Today I meditated, and I was thinking about how I could teach it to someone, since it's something so good. After doing this for over ten years (I started when I was 14/15 and now I'm 26), I have to know at least a little bit about how to explain it to someone, right?
I confess that I've tried to explain it before to people who had never meditated, but never successfully. I mean, never successfully explaining it in a way that would convince the person to try it, to get them interested.
But that was a long time ago, and I believe that today I can explain it in a way that makes someone interested and attracted, wanting to meditate, to at least try. However, for that I need to explain it in a way that makes it seem very simple—because, in fact, meditation is extremely simple.
Not only very simple, but I believe that meditating is one of the easiest things there is, second only to sleeping.
In fact, sometimes I get frustrated because I can't sleep when I should or want to, but I rarely fail to meditate when I stop to do it. So it might even be that for those who have been meditating for a long time, meditating is even easier than sleeping, haha.
Meditation is the second easiest thing to do, second only to sleeping.
Once someone saw me preparing to meditate and asked why I was putting a cushion under my butt. A great question. So let's start here, because before meditating you have to sit down to meditate (at least for beginners, haha), so learning to sit correctly (there he is, haha) is extremely important.
First, when we sit with our legs crossed, whether normally crossed or in half-lotus (which is how I do it, because it's more comfortable — leave a comment if you want me to write about the ways to cross your legs), what tends to happen is that our weight is more on the butt and that it and the legs are at the same height. This makes it harder to keep the spine straight.
If we sit on a cushion with our legs hanging off the edge, still crossed, what will happen is that they will be slightly lower than our hips, and this will transfer some weight to the legs, making the hips feel lighter.
Having your legs slightly lower than your hips also helps to make it comfortable to keep your spine straight. That's why many people use some kind of cushion to meditate. It simply helps maintain better posture.
Keeping your legs slightly below your hips helps keep your spine straighter.
But why do we need to keep our spine straight?
And does it really need to be completely straight?
Meditation (at least the kind I practice—leave a comment if you want me to write about types of meditation), is a practice heavily focused on breathing. Yes, that thing you do all the time and most of the time you don't even realize it—breathing. (And I'll explain why it's a practice focused on breathing).
Since this is a moment when your breathing is important, it's good that it can flow comfortably throughout your body. That's why it's important to keep your spine straight—this way you can breathe better, and your breath can expand easily without you having to strain it.
No. The important thing is that you are comfortable and that your breath can flow well throughout your body. If these two factors are guaranteed, you're all set!
Your posture influences the quality of your breath's circulation throughout your body.
Imagine that in front of you, on one side, there is a sphere representing your mind and all the thoughts happening in it, and on the other side there is another sphere representing your breath.
You've probably heard the saying, "What you focus on expands," right?
So, the sphere representing your mind is usually much larger than the sphere representing your breath, because you spend most of your time directing your attention to thoughts and what's happening in your mind.
(In fact, besides directing a huge amount of attention to the mind and thoughts, we also experience reality mostly through the mind and thoughts. But that's a topic for another time… Leave a comment if you want me to write about it.)
The practice of meditation is exactly to reverse this dynamic—during meditation we direct our attention to the breath, and consequently the "spheres" change size. The sphere of the mind becomes smaller, silent, in the background, and the sphere of the breath grows, gradually taking most of our attention, making the mind and thoughts disappear.
By directing our attention to our breath, we "turn down the volume" of our mind, making it almost impossible to hear it.
That's why breathing is so important—it reduces the activity of the mind, leaving our mind silent, calm, and tranquil.
The more your breath takes your attention, the less space there is for thoughts.
To better observe and absorb the beauty of a landscape, or even any moment in life. A person you love laughing, your child playing, the smell and taste of the food you prepared, or the details of how each part of your body is feeling.
Or, if you want to talk about work or study—to be able to sit and listen to your deep thoughts on a given topic and then understand exactly how to act, instead of having so many thoughts that don't lead you to a satisfactory conclusion and leave you unsure of what to do.
To be here now, you need to turn off your mind.
It takes us to so many places and to so many doubts and conclusions all the time, that we get so lost that we don't see that today is the most important day of all.
Today is the most important day of your entire life.
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You remember that earlier in this text I talked about how the "sphere" representing the mind is usually much larger than the one representing the breath, because we are constantly paying attention to our thoughts, right?
So, that's exactly where the fact that meditation is so good for treating and curing anxiety and depression comes in.
We are living in a reality where anxiety and depression are called "the diseases of the century." Anxiety is worrying too much about the future. Depression is worrying too much about the past. What makes us worry so much about the future and the past are the many thoughts about them.
That's why meditation today is so important. It is literally a practice that CURES these two diseases. It's such a simple practice that helps us live in the present moment.
The cure for the diseases of the century should be treated as "the cure of the century".
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