Awareness Meditation: The Best 15-30 Minutes Of Your Day

Let's get something straight... Do you really need to cross your legs in a such a symmetrical way, creating a circle with each hand as they rest on your knees or making some strange gesture? No. The reason that many people follow these two guides is because they have either seen photos of people sitting in such a position, or they have read that each finger and hand gesture can represent a certain energy path. These gestures that we create using our fingers, are called Mudras. However, if you are finding yourself in need of some calm and space in your life, don't worry too much about these fancy terms and gestures. Meditation is a very simple process, a doing that aims to shift you into the moment you are in by giving yourself that time and space to feel your body, instead of worrying about the past/future "what ifs", and with practice, the narrow space and calmness you will feel (usually after meditating) will widen as you do this practice on a consistent basis. The mind will always try to complicate things further, in order for it to remain in control and to keep you distracted from allowing the feelings and energies within your body from shifting you into a place of "no-mind", where thinking is no longer the primary source, when feeling and intuition takes the front seat. You see? Meditation is simply just another way of saying "just being"

Why Should I Meditate?

For many of us, we wake up, go about our morning routines of showering, brushing our teeth and then having breakfast whilst we scroll through our phones on Twitter and Facebook, before heading off to a full day of using the energies from our body and mind at work, college, or university. 
Let's say you reach day one of your new routine, workload and studies... You are having a blast, you remain enthusiastic for this whole week. From here on out, you may begin to find yourself becoming more tired, stressed out and filled with thoughts that are just not needed, that drain you more and more throughout the course of the next few weeks and months. On top of this, you notice things beginning to go against you. You are agitated very easily, you are reacting to people that appear to be "pushing your buttons", and finally, you develop a resisting attitude to what happens in your daily go-about's. In other word, you are beginning to refuse the "isness" and the flow of things, thus guiding yourself into a deeper and deeper pool of unconscious thinking, where you become less aware of your surroundings, as you are continuously focusing on negative things. Maybe this has also begun to affect the goals that you wish to achieve, the hobbies that you love doing and the spare time that you used to appreciate so much when you were filled with enthusiasm and passion. Eventually, you let the security and comfort from your routines become a part of you, regardless of the negative lifestyle that you hide from yourself through external and materialistic sources, developing a strong sense of self: "I guess this is who I am, this is me... Oh well". You begin to forget just how insane your negative thinking has evolved over time and become the victim of the mind storm, instead of training yourself to be the "eye of the tornado". The "observer", not the person that is being observed. 

The Benefits Of Meditating (HUGE!) 

The aim of meditating is to put you in a position of "no-mind" and to feel our natural essence of being. It is a chance for you to take back what is yours and transform yourself through this in any way you want. It is training your intellectual half (the mind) to follow the instructions of your intelligence and intuition (your entire being). We are aiming to get to the stage where the mind tells you "no, don't do it, it may be dangerous", and you tell the mind "okay, maybe you're right, but I'm going to try it anyway". 

Benefits of meditating include things such as: A sense of calmness within you, slower heart rate due to the awareness that you will put on your breath, the "numbness" of daily anxieties, a healthier diet stemming from you feeling how your body really responds after a chocolate bar or apple intake, an overwhelming amount of optimism that allows you to see Big and Small happenings as they are, accepting them and managing to welcome the passing by of such situations, a feeling of space in your mind that allows you to be more decisive and trustworthy of choosing the right thoughts that will fit in with what you are trying to accomplish, and lastly, what I really feel is the most important, you are always increasing the space that allows you to be anchored in the present moment, the Now, through feeling the different energies in your body that guide you to this moment only. There are clearly many other topics that meditation helps us deal with, such as depression, a breakup, a loss of something or someone close to you and many more... 

A Guide To Your First Meditation Practice

Hey, buddy... Had a rough day? Feeling tired, stressed out and struggling to keep your head up? Let me do my up-most best to help you feel slightly better: 

Hopefully, by now you are aware enough to understand how important it is to make time for yourself to practice meditation. You must realise that in order to meditate, you must be in a place where you can be at ease, relaxed, able to let go. 

Go into a quiet room or place where you feel fully able to "let go" and be comfortable, take your phone with you as we will need this as a timer. Sit down and begin by relaxing your body, feeling from your toes, all the way up to your head, feel the tension in your muscles and simply relax them. It is also very important to keep your spine straight in order to be sure that you don't fall asleep. Set your timer for as long as you feel comfortable. Anything from 10-30 minutes is perfect. Don't worry if you can only manage a few minutes to begin with, it will build up in the form of endurance. Close your eyes...

Once you are sitting down in any position you feel most comfortable in, simply take a slow, deep breath in and then out, repeat this three times.

Once complete, breathe in through your nose (slowly), as you count to four in your head, hold for three and each time try to hear and feel the silence in you whilst holding. Now, breathe out of your mouth for the count of four. The inside counting allows your choice of conscious thinking to overwhelm your toxic and habitual (unconscious) thought patterns you may be having. 

Repeat step 1, this time breathing in for the count of five, holding for three, breathing out for five. 

The key here, is to repeat the breathing process, increasing your breathing in for up to a maximum of seven counts and breathing out for up to eleven counts, continuing to hold between breaths for five seconds. 

As you will be doing these breathing exercises, we now must bring in the Awareness part: This is the bit where we feel, hear and smell the things around us without any form of judgement what so ever. Start small, hear the sounds around you, starting from your left ear, all the way to your right ear, both in great detail, now begin to feel anything you like, you may not be able to feel much to begin with, but over time, you feel more (remember, we have forgotten about our bodies feelings and energies, they will take time to come back into our awareness!). Now, bring your attention to the feeling of the air flowing from the tip of your nose, all the way to the back of your throat, filling and expanding your chest. If you feel a lot more relaxed (this may take more time for some people, depending on how uneasy you were feeling to begin with), put your attention on some of your fingertips and you should feel them start to tingle, these are the energies that we are aiming to become more in touch with. It may be very subtle to begin with, so our fingertips are great to start with, just to prove that there really is an interesting, energetic feeling inside of us that we pass up the opportunity to welcome and that our minds struggle to put labels on (hence the no judgement part).

By this point, all you need to keep doing is focus on your breathing, whilst switching to smelling, hearing and feeling your body and surroundings. Continue this process until your timer goes off. 

It is important to realise that when meditating, it's one of the most important "doings" that you will know of. It is exactly about being in the moment that you are in, increasing that space between the past and the future, allowing yourself to let go of the "problems" of the mind, problems that YOU and I do not really have. If this confuses you, simply ask yourself...

Who knows that you have a problem right now? You? Well, in that case, it is time to ask yourself, who is this "me" that happens to have these problems? Who are you? Ask yourself this fundamental question every time you find yourself drowning in a "problem": "Who Am I?" You are the observer, your natural essence is awareness of what is within and around you. You are not your conditioned self. You are the observer, just like a baby watches and observes in awe, without hate and judgement.