Sensing a Target

Fully sensing a target can improve your mindfulness. Pick a material that
appeals to you fabric, beads, a pebble, a wooden object, etc. Explore the
texture of this object. Spend a few minutes doing this without analysing or
judging the experience.
You can also do this with your other senses, such as visually exploring the
hues and shades of a flower, listening closely to the tunes and rhythms of
bird song, etc. Explore how you perceive the world. Try not to ignore
anything just because its ordinary. You will realize that theres a lot that you
normally dont pay attention to. Try to use your full awareness whenever
you can.
Stopping and Sensing
Set an alarm or ask a friend to say stop during random times, especially
when youre in the middle of a routine task. Halt whatever youre doing and
pay close attention to physical sensations pressure, sense of balance,
textures, temperatures, etc.
Walking Meditation
When you go for a walk, dont get lost in your own thoughts but look around
you. Notice how your mind tries to take you away from direct experience by
analyzing and judging what you are noticing. Resist giving in to the pull of
your mind until youre done with the walking meditation.
Walk slowly and with purpose. Become aware of the movement your arms
and legs make. Pay close attention to what goes around you without
thinking about it. Take away your mind from your worries. Be attentive to
the way you breathe and to every sensation you can notice.
Self-Commentary
Make a mental commentary of what youre doing at each moment. For
example, I am now reading this book. I am now taking a sip of water.
This will help you set your experiences firmly into your mind so that your
focus does not slip away. You can easily remember what you were doing
later on.
Daily Review
Before sleeping, recall the events that happened through the day. You may
think about them sequentially or in any order you want. Are there any gaps
in the days events? Where could your mind possibly be during those gaps?
Plan how you could avoid being distracted in the future.
Breathing meditation
Many traditions link breathing with meditation. Controlling your breath
enables you to control what you feel; slow breathing slows down your
heartbeat and causes you to become calmer.
Meditating with the breath involves paying attention to your breath and/or
breathing in a certain way. When you let your breath come from your
stomach and not from your chest or upper torso, you are doing
diaphragmatic breathing. Diaphragmatic breathing can provide your body
with as much as ten times more oxygen than chest breathing does.
To know whether you are breathing from your diaphragm, place one hand
over your chest and the other on your stomach. The hand on your stomach
should move more than the one on your chest.
Avoid taking huge breaths but keep your breathing natural. Breathe quietly
and easily. While breathing, you may fix your attention to the point below
your nose where you can feel air coming in and out. Concentrate on
breathing simply feel the sensations without talking about it in your head.
Breath control consists of breathing in, holding your breath, and breathing
out. One common breathing technique is two-for-one breathing. This means
exhaling two times longer than the way you inhale.
Breathe in through your nose slowly and deeply while counting 1, 2, 3, 4.
Make sure that your belly expands but your chest does not rise. Hold your
breath while counting, 1, 2, 3, 4 in your head. Exhale through your nose
slowly and completely and count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Hold your breath for
another four counts. Repeat this for up to 10 times.
If you find that the counts are too long, you can shorten it. But try to keep
your exhales longer than your inhales. Count slowly but keep a pace thats
comfortable for you. Continue with this for a few minutes.
Expelling the breath slowly may reduce the activity of your brains nerve
cells and quiet your mind. This is very helpful especially when youre angry
or anxious. Anxiety and anger involves the fight-or-flight response;
breathing this way will reverse the effect and help you regain your
composure.
Heartbeat Meditation
Put your hand over your heart or feel your pulse. Be aware of your heartbeat
you can count each one if you wish. Keep on doing this for three minutes
or so.
Using Objects
Keep the lighting soft but make it bright enough so that you can still see
your target. Place your image or object at eye level in a comfortable
distance from where you are meditating. Close your eyes and enter a
meditative state. Open your eyes and focus them upon your target. Blink
only when you have to. Try to keep your eyes as still as you could. Your
eyes may move from one part of the image to another, or to other things
if they do, refocus them to one point.
Do not decipher or evaluate the subject this will only scatter your
awareness. Let the object focus your mind. Recognize that the object is both
in front of you and within your mind. If you are meditating upon a
meaningful image such as a mandala, its meaning will affect your
subconscious directly. You dont have to ponder on it.
Musical Meditation
Meditation can be done with music in the background, but it can serve as the
meditation target itself. You listen to the music and surrender to it, letting it
carry you away. The key is to embrace the experience instead of separating
yourself from it by a layer of ruminations.

