from different sources - anything that can activate the parasympathetic nervous system: counting the breath meditation, yoga poses, quigong (8 Brocades or Ba Duan Jin or Baduanjin), tai-chi, progressive muscular relaxation, hypnotic induction. I cultivate happiness through a technique I learned from reading Thich Nhat Hanh who wrote, "... practice breathing with a half-smile. You will feel great joy.". But too much great joy can become tedious (believe it or not) so I try to cultivate just a pleasant positive slightly happy feeling. Also, to cultivate happiness, I try to use information on how to increase serotonin levels in the brain that I might read about here and there.

Some advocates of insight meditation, who don't meditate this way, might misunderstand this meditation technique, believing it is a form of escapism, not realizing how the practice has cumulative effects that carry over to daily life. It is not a static practice but something that helps you to develop more and more equanimity over time. I tried to explain it in the same discussion forum approximately like this:

You can't separate insight from concentration. You need some minimum concentration to do insight, and every wandering of the mind during concentration produces an iota of insight which adds up over time.

You can't "rest in a pleasant state" unless you have reached perfection. There is always something that disturbs your peace but since you prefer a pleasant state, you see what is disturbing your peace and you figure out how to let go of it (get back to a peaceful state) during the meditation session and during daily life.

Because the technique provides a solution to a the problem of unpleasant emotional states, it does not require will power any more than taking an aspirin for a headache takes will power. When you are in an unpleasant emotional state, you know what to do. And over time the "aspirin" gets stronger, your equanimity becomes more and more stable.

It is also important to understand this type of meditation might or might not help with anxiety or depression - depending on the cause. If the cause is cognitive it might help. If the cause is organic it might not help. But there can be interactions between the organic and the cognitive so ... the subject is complicated.

On the same forum I wrote:

No one should think I am implying this a treatment for anxiety or depression. Those issues are outside the scope of my expertise. The technique might not even work in situations where brain chemistry or the nervous system cannot support the effects.

On a different internet forum I wrote:

My own feeling is that people will get more out of a spiritual practice if they get their brain chemistry right through other means, for example through diet and exercise, otherwise they might not get the effect they seek from the spiritual practice.

I don't see spiritual practices as a mental health treatment, I see them as a means to spiritual development and growth. So I have the opposite view from a lot of psychologists and doctors who are also in the spiritual arena. I think it is a bad match when people go to a spiritual school looking for solutions to their psychological problems. The spiritual quest is fraught with dangers and people in a fragile condition are at heightened risk.

You might recognize this meditation is similar to other forms of breath meditation. What is unique about this form is focusing your attention on the pleasant feeling of relaxation as you breathe. The pleasant feeling of relaxation will probably make you feel like smiling. Smiling causes the brain to release dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin, which are molecules that will elevate your mood. Smiling also reduces levels of the anxiety causing stress hormone cortisol. These chemical changes will produce a pleasant effect and may make you want to smile even more. This can result in a feedback loop that produces intense feelings of feelings of happiness, loving kindness, and connectedness.

Please read the detailed instructions below which include many details that will help you to get good results from this type of meditation:


Detailed Instructions

If the instructions below seem too complicated to master all at once, you can start meditating with the simplified instructions and you can work through the detailed instructions at your own pace to refine your understanding of the technique. Anytime you feel confused or uncertain about what to do, refer back to the simplified instructions.

When you read these meditation instructions, it might seem like there are too many things to do simultaneously. However, in actual practice it is not difficult. Put the main focus of your attention on breathing and observing the pleasant feeling of relaxation. Counting breaths should not require much additional attention or distract you from the main focus. Counting in itself is not important it is just a neutral way of keeping the verbal center of the mind occupied to reduce mental chatter thus helping the mind to quiet down.

When you do this meditation technique, you should clearly understand how it works. You should understand what your intention should be, i.e. what you will try to do during the meditation. And you should also understand what the effects of the meditation are likely to be, i.e. what may happen to you if you follow the technique. And with one exception, relaxing, you should not confuse what you try to do with what happens to you.

During the meditation session, you should breathe gently. It is okay to try to relax. You should observe your breath. You should count your breaths. You should observe the pleasant feeling of relaxation. You should smile if you feel like smiling.

What happens to you, (what the effect of the meditation is), is that you should become more relaxed (muscle tension, and negative emotions should dissipate somewhat). Focusing the mind (on counting the breath and the pleasant feeling) will make the mind calmer, there will be less mental chatter. Observing the pleasant feeling of relaxation can produce feelings of happiness and other more intense positive emotions. Smiling if you feel like it will remove unconscious suppression of feelings of happiness and other positive emotions.

You should not confuse the effects of the meditation technique, i.e. the mind becoming calmer, and feelings of happiness arising, with what you are trying to do. You don't try to force the mind to be calm, you just devote your attention to the breath, counting, and the pleasant feeling and the mind will become calm. You don't force yourself to be happy you just observe the pleasant feeling of relaxation, and feelings of happiness may arise.

The meditation technique as I have described it so far should be the main focus of the practice. It is easy to get sidetracked by what I will say below and become too focused on that. The main practice is to count the breath while breathing gently and if you notice a pleasant feeling of relaxation, observe that feeling, and smile if you feel like smiling. Below I have some additional suggestions to get the technique to work but don't become overly concerned with whether or not you feel anything because that will produce stress and cause distraction and it will prevent the technique from working.

Back to Detailed Instructions

Back to Serenity Meditation

Troubleshooting

Even if you can feel the feeling of relaxation when you breathe and you feel like smiling as you meditate, if these suggestions help the technique to work faster, you should not hesitate to use them. I use them myself.

But if you don't feel anything, that's okay, it might not happen every time, don't force it. Either way, let go of any expectations you might have about what could happen during the meditation session and continue counting the breath.

Sometimes you may have an especially pleasant experience meditating. If you become overly concerned with reproducing that experience the next time you meditate, you will find it can cause stress and distraction and prevent the meditation from working. You shouldn't be trying to have any particular experience when you meditate. Just follow the instructions as explained above and let the experience develop naturally from doing the technique. Keep this in mind and it will be easier to let go of any expectations you have and you will have better meditation sessions.

The purpose of this meditation is not to make the mind completely still. The purpose is to:

This is a spiritual practice because when you are happy, you are better able to live according to spiritual values such as love, forgiveness, tolerance etc. When you are happy, love arises naturally and you feel a connection to all things.

This meditation should be relaxing. The effort to concentrate shouldn't make you feel tense, fatigued or repressed. However, try not to lapse into the state where you count with half your mind and the other half is wandering off. Try to devote your attention to the breath, the pleasant feeling of relaxation if you notice it, or the pleasant feeling that makes you smile, and awareness of counting. During the meditation session, if you feel like smiling, do so, let go of the thought that made you want to smile, but begin to notice the pleasant feeling it created while you continue to count the breath.

