Thursday, March 27, 2025

Thursday, March 27, 2025

This is the last Inspiration on meditation as next week we begin a month of “Mindfulness and Reading for Pleasure.” However, we continue the practices of Meditation and Journaling to strengthen our mindfulness. 
Mindfulness helps us see things as they truly are, with wisdom and without prejudices or biases that spring from anger, hatred, jealousy, greed and delusion.

Relationship Between Body and Mind
Without mind body is blind and without body mind is disable. Like a log, body can do nothing by itself except grow, decay and die. The mind can do nothing without the support of the body. But both together, as we know, they have power to connect us with our Authentic Self and teach us to be 100% honest with ourselves.   

In our day-to-day life, we face unpredictable obstacles or advantages. Without mindfulness, instead of acting we react to negative emotions. We believe we have been treated unjustly. But when we learn to apply mindfulness, it teaches us to pause and investigate our own mind. In doing so we discover unpleasant truths about ourselves.

We realize that the root of all the negative mental states such is within ourselves. But we’ve been blind to our own flaws. What can we do? How can we know what is negative in our subconscious and what is noble and wholesome?  

We meditate and journal. By practicing each day we learn to keep our mind in the present moment. We focus on the breath. When the mind darts around like a bumble bee, when mental distractions happen again and again and again we simply return our attention to the breath. And then we pour our hearts out on the pages of our notebook.

What is the Right Way to Sit and Meditate?
You sit in a posture that promotes immobility. Immobile body reflects immobility of mind. The still posture helps you to sit for a long time. Loose and soft clothing helps as well. You want to be completely still but yet you don’t want to fall sleep.

What Do I Do with my Mind?
You begin by focusing attention on breathing. Notice any physical sensations and mental phenomena that may arrive. Yet normal thought will suck you in and grab control of your consciousness. Bring chaos. Make you crazy. 

You must train your mind like you’d tame a wild elephant, writes Bhante Gunaratana in his masterpiece, Mindfulness in Plain English. “A newly captured elephant is tied to a post with a good strong rope. It screams and tramples and pulls against the rope for days. Finally it sinks through his head that he can’t get away. He settles down. You begin to feed him and handle him with comparative safety. Eventually you dispense with the rope and the post and train the elephant for various tasks. Thus the tamed elephant can be put to useful work.” 
The wild elephant is your wildly active mind, the rope is mindfulness and the post is your meditation. Meditation tames the mind using the breath, an intention or a chosen mantra. 

As you meditate avoid two mental states: Thinking and sinking.  Thinking mind is the monkey mind jumping from one thought to the next and next. And sinking mind is when the awareness dims. Mind turns blank, a mental vacuum is created where there is no thought, no observation, no awareness of breath. Remember, mindfulness meditation is always an active practice. 

After you’ve followed these instructions for several months, preferably one year your breathing will slow down. You will experience great calm. At the end of a well-done meditation session you will feel inner delight and receive insights about yourself. You won’t feel envious, hatful, jealous or greedy. But all this takes time, effort and patience. This is an incredibly high goal. So start small and practice daily.