Start this meditation session by concentrating on your thoughts. After a few minutes, notice the whispering voices inside you. (If you don't hear any voices, you probably have some feelings or images.) Analyze the voices - do they sound at the same time, interrupting each other, or does one dominant voice stand out among them? Do they criticize or approve of you? Shame or praise? Talk about you or more about other people?
What emotion are these voices colored with? Do they sound like love and kindness or evil and impatience? Doesn't one of them sound like your own voice or the voices of people you have to (or have had to) deal with in life? What are your feelings about these voices?
Allow about ten minutes for this exercise to begin. When it starts to work, stop and listen to your internal dialogue several times a day. Remember that you should not identify with your thoughts or trust the messages they are trying to impart to you.
How underwater currents cloud your consciousness and heart
If you intend to engage in meditation at a time when you are experiencing internal anxiety, connecting to being can be very difficult. Of course, sometimes it happens that your consciousness calms down on its own and you can observe all the way to the bottom of the lake. (You can use another natural metaphor: remember the gloomy autumn day when the sun ray suddenly breaks through the cloud, giving us joy and hope for a better future.) These moments can be marked by a sense of peace and tranquillity, a sudden feeling of love and joy, or signs of unity with life and everything. However, most of the time you will experience the sensation of a diver cutting through muddy and dirty waters.
So, underwater currents, which you face during meditation, do not appear suddenly, on some signal. They constantly accompany you, clouding your mind and soul, preventing you from seeing a clear picture of the world around you. You can feel it as an internal claustrophobia or some kind of internal overcrowding: emotions and opinions overwhelm you so much that there is no room for other people's ideas and feelings, for new ideas and feelings that could arise within you. Or you are so seized by your drama that you do not even realize that you are engaged in filtering your experience.
You have understood: the way a person perceives himself and how he interprets what is going on around him, completely determines his destiny.
As these examples show, it is the underwater currents and whirlwinds through which you filter your experience, and not the experience itself - that are the main cause of our suffering and stress, that make you happy: meditation will teach you to calm the restless waters of your consciousness and your soul, to get rid of the inner claustrophobia, creating an inner space, and to bypass your filters (or completely get rid of them). Then you will be able to feel your life more directly - and reduce the stress you experience. But first, let's discuss how suffering and stress in a person's life is shocking.
You are not identical to your thoughts and feelings
Find yourself a quiet place where no one would bother you for ten minutes. Once you are comfortable, do the following exercise
1. Take a few slow, deep breaths and exhalations.
2 Pay attention to your thoughts. (If you are an emotional person, you can do the same exercise with your emotions.)
Instead of being immersed in your thoughts (or emotions), as is usually the case with you, observe them carefully (in the same way as a fisherman watches a float or a tennis player watches a ball fly). If your attention dissipates, focus it again on your thoughts (emotions).
At first, your mind will experience a real push, Brownian movement of thoughts or emotions, and you will find it difficult to follow each thought, from its origin to its disappearance. It can also be that some thoughts or emotions are repeated over and over again, like an obsessive melody, such as an anxious thought, a favorite image, or a fantasy. If you concentrate well, you will notice that every thought or emotion has its beginning, its continuation and end.
3. After about ten minutes, stop and reflect on your feelings.
Have you felt any detachment or your thoughts or emotions? Or, on the contrary, your thoughts or emotions absorbed you so much that you could not control the beginning, continuation and completion of each of them?