Although the interaction of concentration and receptive awareness can be of great benefit, ultimately the true emancipation from suffering brings you insight and understanding of how consciousness functions, how you endlessly multiply your own suffering, how much you depend on the outcome of certain events, and how uncontrollable and fleeting these events are. And in everyday life, it is creative thinking - free from limited and infinitely repetitive patterns of thinking - that brings the most successful solutions to problems. That's why reflection is the third key component that turns meditation from a soothing, relaxing exercise into a mechanism for freedom and creative expression.
Having developed the ability to concentrate and expand your awareness, you will gradually realize that you have the opportunity to penetrate more deeply into the essence of things and the nature of your experience. You can use this ability to study your inner world and to gradually understand and eliminate the cravings of your consciousness to inflict you suffering and stress. If you seek spiritual perfection, you can use this ability to study your essence or to reflect on the mystery of God and the universe. And if you are more pragmatic, you can think about the next stage of your career, your relationship with loved ones, or some seemingly unsolvable problem in your life.
Cultivating positive, healing states of mind
The purpose of some types of meditation is to open your heart and develop certain life-affirming qualities, such as compassion, love for people, self-control, joy or forgiveness. On a more practical level, meditation can be used to prevent disease, to create immunity, to develop the balance, self-control and accuracy needed in different sports. For example, you can imagine T-cells attacking your cancerous tumor, or you can imagine making a difficult dive from a tower without making a single mistake. I decided to combine these types of meditation with the name culturing.
While the purpose of the reflection is to explore, study and ultimately penetrate as deeply as possible into the essence of things. Cultivation will help you transform your inner life by directing your ability to concentrate on strengthening preventative, positive and healing states of consciousness and, conversely, to take away energy from those states of consciousness that are more reactive and destructive.
Meditation in your own way
The development and management of awareness creates a solid foundation for effective meditation, but like any good foundation, it is just the beginning. The next step is to build a house - brick by brick, meditation session by session, identification and elimination of everything that fails and does not help. And so on until your meditation sessions are stabilized and take the final form. Or, returning to my favorite metaphor of climbing a mountain peak, awareness is the same muscle that helps you to reach the top faster. But you need to choose the route and speed, learn how to bypass possible obstacles. In other words, you have to choose the most suitable ways of meditation and learn to eliminate the difficulties that may be encountered on your way.
How to develop your own meditation methods?
When you begin to develop and direct your awareness during meditation sessions, you will sooner or later have to solve the problem of combining many disparate elements into a holistic meditation practice that best meets your individual needs. For example, you will choose a form of meditation that is based on focused concentration and ignores receptive awareness. Your meditation sessions may have a specific purpose, such as curing a disease or solving a psychological problem, and you need to use only approaches that meet your goals.
In this case, you should experiment with the different forms of meditation and call for help with your intuition, which will tell you which forms of meditation are right for you at this stage of your ascent to the top of the mountain called meditation. Yin and yang will inevitably balance the forms of meditation you use: you can start, for example, with intense concentration and end with a more relaxing receptive awareness, or you can start with a more receptive (i.e. receptive) regime and eventually discover the virtues of concentration and focus. Journey into the world of meditation alone will allow you to learn many useful lessons and, whatever your initial intentions, you will eventually get everything you owe to the floor
Solving problems arising from mastering the art of meditation
As your meditation practice improves, you may face unexpected problems, and the ways in which these problems can be addressed may not be as obvious as you would like them to be. Here again, it is worth returning to the metaphor of climbing a mountain peak. For example, halfway to the top, you suddenly find yourself in an impassable glacier, a deep crevice, or a steep cliff... Or suddenly there is a hurricane wind and snow, and you need to find a safe haven as soon as possible. What will you do in this case? Maybe you will take out your mountaineering gear from your backpack and try to remember everything that took place during the preparation for the ascent? Or maybe you'll bring in your intuition and start improvising?
The good thing is that, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, for thousands of years thousands of people have already climbed to this summit, and they have created tools and detailed maps of the terrain, with the help of which you will be able to overcome all these obstacles with minimal risk to yourself. If, for example, your meditation activities are hindered by strong emotions such as anger, fear, frustration, or grief, and do not allow you to calm down and concentrate, you should use methods that will weaken the effect of these emotions. Or if you are affected by any other distractions such as drowsiness, anxiety and over-excitement during meditation, or if you are in doubt, you can use proven methods to remove such obstacles and continue your studies.
Involvement in the current situation: meditation as a lifestyle
Although I describe many different methods of meditation, the main approach in this book is what Buddhists call inclusiveness - the current situation (or just inclusiveness), i.e. the constant, ongoing attention to the events.
Based on my many years of meditation experience, I have come to the conclusion that inclusion, which combines concentration and receptive awareness, is one of the simplest methods available to beginners. In addition, it is extremely easy to adapt to the intense rhythm of modern life and the busy schedule of the working day, in which most of us have to act. After all, you, like me, probably want to live a more harmonious, loving and stress-free life without going to a monastery.
In fact, the beauty you need, your belonging to human society and your love are not somewhere in the distance - they are available to you here and now. To make sure that this is really the case, you just need to clear your brains and open your eyes wider. This is exactly what the practice of "being involved in the current situation" serves. When you pay enough attention to your every minute experience and your every minute feelings, thus you do not allow yourself to indulge in the "sleep in reality", as well as cares and anxieties generated by your consciousness, and constantly return to the clarity, accuracy and simplicity of the present moment, in which your real, not fictional life takes place.
The most important thing in being involved in the current situation is that you do not have to limit your practice to specific places and times - you can practice awakening (true, not imaginary) and attention to the details of the moment, wherever you are and at any time of the day or night.