Visualizing
Meditation often includes visualizations. Visualizing means imagining. When
you visualize, you focus your mind into creating something. You can
visualize your goals, a meaningful image, or anything that you consider
worthwhile to focus on.
What you visualize will have an effect on you so choose your targets wisely.
For example, if you want to deepen your mental relaxation, you can create a
scene that makes you feel peaceful, like a beautiful sunset. If you want to
get over a distressing memory, change how it plays in your mind by making
it funny or boring (add a soundtrack, make characters do silly things, see it
in black and white, etc.)
Writing
Writing can be a form of meditation. You can express yourself to release
your suppressed feelings or ideas and process them. When writing, you can
communicate with whoever or whatever you want to a loved one, to an
enemy, to an idea, to God, etc. You can send what you have written to them
if possible, keep it to yourself, or destroy it. It doesnt need to be read by
anyone else to be effective.
Write freely and try not to edit it this will allow your deeper mind to come
to the surface. Use this time to release whats bothering you. When youre
done, read and absorb what you have written. Reflect on it. Putting it into
writing can help you see things from a new perspective.
Dealing with Feelings
You can meditate to help cope with feelings better. You may choose your
emotions as your meditation focus. Accept them as they are; do not analyse
or change them. Simply feeling without adding energy to them (through
amplifying the sensations or fighting against them) helps dissolve it.
Keep yourself calm and relaxed by controlling your breath. Tell yourself, I
am feeling (emotion), but I am not my (emotion). The more you do this to
your unwanted feeling, the less power it will have over you.
Detachment Exercise
Meditation can make you more present (mindfulness) and it can also help
you be more detached.
If you are stuck with a problem, step back and detach from current
situation. Take an outsiders point of view, and imagine another person in
your situation. This helps you put a new perspective on your problem and
evaluate more calmly and rationally what needs to be done.
Close your eyes. Think about situation thats bothering you. Imagine that it
gets projected into a screen in front of you. Watch the events on the screen,
but play only what really happened instead of what youre afraid might
happen. Replace yourself with someone else. As an outsider, what advice
would you give to the person on the screen? Remember and act on your own
advice.
You can also let your deeper mind work on the problem. Let go of it for the
moment and focus on something else. The resolution might arrive the next
time you meditate, when your mind is receptive.
You can make yourself more detached about anything by changing how you
portray it in your mind. By observing the matter through an outsiders
perspective, you allow yourself to respond differently.
Encouraging Success
Whatever you focus on has an effect on your progress, so you can use
meditation to concentrate on something positive. If you have a problem,
imagine travelling forward in time to moment when current problem is
resolved. Experience with all your senses what its like to have solved the
problem. Hang on to the positive feelings and bring them back with you to
the present time.
Dont be caught up in figuring out how it will happen; just keep your aim in
mind. Focusing on a positive outcome to think more clearly and make better
decisions, which will eventually lead to your desired results. You can focus
on different desired outcomes each day if you wish; what matters is that you
create a mindset that will allow you to progress
Focusing on a Idea
Meditating on an idea enables you to absorb it better. Close your eyes.
Choose words that represent calmness or any other desired state to you:
peace, tranquillity, harmony, bliss, competence, etc. You can also create
mental images to illustrate it. Imagine what it would feel like if you
experienced the state. When you do, hold on this for as long as you can.
Open your eyes. When you need to enter that state again, remember what
you experienced during your meditation.
Mental Relaxation
Your mind can become relaxed if you willingly release whatevers troubling
you and focus on your chosen target. Other than that, you can visualize
things that bring you deeper into trance.
As mentioned in the previous exercise, you can meditate on your concept of
relaxation. You could also imagine doing an action that symbolizes your
deepening level of awareness.
What brings you into a passive state of mind? Is it descent or ascent?
Repetitive motions? Floating? Here is an exercise that you can use or modify
to relax more fully.
Close your eyes. Count back from 100-1. When you reach 1, imagine that
theres a staircase in front of you. See the staircase out of your own eyes,
and not through an outsiders eyes. Walk down on it and tell yourself that
you are going deeper and deeper into your own mind the lower you get.
You can also enter an elevator instead. Notice how calmer you get as the
number depicting the floor level decreases. When you reach 0, enter a room
or a place that you feel absolutely good to be in. Spend some time in there.
When youre completely relaxed, you can focus on your chosen meditation
target.
Meditation in Motion
You can meditate while moving. One technique is to coordinate your
breathing with your movements. You can also dance or move randomly with
music. Afterwards, keep still and pay attention to your breath. This will help
you release pent up emotions and free you up whenever you feel stuck. It
will also create harmony between your body and mind.
You can meditate while building, designing, or decorating something. You
can draw, paint, write, or work with different kinds of materials. Make sure
that you fully concentrate on whatever you decide to do.
Watching Thoughts Exercise
Let go of all external distractions. Close your eyes and pay attention to your
inner world. As objectively as you could, observe the thoughts that go
through your awareness. Dont judge them, cling to pleasant ones, or block
unpleasant ones.
Notice how one thought leads to another. Observe what your mind does so
that it can distract you. Also notice how your awareness becomes lost in
your thoughts. When this happens, bring back your awareness.
Knowing the Knower Exercise
Make your mind be still. Watch the thoughts that pass through your
awareness without interacting with them. Ask yourself, Who am I? Who is
meditating? Who is observing these thoughts?
Do not expect an answer. Insights may come to you, but dont demand that
they arrive. The goal is not to find an answer. The questioning itself is the
point of the exercise.
If you find yourself answering your questions, question your responses. If
you responded with, The one who is meditating is me who is in this body,
you can follow up with a question such as, How do you know that it is you
who is in your body? and respond to that as well. Keep going on with this
until you arrived at a response that you can no longer counter.
Working with Zen Koans
A Koan is a paradoxical question that is not solved through logic but by
seeing things from a different perspective. There are common koans around
such as what is the sound of one hand clapping? but a meditation teacher
may be able to give you a unique koan to work on.
Be committed to your koan. Do not change it because you are having a hard
time with it. Being frustrated is part of the experience.
Accepting it will make it easier to bear, like accepting troublesome emotions
will make it lose its power over you. Dont be concerned that you cant solve
it fast enough. Even if you havent arrived at the answer, the koan will affect
you in positive ways if you let it.
Ponder on the koan not only during meditation but as often as you can.
When youre ready, discuss your resolution with your teacher. If you dont
have one, you can meditate on your resolution by yourself.

As you can see, there are many ways to meditate, and you can create your
own meditation routine. The final chapter deals with how to overcome
common problems during meditation and how to benefit the most out of
meditation.