Seven Common Emotional Obstacles in Meditation and How to Melt Them Away When you set out to learn meditation, your emotional patterns will delightfully come along. In fact, they will probably be your first and fiercest obstacles to overcome. While you may consistently falter due to their incessant influence, you may not even notice given how unconscious and instantaneous these responses have become.
Many people believe that in order to meditate, you have to free your mind from all thoughts, and enter into a blank, trance-like state. If you do this, you'll be in a trance-like state, but you won't be meditating.
When I write that we need to practice compassion in our daily lives, you may wonder how exactly to do this. After all, you're probably a pretty compassionate person, so is there a need to do anymore than to simply be who you are? Read on...
The "effortless" part of learning to meditate comes from getting to know your meditative mind, again and again. And that comes more frequently when you let go of all of the ways that you think you should meditate.
Here are a few articles on the science of meditation and how it can create long-term benefits for you to alleviate stress, provide pain relief, increase your ability to respond compassionately, and maybe even live longer. I'm just offering a "taste" of what's been published and by doing so, I hope that you'll check into the literature on meditation research, it's great!
Even though this post is written with nurses and healthcare professional in mind, its content may be valuable for anyone who reads it. Give it a read and see. Let me know whether it works for you, regardless of what profession you're in. Enjoy!
Meditation is a process of gradually coming to know your own mind, coming to rest in a state of non-distraction where you release all sense of hope and fear, cease to alter your mind with thoughts, sensations and emotions, and learn to simply be, mindful, aware and spacious.
When you hear the name, Michael Imperioli, many of you may think of the actor who played the part of Christopher Moltisanti on the hit series, The Sopranos. What many of you may not know is that Michael is also a committed practitioner of meditation and practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism.
How do we meditate on compassion for politicians when we’re completely fed up with politics as usual, or when our preferred party doesn’t seem to be getting it right (or maybe our least preferred party seems to be getting it “wrong!”) Try these four steps:
For many of us, when we begin to meditate (or even if we've meditated for a while), we can experience a certain amount of "failure" while trying to meditate. Even if we've been successful in the past, our efforts may be met with what we believe to be failure. But, what if failure weren't an option? What if there was no such thing as "failing" at meditation? What if meditation included failing to meditate?