This technique is, in a way, effortless. It works automatically. You don't have to do anything special. It's like falling asleep, you don't force yourself to sleep by an act of will, it comes over you. Just like falling asleep, if you sit quietly and try to count the breath, eventually the mind will calm down. When the mind is calm you will notice a pleasant feeling caused by breathing in a relaxed way or a pleasant feeling caused by a pleasant thought. As you notice the pleasant feeling while you meditate with a calm mind, the feeling will increase over time into feelings of happiness and love. All this happens automatically. All you do is to make a gentle effort to breathe in a relaxed way, and count your breaths, and without any expectation or further intention, notice what you feel.

If you've been meditating this way for a while and you feel something is not quite right, go back to the beginning of this section and reread the instructions and follow them as if it was the first time you tried them. You have to do each component of this meditation if it is going to work. You have to count your breath, you can't let your mind wander, you have to observe the pleasant feeling of relaxation, and you have smile if you feel like it.

More information about this meditation technique can be found at Joy During Meditation

One of the benefits of this type of meditation is that it shows you happiness is a choice, and this can improve your entire outlook on life. If you can do this meditation, you will discover that you have the ability to be happy when you choose to be. Many people are unhappy and they feel that it is not under their control and that somehow it is their fate. But when you know you have the option to be happy, it changes everything. Then, if you are not happy, it is because you choose to do things that do not lead to happiness. There is nothing wrong with that choice and it is empowering to understand that it is your choice and not fate that is the cause of your unhappiness. Being unhappy is not a problem if you prefer not to be happy.

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Equanimity

This type of meditation in which you learn to produce pleasant emotions and release unpleasant emotions can lead to a very stable form of equanimity. With practice, it can help you to develop the ability to be happy and relaxed even when you are not meditating. In time, the ability to be happy and relaxed may become second nature and you will find that in many cases, worrying, becoming angry, or becoming upset in any way is something you can choose not to do. When you feel an unpleasant emotion arising, you can choose to be happy and relaxed instead, and the unpleasantness of the emotion will cease without the emotion being suppressed.

I described what this is like on facebook group:

There is a certain state produced by meditation - but not limited to a meditation session, you experience it during daily life - where you feel all the usual emotions, but you don't consider them a problem, they are not "suffering". For example you might notice disappointment, but it's okay. You might notice anxiety, but that's okay too, not a problem.

...

What is very good about this state from a psychological perspective is that the unpleasant emotions are not suppressed or repressed. They are allowed to be expressed, but don't cause unpleasantness.

This type of equanimity is known in the Buddhist tradition as upekkha.

The feelings of love and connectedness produced by this meditation also help you to maintain equanimity. When you love, you are more tolerant and less apt to become angry. When faced with the choice of becoming upset or retaining those pleasant feelings, the choice is obvious. This meditation teaches you how to be relaxed, calm, loving, and happy and you can choose to be that way when you want to.

The calming of the mind caused by this meditation also helps you to maintain equanimity. When the mind is calm, negative mental chatter that might lead to or exacerbate anxiety or depression is absent. When the mind is calm, you can see its activity more dispassionately as an observer rather than being carried away by it and reacting heedlessly. You can see clearly the arising of unpleasant thoughts and emotions and can have the presence of mind to remain happy, loving and relaxed without suppressing them.

As you can see on this chart from www.dhammasukha.org, when you experience an unpleasant thought or emotion arising and you relax to cause it to cease, when you extinguish it (Nirvana means extinguish), you are breaking the chain of dependent origination at the seventh step: "feeling". When you do this, you know that the thought or emotion is unpleasant and causes suffering. You know it is impermanent when it ceases as you relax. You know it is not part of your eternal self when you reject it and cause it to stop. When you go through this process, you experience the truth of dependent origination, the three characteristics of existence: suffering, impermanence, and not-self, and the third noble truth: the end of suffering.

Bhante Vimalaramsi's The 6 R's describes a process for releasing unpleasant emotions similar to what I have described. His process involves six steps: Recognize, Release, Relax, Re-Smile, Return, and Repeat. He says about this process (I have added the bold formatting):

... When a feeling or thought arises, you release it, let it be there without giving anymore attention to it. The content of the distraction is not important at all, but the mechanics of “how” it arose are important! Just let go of any tightness around it; let it be there without placing attention on it. Without attention, the tightness passes away. Mindfulness then reminds you to:

Relax: After releasing the feeling or sensation, and allowing it to be there without trying to control it, there is a subtle, barely noticeable tension within mind/body. This is why the Relax step ("Tranquilization" step as stated in the suttas) is being pointed out by the Buddha in his meditation instructions.

...

Gently re-direct mind’s attention back to the object of meditation (that is the breath and relaxing, or Metta and relaxing) continuing with a gentle collected mind and use that object as a "home base".

...

Repeating the "6Rs cycle" over and over again will eventually replace old habitual suffering as we see clearly for ourselves what suffering actually is; notice the cause of it and how we become involved with the tension and tightness of it; experience how to reach a cessation of that suffering by releasing and relaxing; and discover how we can exercise the direct path to that same cessation of suffering. We achieve this cessation each time we Release an arising feeling, Relax and Re-Smile. Notice the Relief!

As you practice the type of serenity meditation described here on this page, after you notice an unpleasant emotion, relax, and accept it in a friendly way, when you shift your awareness from the unpleasant emotion and direct it inwardly to the pleasant feeling of relaxation produced by inhaling and exhaling gently and to the pleasant feelings of happiness and good will produced by the smile feedback loop, that shifting of awareness from unpleasant to pleasant is the cessation of suffering. Observe it closely. Learn to know it well. Become good at it.

A beginning student may think practicing meditation in a quiet room will help him develop equanimity in turbulent circumstances. That is true to a certain extent. And a it's fine for a beginner to learn the basics in a comfortable situation. But eventually the seedling has to come out of the greenhouse and be planted outdoors. The advanced student realizes that cultivating relaxed, happy, contentment, during turbulent, unpleasant circumstances is necessary to deepen equanimity. You have to meet experiences of "I don't like this sensation" and "I don't like this situation" and investigate the activity of the mind, learn to release unnpleasant emotions, and cultivate relaxed, happy, contentment amidst them to develop deep equanimity. You don't have to seek out these experiences, life brings them to you. You can start with small things like an itch that occurs when you are trying to sit still during meditation or the feeling of annoyance caused by something another person does. Reading the news will give you plenty to work with. Life will bring you even more exercises.

More here.

It also helps to deepen equanimity if you understand the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is a physical sensation. Suffering is an emotional reaction. When you experience unpleasant physical sensations, try to notice the emotional reactions and release them.

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Why this is Buddhist Meditation

In the Mahasaccaka Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 36, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu at accesstoinsight.org Buddha says:

"I thought: 'I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then - quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities - I entered & remained in the first jhana: rapture & pleasure born from seclusion, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation. Could that be the path to Awakening?' Then following on that memory came the realization: 'That is the path to Awakening.' I thought: 'So why am I afraid of that pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality, nothing to do with unskillful mental qualities?' I thought: 'I am no longer afraid of that pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality, nothing to do with unskillful mental qualities, but that pleasure is not easy to achieve with a body so extremely emaciated. Suppose I were to take some solid food: some rice & porridge.' So I took some solid food: some rice & porridge.

