Strengthening Your Mind Through Meditation

This is the fifth article in a series on cultivating transcendent action in your everyday life. Each article focuses on one of the six paramitas, or perfections. Cultivating and practicing these actions in your everyday life helps you connect to your true nature and allows you to overcome suffering, or samsara.

The first four articles can be read by following these links:

1. Generosity
2. Discipline
3. Patience
4. Diligence

Meditation in Action

Meditation is a process of re-connection. It’s re-connecting to the mind and your true nature. I suppose using the word re-connect could be a misnomer because it may imply that you are somehow disconnected, which is not really true.

Think of a tarnished brass bowl. There’s a dullness in color there. However, as you start to gently clean and polish the brass, it’s true, radiant nature is revealed. Soon you can see the glimmering gold color of the brass.

The radiance and natural color of the brass was always there, it was just covered by years and years of accumulated dust, dirt and other debris. The same thing goes for your mind. Your true, innate wisdom is there, however, it’s likely covered from years and years of built up, negative habitual patterns.

This is where meditation comes in. Meditation is a process of slowly polishing the mind to uncover your true nature. So, in that sense, you are re-connecting to your true nature and transcending your current view of what reality is.

You Keep Your Body in Shape, But What About Your Mind?

I have a horrible habit of multi-tasking, but it can probably be explained more as some form of ADD. Even sitting here writing this, I found myself being distracted by Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford talking on the Today show. Half way through listening to them talk about something related to the TV show, The Bachelorette, I kind of snapped out of it. I thought ‘why am I listening to this junk?’ So, I turned off the TV.

I’m constantly aware of just how easily I can get distracted. My mind racing from thought to thought. I’ll be working on something at work and I see the e-mail pop up with a new message, so I take a look at it and soon I’m not even working on what I was supposed to be working on. The more I’ve been practicing meditation, the more I’ve become aware of this. When I meditate, I become acutely aware of all the thoughts racing through my head.

I continue to meditate on a daily basis because it’s a way of ‘working out’ and keeping my mind healthy. A dedicated meditation practice helps cultivate concentration and control over the mind so that we don’t get swept away by our emotions and negative patterns of interacting with the world around us. Mind/body practices, such as yoga, will help you cultivate this concentration and connection as well.

All of the paramitas build upon one another. So, within the practice of meditation there needs to be generosity, discipline, patience and diligence.

In your meditation practice, you need to be generous with yourself. You can do this by letting go of pre-conceived notions of what you think meditation is or what you should be experiencing through your practice. By letting go of expectations and entering into the practice in a loving and open way towards yourself, you cultivate this generosity.

Discipline is essential in the meditation practice. The instructions can seem quite simple and even boring. Pay attention to the breath. Breathe in and feel the breath – breathe out and release the breath. The constant focus is on the breath or another object of meditation. Soon you find that you get distracted. Thoughts arise. Emotions bubble up. When this happens, you simply go back to the breath. No matter if you’re distracted after every breath or after a few breaths. You need to have the discipline to go back to the instruction in order to achieve the benefits of meditation.

Building on generosity and discipline comes patience. Patience involves not becoming discouraged with the practice. When you get bored, simply notice the feeling. If you don’t think ‘something’ is happening, stay with that. Patience helps you release your expectations and allows you to maintain a consistent practice in the normal ups and downs of everyday life.

Finally, diligence is required. If you don’t work out your body, you will become weak, flabby and unhealthy. By maintaining a consistent cardio and weight training program, you help your body stay in shape. Muscle tone is maintained. Your health is maintained. The same goes for your meditation practice. Practicing a short period of time everyday is much more beneficial than doing a longer session once a week or every once in awhile. Diligence is required to make the practice worthwhile.

When all of these practices come together, compassion and bodhicitta naturally arises and that’s the most important part of this. You discover that it’s really not always about ‘me,’ which can actually be quite liberating.

Photo Credit: AlicePopkorn