What Is Meditation And How It Helps

Meditation—that great and mysterious subject which in the past has always conjured up the image of the solitary Asian ascetic sitting in deep trance—is fast appearing in unexpected places throughout modern American culture. Secretaries are doing it as part of their daily noon yoga classes. Preadolescent teenagers dropped off at the YMCA by their mothers on a Saturday morning are learning it as part of their karate training. Truck drivers and housewives in the Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center are practicing a combination of Hindu yoga and Buddhist insight meditation to control hypertension.

To better understand meditation, consider the following analogy. Imagine a light bulb shining on an object. Now imagine that you have placed a lens between the light bulb and the object which concentrates the light on the object. Different lenses would concentrate varying amounts of light on the object. Now imagine that you also place a colored filter between the lens and the object, which allows you to also control the color of the light as well as its intensity. This filter can be replaced with any other color. Now imagine that the light bulb, the concentrating lens, and the filter are mounted on a board so that you can choose where to point it, and so select different objects as the target for your colored light.

There are many methods of meditation: complicated and simple, effective and useless, requiring much time and requiring little. The following method is simple, effective and not too time consuming. It is ideal for beginners. Many teachers, especially Buddhists, limit themselves to it because it is sufficient for attaining enlightenment. This method will provide the "optimum dose" of contemplative activity without which the attainment of the Spiritual Goal is impossible. It will also help in coping with stress, learning how to relax and seeing reality as it is.

In meditative exercises, the selection for people to whom thoughts of love, compassion or sympathetic joy are directed, proceeds from the easier to the more difficult. For instance, when meditating on loving-kindness, one starts with an aspiration for one's own well-being, using it as a point of reference for gradual extension: "Just as I wish to be happy and free from suffering, so may that being ... may all beings be happy and free from suffering!" Then one extends the thought of loving-kindness to a person for whom one has a loving respect, as, for instance, a teacher; then to dearly beloved people, to indifferent ones, and finally to enemies, if any, or those disliked. Since this meditation is concerned with the welfare of the living, one should not choose people who have died; one should also avoid choosing people towards whom one may have feelings of sexual attraction.

During meditation you learn to control where you focus your attention. By teaching you to interrupt a negative focus, meditation gives you a break from stress. The resulting "relaxation response" allows your body to repair the damage done by stress. At the same time, the improved blood supply to the "thinking" part of your brain, gives a tremendous boost to your creative problem solving ability- exactly what you need to solve today's complex problems!