In the Satipatthana Sutta Buddha says that when meditating on the breath, attention should be focused on the area around the mouth.

Satipatthana Sutta at dharmafarer.org

Mindfulness of the in-and-out-breath

...

Here, bhikshus, a monk who has gone to the forest, or to the foot of a tree, or to an empty abode, sits down, and having crossed his legs and keeping his body upright, establishes mindfulness fully before him.21

...

21 Parimukha?, lit "around the mouth."

The book Breathe! You are Alive by Thich Nhat Hanh includes a translation of the Anapanasati Sutta including the following lines:

5. 'I am breathing in and feeling joyful. I am breathing out and feeling joyful.' That is how he practices.

6. 'I am breathing in and feeling happy. I am breathing out and feeling happy.' That is how he practices.

...

10. 'I am breathing in and making my mind happy and at peace. I am breathing out and making my mind happy and at peace.' That is how he practices.

When discussing how to put this into practice, Thich Nhat Hanh write:

... practice breathing with a half-smile. You will feel great joy.

This type of meditation helps you develop the four foundations of mindfulness: mindfulness of body, sensations, mind, and objects of mind.

When you experience happiness and love through this meditation, you may see through the illusions projected by the mind. Happiness eliminates desires. Love eliminates attachment to self. In the absence of desire and attachment to self, the impermanence of things will not cause trouble.

In the Tevijja Sutta Buddha teaches that cultivating the Brahma Viharas can lead to awakening. The Brahma Viharas are four emotions: loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The meditation explained above cultivates these emotions.

When you see that you have the ability to be happy and that existence can be pleasurable without the need for anything outside yourself to cause it, you naturally want to improve your ability and extend the experience. This makes you sensitive to things that interfere with that pleasant state. You naturally learn that attachments and aversions separate you from this state so you naturally begin to let go of attachments and aversions.

In The Path of Concentration & Mindfulness Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:

Another advantage to this mindful, concentrated state is that as you feel more and more at home in it, you begin to realize that it's possible to have happiness and pleasure in life without depending on things outside of yourself — people, relationships, approval from others, or any of the issues that come from being part of the world. This realization helps pry loose your attachments to things outside. Some people are afraid of getting attached to a state of calm, but actually, it's very important that you get attached here, so that you begin to settle down and begin to undo your other attachments. Only when this attachment to calm is the only one left do you begin work on loosening it up as well.

...

You can see, say, where there's an element of attachment, where there's an element of stress, or even where there's inconstancy within your balanced state. This is where you begin to gain insight, as you see the natural cleavage lines among the different factors of the mind, and in particular, the cleavage line between awareness and the objects of awareness.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu also wrote in A Guided Meditation:

Try to breathe as comfortably as possible. A very concrete way of learning how to provide for your own happiness in the immediate present - and at the same time, strengthening your alertness — is to let yourself breathe in a way that's comfortable. Experiment to see what kind of breathing feels best for the body right now. ... Learn to savor the sensation of the breathing. Generally speaking, the smoother the texture of the breath, the better. Think of the breath, not simply as the air coming in and out of the lungs, but as the entire energy flow that courses through the body with each in-and-out breath.

Insight can come from observing many different aspects of experience. In this meditation, one observes the breath, a mantra (counting), and feelings (relaxation, happiness, etc.). These are also objects of insight in other types of meditation. What is different about this type of meditation is that it is a lot more pleasant than many other techniques so you will naturally be drawn to practice it, and it will improve the quality of your life along the way.

(If you are already practicing some type of meditation, you don't have to give that up, but you can make it closer to the method of meditation taught by Buddha and make it a more positive experience by observing the pleasant feeling of relaxation while you meditate.)

The vast majority of people who experience realization are monks and nuns. There are a few laypeople who experience it but they usually meditate for hours a day and go on frequent meditation retreats. It is very rare for the average meditator to experience realization. Many of the schools that teach meditation are teaching how to attain realization to people who will never experience it, and they never warn their students about the dangers of meditation. But meditation can still have benefits for the ordinary person and the type of meditation described here is intended for the ordinary person.

For most people, spiritual development is more important than realization. Most of us are here to have an experience of a physical existence and we can do that better if we are happy, loving, feel connected etc. This meditation should help a person to live more in harmony with spiritual values.

This form of meditation integrates aspects of meditation from several different traditions. I learned of diaphragmatic breathing from Himalayan Yoga. Counting breaths is described in a number of books on Zen Buddhist meditation. Smiling during meditation is advocated in books by Thich Nhat Hanh. Observing the pleasant feeling of relaxation as a way of implementing instructions found in the Anapanasati Sutta, was something I discovered myself (although it may be known to others as well). I haven't seen these components put together in this way anywhere else but I find they work extremely well when combined in this integrated approach.

Most forms of Buddhist meditation taught today such as insight, vipassana, the nana's, and jhana, are based on teachings that came after the Buddha. They are missing a key factor originally taught by the Buddha: relaxation to prevent repression of negative thoughts and emotions, which produce a deeper realization and are needed for true lasting Nibbana. The form of meditation described in this article includes relaxation in releasing negative thoughts and emotions to prevent repression.

On the subject of release, see this link: What are the 6 R's? by Bhante Vimalaramsi, and this quote Thanissaro Bhikkhu:

One technique I like to use — when anger is present and you're in a situation where you don't immediately have to react to people — is simply to ask yourself in a good-natured way, "Okay, why are you angry?" Listen to what the mind has to say. Then pursue the matter: "But why are you angry at that? " "Of course, I'm angry. After all..." "Well, why are you angry at that?" If you keep this up, the mind will eventually admit to something stupid, like the assumption that people shouldn't be that way — even though they blatantly are that way — or that people should act in line with your standards, or whatever the mind is so embarrassed about that it tries to hide from you. But finally, if you keep probing, it'll fess up. You gain a lot of understanding of the anger that way, and this can really weaken its power over you.

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How it Works

Neuroplasticity is a phenomenon of the brain in which brain functions that are active recruit more neurons to participate in that function. As you use a capacity of the brain, the brain rewires itself to improve its ability to perform that function. There are several components to this meditation that improve with practice and rewire the brain for happiness:

Networks in the Brain

Research has shown that because of the structure of the brain, analytical thinking and empathic thinking are mutually exclusive. Humankind in general and Western society specifically owes much of its prosperity to analytical thinking but as a result we are out of balance as a species. There is nothing wrong with analytical thinking (which is used in problem solving), it is only a problem when it is out of balance with empathic thinking (which is used in social situation) because a lack of empathic thinking results in callousness which is the cause of many problems in the world today. We need to focus more on cultivating empathic thinking. The type of meditation described here, as well as insight meditation (see below), will help you develop empathic thinking. It can have the effects of making you more sympathetic to other people which is a spiritual virtue, but it can also make you more emotional and it might cause you to experience psychic perceptions as well.

