Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Meditation notes

I previously tried to set up a meditation routine by trying out a 30 day meditation experiment.
During this period, I was having difficulty centering my mind. I would also have frequent headaches, I would feel very sleepy during the meditations, etc. So I had to stop the experiment after a week.
Recently, what's happening is that I do meditations spontaneously. Whenever I feel calm and relaxed, I just sit down and let go, and usually after 15 minutes, I get a little restless and then I open my eyes.
It's a paradox that meditation is supposed to calm your mind but to meditate effectively you need a calm mind to begin with.
So what's helping me is to do shavasana before meditation. Shavasana or corpse posture in yoga is well known technique for completely relaxing the body. Once your body is relaxed, you can observe your mind easily during meditation.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Fear and its ramifications - My thoughts

Fear in my experience hasn't helped me at all. People who have used fear to manipulate me have given me the worst in life. I have come out of these experiences becoming fearless and with a new resolve to face fear boldly. The worst thing you can fear is death. I don't fear that - I don't fear anything. It's easy to make the previous statement but difficult to implement it in reality. You have to be clear in life - You are not going to live a fear-based life, your life is going to based on a lack of fear or better, love.
Fear is basically 'false evidence appearing real'. The false evidence is your wrong perception of what is true.

Notice instances of fear in your life - Fear of losing your love, fear of displeasing your boss, fear of being less competitive, fear of being less productive, fear of disease, fear of... The list goes on.

Stop right now and think for a moment how your life would change when in these situations you replace fear by fearlessness and courage. Think of the opportunities you are missing by cringing in fear. If you can't imagine how not fearing would help, try it out. Try courage and being bold the next time you face fear in some situation in life. Look fear eye to eye and it should vanish.

You might ask, all this is nice but what if I lose my job because I was fearless with my boss. Well, you lose your job, you find a new job where fear doesn't have a high place. Also if you are afraid of losing your job, you are still caught up in fear, you are still caught up in 'what-if' scenarios. Let go of fear, try it out in instances that may not have huge repercussions and then you can extend the confidence you gain from these situations in life to any situations.

Live without fear, live in the present, and enjoy life to the fullest, enjoy the uncertainity of life and you would truly have lived life.