Meditation Session 2

I convinced myself that one day was not enough for me to decide whether I want to continue taking the classes or not ,so I went for the 2nd class.I asked Andrew whether I can come today without signing up for whole course. He said I can, so I hauled a taxi (was getting late ,otherwise I would have taken the brown line towards Kimbal ) and the class began at 1.

Today we dealt with mostly about setting up the meditation space. It should be clean and less distractions, no noise (white/brown or pink noise if you want to block the external sounds. I do it all the time .This is a long duration brown noise link ) . It should be clean so as to bring the point that you love the place and care for the place. Also , free from distractions is a desirable.

The whole idea is meditate where you feel comfortable, respect the process.Respect the idea of meditating and concentrating.Unless you respect it, you won't do it. This is my philosophy.

One can light a candle , it can be stimulating.

I had this doubt that if I am focusing on an event e.g. if I have this issue whether I select X or Y, then focusing on an event will introduce a lot of external variables.As an example, what will I cook for dinner? Veg salad or rice + lentil stew. The words salad and lentil stew are not abstract, they can have many different ideas and events attached to them. e.g. salad can bring in the thought, I have to go to veg market to buy them, then I can think of the lady at the cash counter is very rude, then one of the office mates of mine is very rude, then office reminds me I have to finish the algorithm and design phase by Monday, then tomorrow is Monday, what will I do.

All haywire and you are not concentrating anymore , you are just sitting at a place with your eyes closed and worrying .

I would like to digress for a while here,if you observe the thoughts that you have then you will be able to link how you hopped from one though to the other.Its similar to the connected graphs that I studied in my discrete mathematics course.Rod Bucknell describes his experiences and experiments in though retracing in his article , Experiments in Insight Meditation

Coming back to the point .

Or what I can do is focus on a candle, or a nature's picturesque view.It can help in minimization of the thoughts.

Less number of variables means less number of distractions, sounds right !!

But no, the candle technique is more like focusing technique.

So what?? That's what we do in meditation !!

Well, yes !! But then you need to go to the meaning of meditation.Its not just focusing ,its focusing on ideas, on events, retrospection, introspection and self reflection.Its connection to the inner self about how you truly feel about something. Being true to oneself. So candle is fine, but for long term and or if you want to touch base with your spirit/ soul then it might be temporary.

One more point !! When to meditate? I would personally like to meditate at 2 points, early in the morning and when I am in some difficult situation e.g. multiple geography phone call, you are getting up at odd hour to attend it and people are denigrating your effort in the recent project despite your immense efforts.

I would not like to keep it 'before I go to bed' job because it will mean "now I have done everything, and can meditate". Though nothing wrong with it, but for me its similar to keeping it at the bottom of the totem pole.

So, today I had a strange feeling while meditating. We started with breathing , then focused on body parts and relaxing the body.After some time I began to realize that my body is getting heavier, I had my hands on my upper thighs and fingers intertwined, I was feeling very heavy as my body has become a rock, its solidifying. Some other people also experienced the same .Andrew said its a positive thing, it means that your body is totally relaxed now.

That's a good thing !! :)

I won't say that I was able to ward off the thoughts and for few moments I felt drowsy as well .It was a state of limbo.I was attentive to external stimuli but everything else was slowing down and then I started feeling drowsy. May be that's what happens when you sleep.

I will try to observe the same tonight.