When you focus your attention on your breathing, you are abstaining from analytical thinking and when you do that, the brain shifts to empathic thinking. When you focus your attention on a pleasant feeling during meditation, you are exercising the part of your brain that supports happiness and love and connectedness and you are reinforcing neural pathways involved in empathic thinking. This type of meditation is a fundamental spiritual practice.

The Default Network

Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In the transcript of a podcast on bigthink.com, he describes how meditation can quiet mental chatter made up of anxious and depressed thoughts:

If you put people in a scanner and tell them to just do nothing; just rest in the scanner; don’t do anything at all, it turns out that there’s a region in the midline of the cerebral cortex that’s known as the default mode network that just lights up, that all of a sudden gets very, very active. I mean you’re told to do nothing and then your brain starts to use up energy a lot. ... And that’s called the default mode network because when you’re told to do nothing, you default to activity in this mode and when you inquire what’s going on there, a lot of it has to do with my wondering and just daydreaming. And a lot of that has to do with the self-referencing our favorite subject, which is me of course. So we generate narratives. ... it’s also called the narrative mode network or the narrative network. And it’s the story of me.

When you train people in MBSR, you find that another area of their cortex lights up more lateral after eight weeks of training in mindfulness. And that that area is associated with a region called the insula and that doesn’t have a linear, time-based narrative. It’s just the experiencing of the present moment in the body — breathing in, breathing out, awake, no narrative, no agenda. And the interesting thing — and this is the study — when they put people through eight weeks of MBSR, this narrative network decreases in activity and this experiential network increases in activity and they become uncoupled. So they’re no longer caught together in such a way. So this one can actually attenuate and liberate you a little bit from the constant thinking, thinking, thinking — a lot which is driven, of course, by anxiety and, "What’s wrong with me?" The story of me is often a depressing story. And a fear-based story. We’re like driving the car with the brake on, with the emergency brake on. And if we learn how to just kind of release it, everything will unfold with less strain, with less stress and with a greater sense of life unfolding rather than you’re driving through it to get to some great pot of gold at the end, which might just be your grave.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn also says the benefits of suppressing the narrative network and stimulating the experiential network with meditation leads to wiser, more empathic and more compassionate thinking in an interview at: psychcentral.com:

One pathway is a mid-line pathway, very akin to what is called a default mode, that seems to be functioning when nothing else is supposed to be happening — like being or mind wandering, or something like that, which is what they call the narrative network for self. So like what you tell yourself about who you are, where you’re going, how things are going, how stressed you are, how great it’s going to be in the future, how horrible it was in the past, or vice-versa, how wonderful it was in the past, or how horrible it is in the present. So it is a narrative ongoing story of me. And that occupies a certain kind of brain territory.

They showed that people who are taking the MBSR program showed activity in a whole other, more lateral ventral pathway in the cerebral cortex, again in the prefrontal cortex, which was involved with what they called experiential focus. It’s like no more story, just this. Just this moment. Just this breath. Just this unfolding. And I want to emphasize that it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you are either disassociating or that you’re going to get really, really stupid practicing mindfulness because now you’re just in the present moment and you don’t know what’s really happening and you’ve now gone beyond thought. Not at all. I mean it’s much more an effective, wise and emotionally intelligent way to make use of one’s thoughts and emotions, but hold them in a much, much greater and more empathic, and in some sense, more compassionate and wise container, and that container embraces what I mean when I use the word mindful.

This says something interesting about the meditative state. In the meditative state there is an absence of analytical thinking and an absence of narrative thinking.

The meditation described here is different from some other types of meditation in an important way. In many types of meditation, if you notice a thought distracting you from concentrating, you stop thinking the thought. That represses thoughts and feelings. But with this meditation you quiet the mind and dissolve negative emotions through relaxation not repression. When you do something with your mind, the neuronal connections involved are reinforced. If you meditate on the pleasant feeling of relaxation you will train your mind to be relaxed and to produce pleasure while the old unpleasant pathways, for example, those producing worry, or anger, will become unused and atrophy.

The phenomenon of reinforcing neural pathways when you use them is called neuroplasticity. When produced by meditation, because it is caused by mental intention, it is called self-directed neuroplasticity. Some neuronal functions use quantum phenomena and it is believed by some scientists that self-directed neuroplasticity may be mediated by the quantum Zeno effect in which observation prevents unstable quantum states from decaying.

When you induce the pleasurable feeling by breathing gently or by a thought, the pleasure centers of the brain turn on. Observing the feeling continuously prevents it from fading away. Because of neuroplasticity, meditating this way causes the brain to wire itself to more readily produce feelings of pleasure. The result is spiritual: increased feelings of happiness, love, and connectedness. This type of meditation is also a form of insight meditation (see below) because you are observing your breath, your counting, and your feelings.

Some people may question whether this form of meditation produces genuine spiritual experiences or if it is just inducing certain brain states. One must understand that the correlation between brain states and mental states does not prove the brain produces mental states. It is much more likely that the brain is a filter of non-physical consciousness. Experiences such as happiness, unconditional love, connectedness to all things, and an awareness of God, are experiences of aspects of our true nature. This meditation technique is a way of learning to control the filter, the brain, in order to allow these aspects of our true nature into our awareness.

We are born without an operating guide for the brain. Most people let their brain and the events around them determine their mood. But you don't have to live that way. You can train your brain to be happy. The result is a more spiritual less callous way of life.

Back to Serenity Meditation

Some Comments on Meditation in General

Some people feel that because they have trouble concentrating, they can't meditate, or they aren't any good at it. In this situation, it may help them to change their understanding of what meditation is. It can be better to think of meditation not as an exercise where you hold the mind still, but as an exercise where the mind is given a chance to become still. Like a wild horse put in a pen, when you start a meditation session, the mind may run around and around in circles. But just as the horse will eventually calm down and stop running, so will the mind eventually slow down and become calm if you sit quietly and persist in meditation. The more turbulent your mind is, the longer it will take to calm down. (When the mind is very turbulent, it may help to combine meditation with relaxation exercises.)

In this view, a meditation session is a process of letting out and letting go which leads to a calmer and more relaxed state of being at the end of the session. As you concentrate, you make the effort to let go of thoughts and emotions by thinking of the object of the meditation to displace other thoughts from your mind. As you do this, you know that letting go is not the only important thing you are doing during meditation. When you notice you are distracted by a thought or emotion you also understand that this distraction is part of another important process - letting out. There is no need to feel any regret or annoyance that you have lost concentration. When you notice you have become distracted, you understand that these thoughts and emotions that arise are an equal part of meditation. Their arising is part of the process of letting out. After each distraction, the mind is a tiny bit calmer. It may help to think of it as if there are a finite number of times you will lose concentration before the mind becomes calm and you have to experience each of those distractions to get to the final state of being calm and relaxed. When the mind is very turbulent, distractions will come fast and furious. No matter. Just keep going back to concentration knowing that this is the natural way a turbulent mind becomes calm, and if you are patient and persistent you will find peace through this process of letting out and letting go. (Also see, Why is it so hard to concentrate? Sources of distraction and obstacles to concentration during meditation.)

