Archive for category Meditation
Meditation and Self-Responsibility
Posted by in Meditation on October 5, 2011
A regular meditation practice can and will change your life. Meditating on a daily basis provides you with the tools you need to be honest with yourself and others. Meditation is the essential tool for self-improvement.
Meditation requires focus
Meditation requires discipline.
Meditation requires willingness.
When you realize the above, it becomes obvious that meditation is the foundation for self-responsibility. Without a process for reflection and self-assessment, you will not be able to make the changes in your life that you want to make.
Meditation develops and strengthens your ability to look at yourself from an emotionally detached point of view. This point of view provides you with the necessary perspective for an honest evaluation of your life: how you’re responding to others, how you’re effecting others, what path you’re heading down and what steps you can take to change that path for the better.
In addition with being able to assess yourself, meditation gives you the ability to forgive yourself. That may sound strange but it’s true. It is also important. Without the ability to forgive yourself for your past mistakes you will not be able to move forward in life. Without the ability to forgive yourself, you will not be able to forgive others. If you don’t forgive others you will spend your life building up a host of unresolved resentments that will wear you down mentally and emotionally without your ever realizing it.
Meditation helps you develop “witness consciousness.” This mental state creates for you the mental space needed to do all the above. Without a reflective, meditative practice witness consciousness cannot be developed. Read the rest of this entry »
Meditation And Meditation Benefits
Posted by in Meditation on October 5, 2011
Broadly speaking meditation can be defined as a self induced change of state of mind for the purpose of heightening certain awareness or attention, or for emotional well being.
However, the narrower definitions vary according to the beliefs surrounding them. As beliefs differ among different people, so the understanding and practice of meditation differ just as greatly.
Some of the more commonly known types of meditation tend to be the legacies of the Eastern religions, but there are aspects of it in many of the Western beliefs as well.
From prehistoric times, ritualistic repetitive movements and chants were discovered to induce a state of conscientiousness which was believed to appease the supernatural that they worshipped. It usually went alongside offerings and sacrifices to the gods.
When it became apparent that these spiritual rituals seemed beneficial to the people who performed them, they began to change and develop them in order to realise the self, but generally still for religious purposes.
The Oriental religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism refined meditation as a means for achieving a higher state of spiritual growth and goodness. The word for ‘meditate’ is ‘dhyÄÂna’ in Hinduism and Buddhism and is derived from the Sanskrit root word ‘dhyai’.
The Western religions were divided in their approach to meditation. Those that included repetitive words or actions formed one school of thought, while those that didn’t formed another. Read the rest of this entry »