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Beat Stress With Meditation: Meditation











 

by Naomi Ozaniec

Meditation is a practical personal activity; it cannot be learned by reading a book even though informed reading can be of great value. Meditation must be experienced through personal practice, the daily and repeated exercise of entering into a particular meditative awareness. Sustained practice alone brings the many benefits that meditation brings.

To establish your own practice, start with a short daily period of between five and ten minutes and build up to longer periods of between 15 and 20 minutes. In the beginning don’t set unrealistic goals. In the early stages, practice tends to throw up many resistances. Mental obstacles such as boredom and distracting thoughts are quite normal; the only solution is to keep going. As practice becomes assimilated, the many traditional meditative techniques begin to show their depth and value. Since it is never possible to fully master or exhaust any particular technique, practice is always experiential and fresh; meditation is a lifelong journey.

Meditation takes many forms; those belonging quite specifically to particular traditions are part of a student-teacher relationship. However, since mindfulness practice is accessible and beneficial, it makes an excellent starting place for anyone. Moreover when mindfulness is applied to all aspects of daily living, practice spills over from the formal session into an informal few moments of mental collection during the day. The bedrock of meditation is daily practice but in time every moment and experience of the day becomes the fuel for practice so that life and meditation merge into one seamless garment.


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