Each person must find the right balance between letting out and letting go for himself. Too much letting out might cause you to develop the habit of dwelling in unpleasant emotions. Too much letting go might cause you to suppress thoughts and emotions and feel tense instead of relaxed. While you meditate, as you notice distractions and go back to focusing the mind, there may be a tendency to suppress the intruding thoughts and feelings. This may lead to developing a habit of suppressing thoughts and emotions during other times. The way to avoid this pitfall is when you notice a distraction in meditation, if you find you are also experiencing an emotion, take a moment to notice the sensations of the emotion in your body and note to yourself what the thought that caused that emotion was. As you bring your mind back to the focus of meditation, you may also allow your awareness to linger on the sensations in your body that accompanied the emotion. This is explained in greater detail in the section below on Insight Meditation.

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Releasing Unpleasant Thoughts, Emotions and Impulses

In addition to the information below, these articles on my blog have useful information on this subject:

Each person needs to find the right balance between letting out and letting go of emotions. Too much or too little of either can cause problems. And there is no single technique that is best for all situations. You should try to learn about the various methodologies, try them, and develop a sense of what works best for you in different situations.

During meditation, when you notice you have become distracted by an unpleasant thought or emotion, try to relax and allow yourself to be conscious of the thought or emotion and notice any feelings in your body that accompany it.

It can be hard at first to both relax and observe the emotion. To do this, try to breathe in a way that you find relaxing, try to relax, and notice the feeling of relaxation while at the same time allowing yourself to feel and experience the emotion. There isn't any one way of breathing that is right in this situation, but one method that can work is to breathe slower than normal and exhale longer than you inhale and pause briefly after exhaling before then next inhaltion begins.

Try to be lucid: maintain the attitude of an observer rather than being immersed in your thoughts, feelings, and impulses.

Allow yourself to feel the emotional pain. Are there any tensions that accompany the feelings? Can you relax them? Are there any other sensations in your body that accompany the emotional pain? Try to accept the feelings in a relaxed way. If it becomes too intense or if you feel you have done enough for the time being, you can refocus on the meditation technique.

While you are observing the emotion, you can try to stay lucid by noticing the pleasant feeling of relaxation as you breathe in a relaxed way. At the same time try to maintain a balance between being lucid and experiencing the emotion. If your mind becomes too focused on the emotion you can lose lucidity and the emotion can take over your mind. If you focus too much on being lucid you may not observe the emotion sufficiently to let go of it. The process requires managing three things:

You can tell when you are losing lucidity because the emotional pain will feel worse. When you are lucid you will not feel the pain as severely. You can use this to help you keep the right balance. When you don't feel the emotion strongly you can observe it more, as you notice it becoming more unpleasant you can focus more on being lucid. In either case always try to relax.

The purpose of this is to develop the skill so that during daily life when you experience an unpleasant emotion you relax in response and do not try to resist it or interfere with it in any way (while at the same time not letting it take over your mind). This can feel like "surrendering" or "relaxing into" the emotion (with an element of detachment that comes from being lucid). It is the resistance to emotions that causes us problems. If we can learn to accept emotions without resisting or reacting, we will actually experience much less suffering. It is like the situation where an infant cries because its warm bath water feels too hot, but as the child gets older it understands its baths are just warm and the child doesn't cry anymore. In the same way our emotions will seem to lose their ability to disturb us if we just get to know them without overreacting.

Unpleasant physical sensations are often a combination of a physical sensation and an unpleasant mental reaction to the sensation. You can try to let of those mental reactions in the same way you do any other unpleasant emotion.

Allowing yourself to feel emotional pain while relaxing and maintaining the attitude of an observer is the way to let go of it. A pleasant relaxed state of mind produced by meditation is a ideal. Trying to be relaxed is important because being relaxed helps to ensure you don't suppress anything or overreact to anything. Maintaining the attitude of an observer rather than being immersed in thoughts, emotions, and impulses, puts your focus on your own reaction as the problem rather than the external situation and also prevents you from overreacting. If the external situation requires some action you will handle it better if your judgments are not clouded by emotions.

Letting go doesn't necessarily mean you stop feeling the emotion, sometimes it means you stop experiencing the emotion as a problem or as something "bad". When letting go of emotional pain by allowing yourself to feel it, you may experience the following:

In some cases a person will experience emotions due to a biochemical disorder such as some forms of depression and anxiety and in those cases releasing might not ease the emotion. However this type of situation can result in secondary emotional reactions to the condition and releasing can help with those.

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Meditation Is Not A Panacea

Many people are attracted to meditation because they hope it will help them cope with stress or calm mood swings. However, if they are suffering from an organic metabolic imbalance, neither meditation, nor other mental approaches such as cognitive therapy or self analysis may be the best solution.

For example:

The effects of diet on moods are numerous. If you are attracted to meditation for it's calming effects, you may also find it helpful to do further research on the effect of diet on moods and emotions. Each person is unique and you may have to experiment to find what works best for you.

The effect of diet and metabolism on moods and emotions has consequences for meditators and those interested in spiritual development. If one's nerves are on a hair trigger because of high levels of stress hormones, then any minor thing that might upset one can cause a stress reaction. One consequence of a stress reaction is that the mind can become fixated on the thing causing the stress reaction. (This fixation can result in symptoms such as obsessive compulsive disorder, misophonia (dislike of certain sounds), and phobias.) If you are trying to meditate but your mind is fixated on something that has caused a stress reaction, you may find it hard to concentrate correctly on the meditation and you may feel that meditation is too difficult. Also, if one is subject to strong emotions of anxiety or depression, those emotions can make meditation more difficult. In meditation one tries to reduce the influence of the ego by letting go of attachments and aversions. If those attachments and aversions are the result of this type of metabolism induced anxiety, depression, or fixation one may become easily confused and think they are being selfish or self centered and unable to let go and spiritually immature when in fact they are simply affected by their metabolism. Understanding why one is having a difficulty like this may help one work through it.

Meditation, as well as relaxation exercises, self analysis, cognitive therapy, and positive thinking have many benefits and may help one cope with symptoms of organic disorders causing anxiety, fixation, and depression, but you should understand mental approaches have their limits and realize meditation is not a cure-all as you read the rest of this chapter and especially the sections on "Insight Meditation", "Kundalini" and "Three Ways To Reduce The Ego". Furthermore, meditation will be easier and more effective if this type of organic mood disorder is under control.

