Beginner's meditation

Recently, a good friend of mine (over forty) decided to ask her boss for a raise. She worked for several years as an artist-designer in her company and deserved a salary increase for a long time, but she was overcome by doubts. Every day, when she went to work, she was tormented by doubts and worries. Over and over again, she went through the upcoming conversation with her boss, remembering all her merits - successful projects, advertising design and brochures. Sometimes in her imagination, she managed...

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...

Unclear mumbling of your consciousness When you look inside yourself, the first thing you meet is the constant mumbling of your consciousness. Buddhists compare the consciousness with the restless and noisy monkey, constantly jumps from branch to branch, not staying anywhere. It is possible that most of the time you will listen to the silent chatter of your mind, not even realizing it. Mumbling of consciousness can take the form of memories of the past, building pictures of the future or attempts to solve the problems of the present...

For more than a thousand years, the greatest minds of the East and West have been telling us that the source of all our problems is our consciousness. I will join their point of view. Of course, they are right: your consciousness itself "may be the heavens of hell and hell of heaven" (as the English poet John Milton put it). After all, consciousness cannot be removed with the help of a scalpel! To find the answer to this question, let's first get acquainted with the principles of our consciousness...

- Learn how to identify cause-effect relationships. Notice how your actions - and the feelings and thoughts that accompany them - affect others and your mood. Note: if you are angry or frightened, the echoes of these emotions for hours or even days affect other people's reactions, your own condition and your meditation activities. The same applies to kindness and compassion. As they say, you will reap. - Think about the fragility and fragility of life. Death is real, the Tibetan monks say; it can...

You want to understand yourself and learn to live in peace with yourself If you are tired of endless attempts to improve or have achieved impressive success, it is time to move on to the next phase. You give up the idea of self-improvement and decide to get to know yourself better and learn to accept yourself as you are. You can compare the changes with the Chinese game (it was popular during my childhood) - the threads are wrapped around your fingers and the more you pull for them, the more they pull your fingers...

Great spiritual teachers and meditators never tire of reminding us of the transience of our earthly lives. Medieval Christian philosophers specially kept a human skull on their tables, which should have reminded them of the immensity of existence. And Buddhist monks in some Asian countries, as in previous times, meditate in cemeteries, increasing their awareness of their own frailty and mortality. Sooner or later - maybe many years from now, or a year from now, or even tomorrow - each of us will go into a different world...

- Openness to everything. By involving your experience in meditation and not trying to "correct" it, you bring yourself into line with the existence that combines everything - light and darkness, good and bad, life and death - without giving preference to anything. - Absence of expectations. By practicing the consciousness of a beginner, you perceive the world around you with the eyes and ears of a pure baby. Instead of meditating for a future goal, you start meditating with the full confidence...

As the health benefits of meditation become increasingly recognized, health clubs, holiday homes and resorts will include meditation in their patients' wellness programs along with aerobics, gym, fitness and hatha yoga classes. After all, meditation allows you to enjoy life more fully, and when to do so, as not on vacation! Perhaps there will be special meditation training courses on television. Outstanding meditation teachers will be called upon to teach these courses, or to give lectures on meditation...

When I talk about the "Americanization of meditation," I only show respect for Native American Indians. They have undoubtedly meditated on this continent for tens of thousands of years. In addition to shamans, who play a special role in the life of the tribe, Indian boys and girls often celebrate the transition from childhood to adulthood by spending three or four days in meditation, for which they are given a special sacred place. By fasting, praying, concentrating their minds and discovering their...

The results of public opinion polls conducted by Newsweek show that more and more Americans consider themselves to be spiritual, but not necessarily religious. In other words, they have given up on the faith their parents chose for them as children, yet are interested in spiritual issues and practices. Formal religion seems to them to be too limited, archaic, and not supportive of their spiritual experience. Religions usually begin with some vital spiritual impulse - even remember the stories of...

The American roots of meditation are not to be found in the 1960s and 1970s, but much deeper. The first settlers brought Eastern ideas to American soil when they arrived on the new continent, including in search of freedom of faith. In addition, many of the founding fathers of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, belonged to secret Masonic fraternities. Transcendentalism and theosophy (1840-1900) The first time that interest...