Meditation
Meditation means awareness
Whatever you do with awareness is meditation. “Watching your breath” is meditation; listening to the birds is meditation. As long as these activities are free from any other distraction to the mind, it is effective meditation.
The word meditation, is derived from two Latin words : meditari(to think, to dwell upon, to exercise the mind) and mederi (to heal). Its Sanskrit derivation ‘medha’ means wisdom.
Meditation is an effective stress buster. It helps to achieve a state of “thoughtless awareness”. In this state the mind becomes calm and the stress producing activity of the mind slows down without hampering effectiveness and alertness.
A regular practice of Yoga and meditation has a profound effect on physiological systems and one’s state of mind. Yoga is well known for its Magical health effects.
Taking time daily to practice meditation is a great way to improve your health. Daily meditation can help reduce stress, release tension, relax, re-energize, and renew your mind, body, and Spirit.
The experience of meditation is the only unique experience in life. Everything else is repetitive. Meditation is never repeated, because it is forever. Once it happens, it remains — there is no way to fall out of it. One can fall on love, one can fall out of love; one can fall in meditation, but one cannot fall out of meditation. The reason one cannot fall out of it is because the moment you fall in, you disappear — there is nobody to fall out, nobody remains to fall out. Meditation means the disappearance of the mind and its centre, the ego; hence all other experiences, howsoever beautiful they may be, become repetitive.And anything that is repeated loses blissfulness, it loses newness, it loses youthfulness, aliveness — slowly it becomes flat. The peak that was once there in the beginning disappears.Then one can go on repeating it in the hope that the same thing will happen again, but it is not possible.
Repetition is mechanical, and our whole life is mechanical. Your love, your hobbies, your work, your relationships, your friendships — yes, they give a certain pleasure, certain happiness And then a great frustration sets in, a tremendous hopelessness, because one cannot see why the joy disappeared:“I am doing the same thing, everything is the same, and yet nothing is the same.” In fact the moment you repeat something, even a second time, you are already losing ground because now you know what it is. When it happened for the first time you were in for a great surprise; that element of surprise was very essential in the joy. Now there is no surprise. It is like going to see the same movie again: now you know all the sequences — from the very beginning, you know the end; you know what is going to happen next.There is no excitement; you cannot even pretend that you are excited. It is like listening to the same joke: the first time it really triggers laughter.The reason is surprise. The whole art of a joke is that it takes a sudden turn; the punchline is a sudden turn. You were expecting a certain logical sequence and then it takes such an absurd turn that you could not have imagined it.
That very shock releases your tension. You were becoming tense: “What is going to happen? What is going to happen? “You were coming to an inner climax and then, suddenly, what happens is so unexpected that you cannot do anything else but laugh — laugh at the whole ridiculousness of logic — because life always takes such turns. But listening to the same joke again cannot be the same. How can it be the same? — you know the punchline already. In life everything turns out to be a repetition of the same joke; hence people live utterly bored. This is unique about meditation: only a person who knows meditation is never bored. Then it is impossible for him to be bored, because meditation is the disappearance of your personality, of your mind, of your thinking process. It is falling into such an abyss that the deeper you fall, the less you are. A moment comes when you are no more — and when you are no more you come home. That state of nothingness, moodiness, is meditation. Hence I don’t know any other experience which can be called unique, except meditation.