Meditation Techniques

I wanted to start this page called MeditationTechniques and since I don't like to ReinventTheWheel I stole the following section from DougMerritt's HomePage.

The meditation forms that I think can be especially helpful towards those ends are breath meditation (originally invented as one of the 7 or 8 classic kinds of yoga), where at its simplest one simply focuses on awareness of unforced natural breathing, and "mantra" meditation, where one repeats a word or a nonsense word rhythmically to calm and quiet one's verbal mind by giving it something to do other than chatter all the time, as it otherwise does.

The basic process is to do one of those forms, or both in sequence (but not at the same time), for about 20 minutes, twice a day, on a strict schedule, always aiming to do everything in a non-forced way, always aiming to let verbal thoughts and memories drift away and to focus only on the meditation -- which takes practice. Initially, one drifts off into thought or memory and forgets one is meditating. Or one falls asleep. So it takes practice to learn to stay on track.

The benefits are probably pretty correlated with what percentage of the time one stays on track. If one drifts off 95% of the time supposedly spent meditating, benefits will be minimal. If one's mind drifts off only 25% of the time, then usually one will perceive benefits from relaxation for at least the rest of the day. Approximately speaking. If one stays mostly on track every time, for weeks or months on end, one might start getting some very unexpected indirect benefits.

But one has to learn to stay on track via relaxing. If one tries to force it, that leads to frustration, not to staying on track with the meditation.

The long-term effect can be startlingly powerful, which can seem unreasonable for such simple practices, but what's going on is as if we've clenched a rock in our fist all our lives, holding on for dear life, never letting go. That hand will not be very effective for anything else, and the muscles will be in permanent spasm, but since we've been doing that for so many years, mostly we forget we're even doing it.

If we start to learn to relax that hand, by some kind of hand meditation, and let go of the rock, the relaxation frees the hand to be used for other purposes that were not possible before, not because relaxation is so amazing per se, but because it occurs when something very negative has stopped, something that always made it impossible to do many things before.

This is what we all do with our minds: they are metaphorically clenching our thoughts in a never-ending deathgrip, which makes our minds much less effective for doing anything else. So the simple-sounding process of learning to relax, let go of thoughts, and instead just simply be aware of our self, our breath, our surroundings, can lead to astonishing results.

This is not inherently religious nor mystical, and does not require belief in anything to practice, but these practices tend to be invented in religious/mystical traditions, so that's where one finds the most discussion.

For instance, the late Alan Watts, a former Christian theologian who became one of the most famous interpreters of eastern philosophy to the west, discusses an introduction to meditation: http://www.grandtimes.com/An_Introduction.html

Web search also turned up this introduction; I don't know who wrote it or what tradition it came from, but quickly skimming it, it seems reasonable: Technique: http://www.angelfire.com/hi/TheSeer//technique.html Discussion: http://www.angelfire.com/hi/TheSeer/meditate.html -- DougMerritt

Buddhism requires personal determination to end suffering.

And what does this have to do with meditation techniques, the topic of the page?

One technique that Buddhists of most flavors and persuasions use to end suffering, Samsara, is seated meditation, ZaZen. Sitting zazen, letting thoughts and emotions arise naturally, acknowledging their presence in mind, letting them go...LatherRinseRepeat.