Meditation: What are the obstacles and excuses?
Meditation is to be aware, to focus, to observe a specific chosen subject without using any analytic, judgmental and decisional mental process. It is a awareness-based contemplative mental state where the mind becomes just mirror. When thoughts and emotions pop-out, we accept them; then we let them go by going back to our focusing point. These back and forth focusing point- thoughts – focusing point defines Zen mindfulness meditation.
Meditation will never go smoothly even after 100 years of practice. Struggling is part of it as it is part of life. Like our life, meditation has it ups and downs, excitements, boredom, frustration even despair.
“If we do not struggling in one-way or the other, we are not meditating properly” used to repeat the Dalai Lama.
Being before thinking or having a thoughtless mind
Thoughtless mind or the mind before thinking mind is a weird concept, a typical spooky Zen stuff.
Anything that we listen to, read and say —-all of this is thinking coming from the mind of someone regardless the source: Wikipedia, Google, the Bible, Koran, Buddhist Sutra, novels, etc. Their contents are real but are they also carrying the genuine reality?
Same thing with our own mind our thoughts and emotions: they are real but do they carry any reality? Real or genuine mind is mind before thinking. A mind before thinking is an observing mind nothing more.
I will provide another list soon.
Anxiety: Watching anxiety with awareness
If you notice that you are becoming more and more anxious because you are stuck in the traffic and you may miss an important meeting, simply try to be fully aware of your anxiety. Make your mind competing with itself: the anxious one against the awareness one.
But if you are able to do so, you will soon notice that your anxiety begins to be less oppressive and may fade away.
How?
Because, despite its enormous power, our mind cannot deal with two thoughts or two mental states at the same time. This is key to understand and to use as weapon to control our emotions such as anxiety. In our brain/mind : 1 + 1 cannot be equal to 2 but equals to 1 since one of the mental state has to go.