The How-To Mantra

Another good meditation technique is to repeat inwardly (not aloud) the following mantra in time with the rhythm of the breath. This form of meditation is helpful because the mantra helps you to remember what you should be doing during the meditation. Breathe from the diaphragm as explained above and say the mantra in time with each inhalation / exhalation:

Sitting / still

Body / relaxed

Breathing / naturally

Mind / calm

Sitting still is helpful because movement tends to reduce the depth of relaxation that you can attain. Being completely still is necessary in some forms of meditation, such as meditations that help you to learn to be detached from physical sensations and discomfort or some meditations that induce altered states of consciousness. However if you force yourself to remain completely still and you are in an uncomfortable posture, you may injure your body. So, for the purposes here, it is not necessary to be too strict about being completely still. If you feel like fidgeting or scratching an itch go ahead, just understand it is better to be still and avoid unnecessary movement.

A How-It-Works Mantra

Concen- / trating

Calms / the mind

Distractions / are fine

Don't dwell / on them

This mantra helps to remind you how to balance letting out and letting go. Concentration helps to calm the mind. When distractions arise they are not a problem. They can be beneficial in that the my be thoughts that need to arise from the subconscious into the conscious to help you learn from the past or deal with emotional issues. However too much focus on negative thoughts and feelings can be counterproductive (this is discussed further in the section on Insight Meditation) so once you become aware of the distracting thought, don't dwell on it but go back to focusing your attention on the mantra.

Practicing Peace

Letting go / of thinking

Relaxing mind / and body

Practicing / peace

This mantra is another how to mantra. It reminds you of what to do during the meditation session. It can be used during sitting meditation, relaxing while lying down, or as mindfulness practice during daily activities such as cleaning the home or taking a walk.

With practice, you will find that you can hold this attitude of peace for a longer and longer time and through more and more stressful situations.

This meditation can be especially helpful when used in combination with self healing meditation.

The Benefits of Concentration Meditation

The benefits of this type of meditation include, calming the mind, helping you to understand the nature of the mind because it can be understood better when it is calm and you can see what is happening. You gain understanding of the temporary nature of thoughts and emotions and other sensations which helps you to have more equanimity since you understand that ultimately thoughts and emotions are not reality they change and cannot be trusted. Observing the thoughts that arise to distract you is also useful since that helps you to understand what is bubbling up from your subconscious. Concentration in meditation interrupts the habitual patterns of the mind, of thought, tension, attitudes, poses, and negativity. The more these are interrupted the more their hold on you is weakened giving you the freedom to throw off unconscious ingrained habits, and to choose consciously how to use your mind.

Using meditation to calm the mind can help you live according to spiritual values because meditation allows you to be relaxed and peaceful more of the time and you can more easily be loving, forgiving, tolerant etc. Meditation also helps you develop the habit of keeping the mind calm and focused and the body relaxed during daily activities. Another benefit of meditation is that when the mind is calmed by meditation, the practitioner will see from their own experience that selfishness and negative attitudes, attachments and aversion are undesirable and unpleasant. It helps the practitioner to become more aware of these undesirable qualities and allows them to notice those qualities when they arise. Because of this learning experience that comes from calming the mind with meditation, the practitioner naturally begins to change of his own volition and these undesirable qualities begin to diminish. Meditation is like a microscope used to identify an infection, not like a tranquilizer use to medicate away undesired psychological traits.

One of the important consequences of this type of meditation is that it reduces the strength and force of your ego. When you see how ephemeral the mind is, how flimsy are the attachments we hold on to so strongly, it makes you less selfish, less self-centered.

This is important because when selfishness is eliminated, love is what remains. This type of love is not selfish like romantic love, it is not controlling like parental love, it is not ambitious like the love of those trying to solve the great problems of the world.

It is a very simple type of love for other people. For example when you are on the highway and you see someone driving wildly, you wish for that person that they could have the same peace that you do and you remember how unpleasant it was when you were in a similar state of mind, rushing somewhere, feeling out of touch and at odds with other people. At the grocery store you see the other shoppers and hope they have a good dinner with their families and enjoy a pleasant evening. When you are in a crowd you see each person and realize each one is unique and has a unique experience in their life. All this diversity interests you and you want to understand and appreciate each person, their ideas, their values their difficulties and their successes.

When you notice the blessings in your life you are moved to sincerely pray that others may have similar blessings because the thought of others doing without causes you fear and anguish.

This is one of the most important aspects of spiritual development. It is seeing others through the eyes of God, a loving father. You start by looking at the activity of your own mind but you end up moving closer to God.

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The Three Characteristics

Three characteristics of all things are: unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and not-self. Failure to understand these characteristics can cause one a lot of unhappiness. When you are distracted by unpleasant thoughts or emotions while meditating, you can look for these three characteristics in the situation the thought or emotion pertains to. Understanding these characteristics in relation to your own experiences will help you develop a deep understanding of how they cause problems and make it easier for you to eliminate those problems.

In certain forms of insight meditation, one looks for the three characteristics in every experience one has from moment to moment. More information on that can be found at Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, an Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book by Daniel Ingram.

The Three Basic Facts of Existence at accesstoinsight.org says:

To "see things as they really are" means seeing them consistently in the light of the three characteristics. Ignorance of these three, or self-deception about them, is by itself a potent cause for suffering — by knitting, as it were, the net of false hopes, of unrealistic and harmful desires, of false ideologies, false values and aims of life, in which man is caught. Ignoring or distorting these three basic facts can only lead to frustration, disappointment, and despair.

The three characteristics overlap so that a deep understanding of any two is said to be sufficient to bring about awakening:

It is very easy to look for the three characteristics in your thoughts and emotions. When you notice an unpleasant thought or emotion ask yourself, "Is this caused by desire, ego, and/or impermanence?"

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Insight Meditation

Insight meditation involves closely observing some aspect of the experience of existence in order to see through the illusions produced by the mind. The form of insight meditation described here involves observing emotions. This meditation will also help you to improve your awareness and understanding of emotions. To do this type of meditation, all you have to do is observe the physical sensations in your body that accompany emotions. This is similar to what cognitive therapists call "defusion". This awareness helps to change your experience of emotions from a "reality" to just another temporary sensation. It also helps you to see how your thoughts create your emotions. If observing emotions is done during a relaxing form of meditation such as serenity meditation it might also help you to become desensitized to thoughts that produce anxiety. Desensitization is another technique used in cognitive therapy.

With each emotional state be on the lookout for its characteristic:

Thought patterns.

Sensations in the body.

Effects on posture and facial expressions.

Muscle tension.

Effects on breathing and tension in the abdomen and chest.

Tone of voice and manner of speaking.

When you learn to recognize emotions by their own characteristics, you learn they are temporary and you stop believing in them, they have less effect on you and on your experience of reality. It causes you to be less focused on yourself and thus less self-centered. When you understand yourself better, you become more tolerant of others.

Just be aware that you may find a lot of hidden emotions this way so go slow if you need to.

When you learn to be more aware of your emotions in meditation, you will also find that you are more aware of them in daily life. You will see more clearly when they arise and what the cause is, so you can deal with them sooner and they will have less impact on other situations.

