MEDITATION
The key principal behind meditation is the generation, transformation, and circulation of internal energy, known as Qi. Studying and practising meditation techniques can improve your health and provide you with a longer and happier life.
There are two important points when practising meditation:
One is to keep the mind peaceful, slow down your breathing and keep your body relaxed and still.
The second point is to focus and to turn your attention inwards, you have to become a master over your actions rather than a prisoner of your reactions!
The goal to turning your thought’s inward is to concentrate your mind and focus your attention on the breath, by following the breath you are beginning to follow your Qi, bringing awareness and cultivation of your internal energy.
When you first begin to practice meditation, you will find that your mind will be inclined to wander and be very unhelpful. This is called the “emotional mind”. At first it can be quite challenging to turn off your day to day thoughts and emotional conflict. These daily thought patterns can deplete your energy, degenerate your body, and exhaust your spiritual awareness.
When you catch your mind drifting or falling away with storylines that draw your attention to unnecessary thoughts, very gently shift your attention back to your breath. As you follow your breath, slowly inhale through your nostrils and exhale through your mouth or nostrils. By returning to the breath you can once again bring clarity back to the mind again and re-establish a deeper sense of the self.
One of the more common ways that many meditation masters teach to regulate the fire mind of emotion with the water mind of intent is to use a method called “pause and observe”.
This involves paying close attention to how thoughts arise and fade in the mind, learning to let them pass like clouds floating across the sky, without clinging to any particular one. This develops awareness of the basic emptiness of all thought, as well as non-attachment to the rise and fall of emotional desires. Gradually you learn simply to ignore the intrusion of disruptive thoughts, at which point they cease to arise due to lack of attention.
