A Million Thoughts: Learn All About Meditation from a Himalayan Mystic

“Don’t worry, don’t react. It’ll pass. Don’t lose your resolve.

Stay course,” the guru said.

Another few weeks later he sounded really excited and said, “Oh, I’m having the greatest time of my life. Meditation has never been so good.”

“Don’t be so pleased, don’t react. It’ll pass too. Don’t lose sight of your path,” warned the guru.

Yet, another week later a dejected disciple stood in front of his guru lamenting he was experiencing none of the meditational equipoise and bliss he had been enjoying until last week.

“Please tell me master what should I do?’

“Nothing at all, this too shall pass. Stay course,” said the guru calmly.

This is how your sessions of meditation are going to be like for the first few thousand hours. There’ll be good days and there’ll be bad days. There will be days when you’ll have had perfect sessions of meditation and there will be days when you’ll want to give up altogether. The key is to persist. As you gain perfection though, the act of meditation begins to disappear. It metamorphoses into a state, it is no longer an act but a state – the meditative state. You remain in a meditative state regardless of what you may be doing. In that state, you experience the same stillness, quietude and alertness that you do at the peak of your meditation practice. Of the six types of meditation, concentrative meditation is the hardest of all. It specifically works on breaking the hardened tendencies of mind, and our mind loathes nothing more than being tamed. It wants to be free and dictatorial. Concentrative meditation turns the mind of a meditator into a genie – available

to serve you at your command, however you please.

One of the greatest rewards of concentrative meditation is the irreversible transformation it brings in you. Your habits, thoughts, emotions no longer provoke you like the earlier times. Internal or external triggers don’t throw you off balance.

Imagine someone is attacking you verbally, they are saying things that are untrue and they are trying to hurt your sentiments. If they succeed in such provocation, you may yell back at them or get angry yourself. If you get angry, you have lost the battle. What if you just didn’t feel angry at all? There is a subtle difference in not feeling angry versus not expressing it. If you get angry but don’t express it, such suppression causes emotional damage.

What if you just didn’t feel angry, what if no undesirable reaction sprouted in you? Essentially, this is what concentrative meditation does. Your mindfulness and alertness rises to a degree that you are able to choose your response at all times without falling prey to negative emotions. It comes naturally from the stillness of body and mind. The noise of thoughts become feeble and they lose their steam.

In concentrative meditation, you settle your mind on your chosen object of meditation which could be an image, breath, a mantra or plain void. While the other five methods of meditation are a lot more lenient about your body posture, concentrative meditation requires complete mastery of your posture. This is mostly because success in this form of meditation demands complete stillness of the body.

Until you are able to achieve perfect stillness, you will not be able to lose body consciousness, that is, you will continue to have distracting awareness of your body during your sessions of meditation. And till the time you are able to completely rise above your body, you are not going to experience any cosmic oneness. Until you are able to achieve perfect stillness, all your experiences are going to be mere intellectual fabrication, they will have no intrinsic value and will remain mostly meaningless. Such experiences are not replicable. They do not purify, cleanse, guide or strengthen you; this is the harsh truth. An intense practice of concentration stills the ten vital energies in your body helping you gain complete control in sitting still like a rock with ease.

How to Do It Right

Stillness of the body and mind comes with great practice. Here’s how to perform concentrative meditation:

Sit in a comfortable posture, preferably crossed-legged.

Keep your back and head straight. Neck, slightly bent, just only.

Abandon all body movements.

Yoke your focus on any object.

Maintain great mindfulness.

Please review and follow the eight elements of a yogic posture and the six principles of meditation. They are entirely applicable to the practice of concentrative meditation. Once seated comfortably but correctly, start building your focus on your chosen object of meditation with complete alertness and mindfulness. Your mind will go north and south, but you must bring it back to your point of concentration. You’ll be hit by thoughts, just gently bring it back. Images will flash, emotions will rise – let them. You just gently bring your attention back to your point of focus.