I am sitting in my Dharma study centre in Bangalore.
The room is full of people of all ages waiting for our teacher to come in for this special class on how to meditate.
My teacher is a Buddhist monk,
A Geshe which is equivalent to a PhD degree.
He has been studying and meditating for 30 years.
He has abundant knowledge and he is so compassionate.
He asked us what do we think meditation is?
And answers start to pour in.
To relax your mind,
To be mindful,
To focus your mind.
And honestly he kind of chuckled.
He said meditation is much more than just a relaxation technique.
The true power of meditation is to train your mind.
He comes from Tibet and he follows Tibetan Buddhism as our Holiness the Dalai Lama.
He said do you know what meditation is called in the temple?
Meditation is called GOM.
Gom in Tibetan which means to familiarize yourself or habituate yourself.
To familiarize yourself or your mind with your emotions.
What is going on in here?
What is happening in my mind?
And then to habituate yourself with positive emotions again and again and again until it becomes a part of you.
That is meditation in a nutshell.
Let's dig a little deeper now.
Primarily there are two types of meditations,
Placement and analytical meditation.
The first one,
Placement meditation is also called as shamatha,
Karma biding or single pointed meditation.
Here you focus on one object like your breath,
Your thoughts or an image.
The primary goal of this meditation is to still your mind and help it focus.
To help it concentrate on one object.
Now if you think in your day to day life,
Of course it gives you the capacity to relax your mind.
But as you keep doing this meditation,
You keep getting more and more aware.
Because you slowly build the capacity to concentrate,
To control your mind in situations and be aware of what's happening.
To give you an example,
You are in the middle of a meeting and somebody has said something to you.
Rather than getting anxious and angry and just speaking without thinking,
You step back.
Since now you are in control of your mind,
You are more focused,
You calm yourself and rather than lashing back without thinking,
You step back,
You think and then only you speak up.
If this is happening to you,
Your placement meditation is working.
So to summarize,
Placement meditation helps you to concentrate in a way that you are more aware of the situations and you are in control now.
Let's move on to the second one.
The second one is called as analytical meditation.
It is also popular as insight meditation or vipassana.
But there are many different versions of vipassana which are popular these days.
So don't get confused.
The primary aim of this meditation is to analyze your situations and to train your mind in dealing with any situation with positive emotions.
Buddhism works on a concept of karma and hence the doing of positive emotions and karma is very important for them.
According to them,
That's the only way you can achieve a state of mind which is always positive.
Wow!
So how do you practice this?
How do you practice analytical meditation?
This is exactly opposite to your placement meditation.
Here you think and analyze.
Analyze and think.
And keep doing it until you have trained your mind to behave in a certain manner.
To give you an example,
You want to get rid of your anger.
The first step is to analyze.
Why are you getting angry?
Is it really beneficial to me?
Or what is it doing to my emotions?
And the next step is to reflect that what are the steps that you should take to get rid of this anger.
And then you meditate on these steps.
On these analyses of yours again and again until a point in time that you are successfully able to incorporate these in your daily lives.
Analytical meditation requires a deep meditative state.
But you can employ a lot of different techniques here.
You can write.
You can walk and talk.
You can debate with people.
But the main aim should be to incorporate all these analyses in your daily life.
And that's where you need to meditate on these daily.
Of course,
Can we get rid of our bad behaviors in a day?
No.
We need to check our emotions.
We need to change it daily and daily.
Now if you think about it,
Both these meditations,
Your placement and your analytical meditations need to work together.
The first one,
Placement meditation,
Helps you to focus,
To be aware about it.
So that the next time you get angry,
It helps you to control your mind,
Catch your emotion,
Be aware about your emotion and step back.
Now at the same time,
Your analytical meditation kicks in.
It helps you tame your mind.
Through your placement meditation,
You are aware you are angry.
And now,
Through your daily analysis,
You also know that this anger is not beneficial and you have the steps how to counter them.
And now is the time you practice those.
And you keep doing it on your daily basis until you have changed that behavior.
Simple right?
I know it might be a noob to a lot of people,
But believe me,
It works.
Spend equal amount of time in both placement and analytical meditation and see your mind getting trained and getting changed.
You will soon notice that you are controlling your mind and it's not the other way around.
Hope this was beneficial to you.
Do leave me a note or a message for any questions you have or any comments you have.
Happy meditating!
