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

Mindfulness is about paying attention to every thought (for every action stems from a thought) without discriminating a good thought from a bad thought. When you will begin to watch every action of yours, as you become more mindful, a remarkable thing will happen to you: your mind will start downplaying depressing and hurtful thoughts of the past. Your reaction to anything thrown at you will become a mindful act rather than a knee-jerk response. This leads to a great sense of ease and calm, and you begin to feel more in control.

On a daily basis, we do so many things mindlessly, without paying attention to our thoughts, emotions, action and inaction. Mindful meditation is the art of doing everything with a sense of awareness and the only way to master this art is by way of practice.

Mindful meditation is one of the proven and tested ways to break your age-old habits, to shed your old tendencies. Awareness does that naturally, it transforms you into a calm, centered being. This is the easiest way of becoming superconscious of your own actions. With practice, as you transform most of your actions from instinctual to conscious acts, your intelligence gets sharpened because, unlike instinctual actions, performing any conscious act requires a degree of intelligence. The more you use it, the brighter it gets. Mindfulness makes you alert, attentive and watchful.

How to Do It Right

Mindful meditation does not require you to sit in a certain posture. You need not take deep breaths before you start it. On the contrary, it is a practice you have to inculcate in your everyday life, in every waking moment.

At the heart of the practice of mindful meditation is a simple question: what am I doing now?

This is the question you ask to draw yourself to the present moment. What are you doing right now? You are reading this book. Maybe you are reading the paperback version. Immediately you will notice the quality and color of the paper, the style and size of text, lighting in your room, your seat, everything around you and so on. Such awareness also helps you in retaining more information. As soon as you ask, “What am I doing right now?” you become aware, instantaneously. Its simplicity is what makes it effective. This is the secret of its potency. It is the difference between overseeing your actions versus overlooking them. You no longer remain ignorant about what you are doing.

To build on the practice of mindful meditation, you have to remember to ask yourself this question as many times as you can during the day. “What am I doing now?” – I’m brushing my teeth; Now, I am eating my breakfast; I’m drinking juice; I’m reading a newspaper; I am driving to work; I am checking my emails; I am in a meeting; I am working on a report; I am having my lunch, and so on and so forth. Your question and the answers to it, both are in the present continuous tense. In this manner you capture the essence of any moment as it’s passing.

Within a matter of weeks, you will find yourself calmer, sharper and more alert. You will slow down only to become a lot more efficient. You will eat less but you will gain more (not calories but nutrition) from each bite. Most people forget to chew their food, you won’t. As you become an adept at this meditation, you will get most of your work done without the slightest of stress. As you progress, not only do you become aware of your actions, you become increasingly aware of your emotions, feelings and thoughts.

At the beginning, you will keep forgetting to do this meditation. Perhaps during the whole day, you may only remember to ask this question thrice as opposed to the targeted thirty or three hundred times. You could set an alarm to remind you every hour, just a buzz or a soft beep. If you also practice concentrative meditation, you will excel at mindful meditation much faster. Predominantly because concentrative meditation makes you more alert and vigilant. You could go into the greatest depth at the minutest level in mindful meditation.

Next time you have trouble sleeping, ask yourself, what am I doing right now? Now, I’m sleeping. Your mind may feel restless and wander off to thoughts to keep you awake, ask yourself the question again and answer it again. Keep doing it each time your mind drifts away and before long, you will be fast asleep. This meditation is the easiest way to remove distractions. Practicing it also makes you better at other methods of meditation because you are able to filter out distractions.