Mindful meditation is one of the proven and tested ways to break your age-old habits, to shed your old tendencies. Awareness does that naturally, it transforms you into a calm, centered being. This is the easiest way of becoming superconscious of your own actions. With practice, as you transform most of your actions from instinctual to conscious acts, your intelligence gets sharpened because, unlike instinctual actions, performing any conscious act requires a degree of intelligence. The more you use it, the brighter it gets. Mindfulness makes you alert, attentive and watchful.
How to Do It Right
Mindful meditation does not require you to sit in a certain posture. You need not take deep breaths before you start it. On the contrary, it is a practice you have to inculcate in your everyday life, in every waking moment.
At the heart of the practice of mindful meditation is a simple question: what am I doing now?
This is the question you ask to draw yourself to the present moment. What are you doing right now? You are reading this book. Maybe you are reading the paperback version. Immediately you will notice the quality and color of the paper, the style and size of text, lighting in your room, your seat, everything around you and so on. Such awareness also helps you in retaining more information. As soon as you ask, “What am I doing right now?” you become aware, instantaneously. Its simplicity is what makes it effective. This is the secret of its potency. It is the difference between overseeing your actions versus overlooking them. You no longer remain ignorant about what you are doing.
To build on the practice of mindful meditation, you have to remember to ask yourself this question as many times as you can during the day. “What am I doing now?” – I’m brushing my teeth; Now, I am eating my breakfast; I’m drinking juice; I’m reading a newspaper; I am driving to work; I am checking my emails; I am in a meeting; I am working on a report; I am having my lunch, and so on and so forth. Your question and the answers to it, both are in the present continuous tense. In this manner you capture the essence of any moment as it’s passing.
Within a matter of weeks, you will find yourself calmer, sharper and more alert. You will slow down only to become a lot more efficient. You will eat less but you will gain more (not calories but nutrition) from each bite. Most people forget to chew their food, you won’t. As you become an adept at this meditation, you will get most of your work done without the slightest of stress. As you progress, not only do you become aware of your actions, you become increasingly aware of your emotions, feelings and thoughts.
At the beginning, you will keep forgetting to do this meditation. Perhaps during the whole day, you may only remember to ask this question thrice as opposed to the targeted thirty or three hundred times. You could set an alarm to remind you every hour, just a buzz or a soft beep. If you also practice concentrative meditation, you will excel at mindful meditation much faster. Predominantly because concentrative meditation makes you more alert and vigilant. You could go into the greatest depth at the minutest level in mindful meditation.
Next time you have trouble sleeping, ask yourself, what am I doing right now? Now, I’m sleeping. Your mind may feel restless and wander off to thoughts to keep you awake, ask yourself the question again and answer it again. Keep doing it each time your mind drifts away and before long, you will be fast asleep. This meditation is the easiest way to remove distractions. Practicing it also makes you better at other methods of meditation because you are able to filter out distractions.
If you choose to practice this meditation in a timed session of meditation, where you are sitting on your cushion and meditating, the question will change. Instead of saying what am I doing now, you have to ask: “Which thought is on my mind right now?” As soon as you will ask this question, you will experience a subtle thoughtless state for a few moments. It is a beautiful experience, addictive even. After a little while, your mind will wander off into its world of thoughts again. Repeat the question. It will come back to the present moment. Keep bringing your mind back to the present moment with the imperative question: “Which thought is on my mind right now?” Gradually, the duration of thoughtlessness will increase and you will become increasingly joyous and composed.
The mindful practice is a powerful way of staying in the present moment. And the present moment is always stress free.
It is complete in every sense of the word. Above all, the present moment is the only one we are actually in touch with. It’s the only moment in which we can act or do anything to affect a change.
For those who have physical challenges with meditational postures, and those who are pressed for time, mindful meditation is the answer. Like all the other types, the more you practice correctly, the better you get at it. There are other variations of this meditation like watching the sensations you experience in your body (starting from toe to your head and back again), or being mindful of a certain music that may be playing. Similar to the story of Buddha eating tangerine, there’s a famous tea ritual in Zen meditations, where you make, pour, and take every sip with utmost awareness. In Zen, there’s also another form of meditation called kinhin or walking meditation. It’s a type of mindful meditation where you take each step with complete awareness, feeling how your body weight shifts from one step to another. It’s a remarkable way of building mindfulness in the simple act of walking that we take for granted.
While there are many flavours of mindful meditation, in this chapter, I have elucidated for you one of the most effective and primary methods of mindful meditation. Let’s not lose the present moment for this is nature’s greatest ‘present’ that we are alive in this moment. This moment is the only guarantee of life. Put it to use, mindfully.
Observant Meditation
Once upon a time, some 2,500 years ago, there was a little girl agile as a monkey. She and her widower father would go around towns performing a difficult feat. The father would balance a 20 feet long bamboo pole on his forehead and the girl would climb up the pole in a heartbeat and stand on top of it on one foot. As soon as she would find her balance, the father would walk around with the girl poised steadily on top of the pole. Her father worried about his daughter’s safety every time they did this act.
“I’ve told you a million times,” he said to her, “that, you must keep an eye on me. I’m always watching you so I may balance the pole. You should watch me as well so we may avoid any accident. You are all I have, little one.”
“No, father, no,” she protested, “during the performance, you have to focus on your part and I’ll take care of mine. We must not distract ourselves by watching each other. Let’s both stay very stable, very alert and I’ll concentrate on what I must do. This is the only way we are going to pull off this feat every time.”
The father remained unconvinced so they approached Buddha. It didn’t take long for Buddha to conclude that the little girl was right. “If you learn to watch yourself,” Buddha declared, “there’s nothing and no one left to gaze at.”
In line with the six principles of meditation (no recollection, calculation, imagination, examination, construction and digression), observant meditation is about watching your thoughts in the most dispassionate manner possible.
Observant meditation is particularly useful to pacify your mind. Most other meditations I’ve detailed so far can usually only be done when your mind is at peace. It’s hard to concentrate or be mindful when you are angry. Observant meditation on the other hand can be done when your mind is agitated or you are stressed. It helps you in calming down.