Meditation to me simply means the practice of developing the mind. The goals of practice can literally relate to anything, after all how many things are there in life where our mind isn’t present in one form or another? Generally the better we are at coordinating our mind the better results we get from experiences in life. To me that’s the beauty of meditation. I put everything aside for a while and prioritize the aspects of me that I want to develop. It makes integrating personal development principles into daily life a lot easier than trying to do it on the fly.
The focus can be literally anything from healing, spiritual consciousness, mind/body connection, enhanced learning, calming down, energizing up, vision quests, developing the personality, relationships, affinity with the earth, emotional mastery, alchemy, manifestation, music, martial arts, golf – you name it.
Meditation is like training for the big game – the big game in this case being life. I do what I can to break down the myths that meditation has to be done a certain way because I believe that this type of mentality will make some people turn away from developing a skill that in truth is not exclusive to dogma or sectarianism. Meditation is a means to develop the mind – pure and simple. If anyone believes that meditation should only be used for certain purposes they have a right to have this belief – but it doesn’t mean that they are right and it doesn’t mean that anyone else has to abide by this belief.
Meditation is development of the our minds. Let us decide for ourselves what direction we wish to take our own development.
If we keep this in mind then meditation will be inclusive of everyone – not exclusive. It can be used by children to go on grand adventures into outer space, it can be used by students to manifest acing their exams, it can be used by musicians to connect to the genius of Mozart, it can be used by spiritualists to connect to the consciousness of God and the universe.
At the same time when we encourage meditation to be used in this way we begin to embrace the uniqueness of everyone. We are saying that your path is alright too. I’m not the only chosen one. It opens up a courageous heart when we can accept ourselves and our unique individuality regardless of what everyone else is doing. It is in direct opposition to needing to make our path more right, putting ourselves on a pedestal and ragging on other people for doing it “all wrong.” This just affirms our fears and insecurity.
In any case meditation like cooking, will turn out in many forms. Sometimes it tastes like something the cat dragged in, at other times it’s like heaven on earth. What it’s really reflecting is our mind in all it’s creative forms. There’s some stuff we’re good at, some stuff we’re crap at and some stuff that we really don’t have a clue what’s going on with. At the end of the day though it’s a discovery of ourselves no matter how we put it. Sure discovery is something that we get in life regardless – but giving that time, making creative, mental, exploratory expression and practice a priority even for 5 minutes a day, begins to pay dividends big time in the long run.
It’s a conscious and directed work out of the mind. Eventually the split between the work we do in meditation and our every day life becomes seamless. The mind just clicks that this is the way we want things to go – and while I love a good fight and struggle every now and then – there’s nothing like knowing that when I want to go with the flow and make life easy I’ve got a good friend backing me up.
.