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

Treat your mind with love, care and patience. It is through your mind alone that you reach a state of no-mind. To be mindful, alert, determined, disciplined, you need a sharp mind. You may tame a beast with fear but it will hurt you the first chance it gets. So, we have to tame it with love, compassion, firmness and discipline at the same time. You need to know when to pull up your mind and when to pacify it. This comes with practice and experience. This is the art of alternating between mental exertion and relaxation.

When it comes to the practice of meditation, this is the only thing you have to keep in mind. While meditating, when you feel restless or jittery, practice mental relaxation. Mental relaxation can be practiced by stopping your meditation and just breathing deeply. You could listen to the rhythm of your breath (not if you were actually meditating on breath to begin with, in which case simply stop and settle your gaze at a distant point).

Restlessness is caused by excessive thinking or mental exertion. Sometimes when you try too hard, you may be exerting more than necessary. It is absolutely critical to stop exerting at that time by not trying to renew your concentration. Instead, just stop and breathe.

When your concentration is crisp, your mindfulness fresh and your alertness alive, you experience the best meditation but after a while, it gets tiring for the brain. It often means that rather than letting your mind settle in its natural state, you may have been exerting. You don’t need to paddle a bike that’s going downhill. You just need to know when to apply the brakes.

When your mind is tired from exerting or resting, it leads to loss of clarity. At that time, the mind not only starts drifting away, it actually is unable to detect laziness, sluggishness, loss of vigilance or any other defect. It essentially falls into a slumber and mindfulness is lost. The moment you become aware, practice mental exertion. Mental exertion is basically the act of renewing your vigour and focus. You can visualize a bright light, joyous tweeting of the birds on a warm winter day, gentle breeze, blue sky, anything to lift your mood.

Once your mind is alert again, resume your meditation but don’t exert. Exert only when you feel a drop in your mindfulness or attentiveness, which means if you find yourself pursuing a thought and only realizing several seconds later that you were supposed to drop the thought instead of following it. It means a certain dullness has come about. If you are visualizing and find that your object of visualization has faded on your mental canvas and yet you sit unaware, it’s loss of clarity. It means your mind is experiencing dullness, thus exert.

Mental exertion and relaxation is like driving a car on a highway. You don’t step on the accelerator once your car has reached a desirable speed. You keep your foot there just in case or you may gently press if your speed drops, but mostly you just keep a certain pressure to maintain your speed. You are alert to press the brake as soon as you need to. If you don’t, you can have an accident.

In meditation, you don’t keep exerting once you’ve reached the right equilibrium. You keep yourself alert to press the brakes when you need to. When you slow down, you step on the gas again to gather momentum. As you gain experience in driving, you know when exactly to take your foot off. But, you have to be alert and mindful to be effective. In meditation too, with practice, you learn to be in the ‘cruise mode’ without undue exertion or relaxation. This is the science of meditation, the art of balancing between mental exertion and relaxation.

Remember, meditation is about discovering your natural state of peace and bliss. To be in the natural state, you have to be natural, it is effortless. This effortlessness, however, comes after a great deal of practice. A concert pianist who can play even the most difficult pieces effortlessly has reached that state after serious, intense and prolonged effort spanning over years. Concentration is not an intense effort. Once you have established your concentration during your meditation, you simply have to maintain it.

It takes great practice to artfully maintain a balance between exerting and relaxing. If you are mindful and alert and if you carefully alternate between exertion and relaxation, Samadhi – ultimate realization, equipoise or insight – is imminent. I promise you that much. Just like a river’s natural course is to merge in the sea, mind’s natural course is to merge in the supreme consciousness. I say this from my experience.

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