As you become more aware of your emotions, you will see that they are impermanent, constantly changing, they lack any strong foundation in reality, they are subjective, illusion. However, if you believe you cannot control your emotions you will probably be correct because you will not try or you will give up too easily. On the other hand, if you believe you can control your emotions, you may discover you have some ability to do so. Learning to control emotions is part of the normal maturation process that all people go through as they pass out of infancy. Yet little children do not worry the same way adults worry, they do not get annoyed at the same things adults get annoyed at. This indicates that many negative attitudes and mental patterns are learned. They are not much different from other aspects of personality, like posture, facial expressions, and tone of voice, that are also learned. If emotional reactions are learned, it must be true that they can be unlearned and that different and better ways of reacting and thinking can be learned in their place.

At this point you may ask, "Should I let my myself experience my emotions and in that way release them and let them out? Or, would that just reinforce a negative habit? Should I try to let go of emotions - just drop the train of thought? Or would that be suppressing them?"

Control means the ability to start and stop something at will. Therefore at times you will find it appropriate to release emotions by allowing them to express themselves fully in all their characteristics. When you do this, ask yourself, "why am I feeling this way?". When you answer, again ask "why?", probing deeper and deeper for understanding. Are you being reasonable? Are you being realistic about your expectations of others? Is there a more reasonable or realistic way to think about the situation? For example, rather than thinking: "that person is a *!@#$" you might observe: "that person did ___ and I am reacting angrily". Also, a dislike of strong emotions can compound the difficulties caused by them so it can be helpful to face emotions in this way and in doing so lose that fear.

At other times you will find it appropriate to observe your initial emotional reactions to an event and decide not to go down that road. It is possible to allow yourself to think a thought and at the same time not give emotions control over your mind and body. Relax the body and mind, don't tense up, let go of that mind set, drop any attitudes or poses you find yourself taking on. Try to see if there is a deeper cause of the emotion, but sometimes you will see that your emotional reactions are just habits that you picked up over time, maybe from your parents when you were very young or elsewhere. If you learned to react in a certain way, you can also learn to react in a different way. It can be helpful to relax and repeat a phrase such as, "I don't have to react this way" or some other phrase based on a better way of thinking about the situation. Other examples might include "I have plenty of time" when you are unnecessarily hurrying, or "that person doesn't see himself the way others do" when you see someone doing something wrong. Sometimes just resetting your perspective with, "Relax, don't take things so seriously, lighten up, don't be so intense" can really make a big difference in your attitude. Always remember to be relaxed when using a reminder phrase.

If you reach a point where you find that you have done all that you can but you still can't let go of an emotion, then it is time to ask for help from a higher source. Try lying down, doing some deep relaxation exercises and then self healing.

There is no hard and fast rule on when to practice letting out and when to practice letting go. Often it will be useful to practice letting out emotions that have a long history, that you are having trouble with from your past, that you have been holding in and need to bring out into consciousness. At some point when you feel that you have done "enough" letting out of a certain emotion you may decide it is time to let go of it. Practice letting go of the emotions that come and go during the various annoyances and inconveniences of the day. If you find things happening faster than your ability to let go and you find emotions building up inside, then letting them out may be better. In time you should find that letting out and letting go are really not opposites but part of the same process. You may find yourself thinking about something, noticing an emotion in the back of your mind, deliberately letting it out into your consciousness to see what it is, and then letting go of it and moving on.

One method of balancing letting out with letting go is found in concentration meditation described in the previous section. In that type of meditation you attempt to concentrate on some focus of attention. When you notice you are distracted you simply go back to concentrating. When distractions arise, that is the process of letting out. Going back to concentrating is the process of letting go. As you meditate this way the technique itself provides the balance. The How It Works Mantra is one way to keep in mind how to balance letting out with letting go.

If you find you are considering whether to let out or let go of an emotion you should also consider there are more than just those two approaches. Ultimately what you should do depends on the cause of the emotion.

Insight meditation is used for the purpose of learning to perceive how and when thoughts and emotions arise. As described above, in insight meditation you observe the physical sensations associated with emotions. However, it is possible to over do this. When you dwell on the sensations that make up an emotion you are in effect practicing to create that emotion within yourself. If you dwell too much on negative emotions you may develop the habit of making yourself unhappy. However this principle can be used constructively. When you think of things that make you feel good and dwell on the sensations of those emotions, you can develop the ability to fill yourself with good feelings. See the Practicing Peace meditation (above) for a practical method of using this principle.

Believing that emotions are inevitable can have a negative impact on your life because it may lead you to avoid various activities if you believe negative emotions will be associated with them. However, if you believe you can control your emotions you will be open to a wider range of experiences because you will not be so afraid of the emotions that may occur. If you change your belief and come to recognize that emotions are not inevitable, then you may find that it causes you to change your behavior. You try new experiences and are not put off by negative emotions and see all that has been explained here is true. This reinforces your new belief which leads you to try more new things and change old habits and expectations in a positive feedback loop. This is similar to what psychologists call "behavior modification". Since people come into this life to learn from their experiences this can be a help in one's spiritual development. Letting out and letting go of emotions also helps one to eliminate a lot of negative thinking and attitudes thus making one more fit for the higher spheres in the hereafter as well as helping you to find peace in this life by freeing you from your self-centered delusions. If you change your beliefs about emotions you may notice immediate changes in your experiences but in general this process of learning about emotions will be something that you develop gradually over a number of years. If you find you can't let go of an emotion, try to get help from a higher source through prayer or through self healing.

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Joy During Meditation

This article is on my blog: Joy During Meditation

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The Dangers of Meditation

Like many activities, meditation is not without risks. I explained these risks to someone on reddit in approximately this way:

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Tapping into Universal Love - Connecting with God

God is love.

People who experience being in the presence of God during near death experiences describe having an overwhelming feeling of being loved.

God is omnipresent.

You can tap into this source of universal love and connect with God without having a near death experience.

To do it you use your spiritual capabilities - the capabilities that all spirits have and that as an incarnated spirit you have access to even while you are incarnated.

Spirits interact with their world through their mind. They think of a place they want to go to and they start moving there. They are telepathic. They think of someone and their thoughts go off to that person. Spirits use their mind the way an incarnated person uses tools. Spirits create by using their mind.

We also use the word "create" to describe how people use their imagination because it is the same thing.

To create a tap into universal love, use your imagination. Imagine a light beam of love coming down to you from above. Hold your hands in front of you with your palms facing upward to receive it. Relax any tension or tightness you may feel in your chest, open your heart, and let the love flow out into the world.

Try this meditation:

Repeat steps 2 through 4 for the duration of the meditation session.

If you feel like smiling while you do this meditation, go ahead and smile. It is probably an indication that you are doing it right.

If you find that this meditation is working, if you feel love flowing through you, you might also try to cultivate a feeling of connectedness to all things. Imagine an invisible barrier surrounding you dissolves and you merge with the environment around you, that you and the world around you are all one mind.

There are a few other things you can try to help you connect to universal love:

You can do this meditation while listening to music. I recommend some songs to listen to while doing this meditation in this post on my blog. You can use lyrics from these songs for step 4.

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Kundalini

Sometimes during meditation, something called "Kundalini energy" is released. This may be experienced as a tingling or feeling of energy rising up the spine, or it may involve muscle contractions, twitching and grimacing, or sobbing. There are differing opinions on the cause of this. One hypothesis is that stress causes unconscious muscle tension and over a life time that can effect the nervous system. When one begins to relax and explore the inner realms through meditation, the conscious mind can become aware of that tension. As this tension transitions from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind, the Kundalini phenomena may occur.

Often the Kundalini energy is confused with or thought to cause whatever emotions a person is experiencing at the time. However, experience shows that it is actually independent of emotions. When a person is depressed he may think the phenomena is causing or caused by depression. The same thing occurs when he is anxious. However when he is neither anxious or depressed the phenomena may continue to occur.

Often, allowing the phenomena to occur can have the effect of relieving stress or tension or releasing whatever emotion the practitioner may be experiencing at the time. For this reason allowing the phenomena to occur can be beneficial at times. However, if the phenomena is felt to be undesirable there are several alternatives one can take. One alternative is to simply stop the meditation practice. Another is to do a different type of meditation. This might be either a more relaxing form of meditation or a less relaxing form of meditation. In general, lying down is the most relaxing way to meditate. Besides lying down, relaxation exercises can be combined with meditation during a session. Alternatively, a less relaxing form of meditation that might be helpful is walking meditation. Experience shows that Kundalini energy flows when the practitioner is in a state in between that of the normal busy waking mind and the deeply relaxed state attained through deep relaxation exercises.

Sometimes meditating on the chakras can help tame the kundalini energy that arises spontaneously during other types of meditation. Meditate by focusing your attention on each chakra and visualize its associated color, starting at the lowest and moving upward to the highest and then downward to the lowest. Repeat this for the duration of the meditation session.

If you are experiencing Kundalini energy and find it troublesome, it would be wise to investigate it further and seek other sources of information beyond this article. Kundalini is experienced differently in different people so you should read as many different opinions on it as you are able to find. When first experienced, the strangeness and persistence of the phenomena may be disquieting. However, over time when one gains familiarity and observes that it is not causing emotions, one begins to accept it as something that just happens, neither good or bad.

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A Still Mind

One reason to practice keeping the mind still with meditation is to learn from experience that when the mind is still, you don't make emotions. In a healthy person, for an emotion to arise, there has to be some conception in the mind to which the emotion is a reaction. You have to perceive and recognize danger before you feel fear. You have to remember the past before you feel regret.

When you see that attachments and aversions disappear when the mind is stilled, that attachments and aversions can be let go by calming the mind, you are no longer a slave to attachments and aversions. You are not an emotionless zombie either. You can go through life normally except you are no longer controlled by attachments and aversions, you are free. You can still get angry if you want to, but now it is your choice.

Attaining this insight - that by stilling the mind you become free - is easier said than done. It cannot be accomplished through reason. You have to develop the skill yourself. It requires time spent in meditation observing the mind, the bodily and sensory reactions to thoughts which are the reactions to the distractions that arise as you try to concentrate during meditation.

Complete absence of mental activity is not necessary. What is necessary is the skill of being aware of emotions as they arise, of the thoughts that precede the emotions, and the ability to relax the mind, refrain from thinking, to let go of all thoughts, for just a moment to let go of any arising attachment or aversion. This skill is developed by observing the mind and bodily sensations as you try to concentrate during meditation.

Letting go involves relaxation. Letting go can mean relaxing your grip on something. Relax your grip on thoughts. If you find you are becoming tense or feel repressed from meditation, try to relax more during meditation. In the beginning, you may have to let strong emotions have their way until they naturally dissipate to the point where you can let go of them.

The human mind has a great capacity to deny, hide, and suppress thoughts and feelings and only time and effort can allow one to bring all that is occurring in the mind into awareness. As awareness deepens, letting go of more and more becomes possible, and one becomes more and more free.

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The Ego and Spiritual Development

Many spiritual philosophies recognize the ego as an obstacle to spirituality. Buddhism is one doctrine that offers solutions to the problem through its meditation practices.

Part of the "ego problem" is due to the physiological fight or flight reaction. This is the evolved response to perceived threats to safety, status or territory that occurs in many animals. The result of the fight or flight reaction is anger or fear or other negative emotions. You can counteract the fight or flight reaction with relaxation. Because relaxing meditation or relaxation exercises can help reduce the flight or fight reaction, it can have the effect of reducing the ego. This is one reason meditation and relaxation exercises can help promote spiritual development.

To actually diminish the ego, however, is easier said than done. Several Buddhist practices provide help. These include:

The walking meditation can be used for mindfulness during other daily activities or during daily relaxing meditation practice. To do this breathe naturally rather than in rhythm with your steps. If you have meditation beads or a rosary you can use them to combine the concentration-relaxation mantra with the phrases in the walking meditation. Repeat the concentration-relaxation mantra ten times (counting with the beads) in rhythm with your breathing, then say the phrases from the walking meditation and continue in that manner.

This is a life-long process. It is not something you can attain once and then coast along afterward.

One of the pitfalls of this path is the tendency to use concentration in meditation to suppress thoughts or emotions. This is not the right use of concentration. To avoid this, one must be aware of tension - tension is a sign of suppression. The antidote to it is to increase the amount of relaxation in the practice.

The correct approach is to use both concentration and relaxation. Concentration, for example on a mantra, or on a guided meditation, keeps the mind from dwelling on and reinforcing negative mental habits. Relaxation counters the fight or flight reaction those mental constructs may have induced.

Learning from the past and planning for the future are both necessary and deserve time allocated for them. However, you don't have to be totally wrapped up in your thoughts all the time. When you make a effort to spend part of your time living in the moment, you see, by what happens in their absence, that your regrets and fears can create a delusion of unhappiness, and you see that the delusional mental state is self induced and also optional.

However, in some cases thoughts and emotions need to be analyzed consciously. This is especially true when we don't know why we feel a certain way. Sometimes, strong emotions need to expressed. The proper balance between analysis, expression, concentration and relaxation is something that each person must find for themself. It is part of spiritual development because it allows one to live according to their spiritual values by reducing interference from anger and fear, the fight or flight reaction, the ego.

This balance, when developed, has eternal value - it's something you can bring with you from the earth life to the afterlife. This is one of the reasons we benefit from incarnating into the physical plane. The physical plane provides a situation were we have a mechanism for developing selflessness (lack of egotism) something that is of benefit to us for all of eternity.

One other interesting point about all this is that these practices can appeal to anyone because they bring peace and tranquility. Religion, belief in God, the afterlife or spirits are not necessary for someone to make progress in their spiritual development.

Three Ways to Reduce the Ego

Here are three approaches to diminishing the ego. These methods can be used together, they do not invalidate each other and they do exclude each other. A person can try to develop in all three ways at the same time.

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More

More articles on meditation can be found on my blog:

http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/search/label/meditation

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Recommended Reading

More information on meditation can be found in the books suggested in the meditation section of the Recommended Reading chapter.

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