How are you supposed to meditate?

Check out guided meditation on youtube

 

Hey @smokeshade ,

I am a spiritual person, I do not belong to any organized religion. Which has its good side in that I can take the best and most spiritual parts from all of them.

I have heard it said that prayer is when you talk to God and Meditation is when you listen to God. After all, any good conversation requires both get an opportunity to speak. When I say "God", I don't mean a magic person in the sky who grants wishes - I will explain more about that later.

So, if you don't mind, I'm going to answer the question you did not ask - which is how and for what do I pray?

Years ago, like you, I had no idea how to pray or meditate. In fact, I thought them to be useless. After all, ever since I figured out there was no Santa I was waiting for the adults to fess up that there was no God either.

I'm going to leave out lots of personal drama, pain, and suffering. Just believe me when I say I reached a point where I needed prayer and meditation. It took me a while to figure out what prayer should be for myself.

I heard a man speak who was a former monk. He said that when he prayed, he never prayed to change God's will or to ask for favors. His logic was that since the God he believed in was perfect, God did not need to change. Instead, he only ever prayed to change himself - to align his actions with what he believed God's will for him was.

Wow! Okay, I should pray to align my actions with God's will for me. Great! That sounds easy.

Except, I had no idea what God's will for me was. I didn't have the advantage (or burden, depending on how you look at it) of an organized religion telling me what God wanted me to do. With the help of a spiritual advisor, I came up with three simple concepts of what I would want God's will to be for me:

1. I should have enough
2. I should be healthy
3. I should be happy

Enough means I live on the inside, that there is food in the fridge, that I have dinner tonight, that the electricity is paid, etc.

Healthy means I do what I have to do to remain healthy. Eat right, exercise, followup with the doctor for annual physicals. Worse yet, go to the doctor when I know something is wrong and not just consult Dr. Google. Also, healthy means no pmo.

Happy. A tough one. But, I do have a right to be happy.

So, suppose I want to buy a new car. I don't pray to God to suddenly make a new car appear. Instead, I go to work, save some of my paychecks for rainy days, and buy the car I can afford. Sure, I'd like a nice red Mustang but, a better choice might be a four-door sedan from Hertz used cars.

If I finance more of a car than I can afford, I won't have enough to pay the rent, buy food, live on the inside. I might even skip a medical appointment to save money or not take a medication to save money.

The meditation for that situation might just take a few seconds.

Other things in my life might take far more listening. A family member might not be doing something I want them to do. A person at work might be driving me crazy.

That takes far more meditation. I can't do tapes, videos or books. For me, it's having a laydown and being quiet for half an hour, or perhaps just sitting in a comfortable chair and giving myself a few minutes to relax.

Not every problem or overall situation presents an answer immediately. Often, it takes time.

Of course, most of the time when dealing with other people who've pissed me off the answer is to "let it go". If I'm miserable and allowing a friend or family member's actions to bound around in my head like billiard balls and one of my goals is to be happy, then why wouldn't I let it go?

Meditation and Prayer go together for me.

I look at those three points above like a spotlight on a stage. I can decide to stand in the light or I can move out of the light. I meditate to make sure my actions are aligning with God's will.

Yes, I know, that I created God's will for me and didn't get it out of a religious book. Still, for me, it works.

I don't have a better answer regarding meditation and just because tapes, videos, music, and wind chimes don't work for me, doesn't mean they won't work for you.

My experience is that meditation didn't work when I didn't do it. So, I had nothing to lose by trying it.

 

Hey @smokeshade ,

To answer you; yes, yes, and yes.

I think you got it.

May I just add a few more comments? Hopefully, I haven't gone into too much detail already.

I started my last post with:

Forgive me if I sometimes talk in bumper stickers but, these sayings can help push me back on track.

Religion is for people afraid of going to hell and spirituality is for people who have already been there.

I will take my spirituality anywhere I can get it. My brother passed away recently. His children and ex-wife are Buddhists. Although my brother was a bit like myself and not a member of any religion, I wanted to honor my nieces and my sister in law to make sure the flowers were appropriate. I knew there were guidelines for sending flowers to a Buddhist funeral and did a bit of study about it.

The spiritual reasons why certain flowers are preferred is quite lovely. I feel like I picked up that little bit of spirituality (even if it was such a tiny bit) and put it in my spiritual bank.

I did mention above about laying down or sitting in a comfortable chair to meditate. What I didn't mention is that for me I have to be still and quiet. When I'm working on a problem I try to imagine that the world is a movie being played on a giant movie screen in front of me. I am part of the movie and not part of the movie. I am watching the movie not from a seat in the theater but, from behind the screen. That way I can see myself in the movie and be a "not part" of the movie as well.

I wish I could tell you that I'm perfect at it. I am not. But, it does work, it does help.

I am not so happy that my brother died. In fact, I'm kinda pissed off at his sorry ass for having been that damned inconsiderate. Seriously, I hope I don't come across as being only a little mad at him because I am so beyond mad that I seriously can not even grieve his passing. He is a jerk for departing the way he did. And the last straw is how much he's taken from all of us.

I've meditated on it. I get the answer. In fact, it's like dialing a government office, and having to listen to the introduction message before the phone will let you select a department.

Every time I meditate on my brother's death and my anger over it, I get the same message, "let it go and forgive him." Every time.

Why? Why should the little shit get to do what he did and I have to "let it go and forgive him"? Because, if you look at the list of three things "God" wants for me, number three is to be happy. Being this pissed off at him is not making me happy.

Just because meditation has given me the answer doesn't mean it's easy to put the answer into action. Nobody ever told me life would be easy or fair. Nobody ever told me I'd have to bury my little brother a year after my father died. We were supposed to take a family cruise in June to spread my mother and father's ashes at sea and my little brother was supposed to come with us. Of course, the cruise was canceled anyway due to COVID but, had the cruise gone on we'd have had to spread his ashes with my parents.

So see, meditation works. What isn't working in this situation is me. I'm not doing the work I need to do to forgive my brother and let it go. The only one mad at him here in my head is me.

I know that forgiving someone for what they did doesn't mean that I approve of what they did. It means that I stop spinning on it and let them back in my heart. It's just not easy. Further, it has taken me a long time to get to the point of being able to even figure this simple stuff out using meditation.

You are also correct that prayer and meditation are two different things. And, yes, of course, you can use meditation without prayer. As I said in the post above, I don't pray to change God, I pray to change myself.

So, now that meditation has given me the oblivious answer on how to stop being so mad at my brother, I need to pray for the strength to carry that out. Not to a God that lives in the sky and controls the color of every flower and landing site for every drop of rain but, pray that I can follow those three simple guides I created and shared in the above post. Bumper Sticker Warning! I sometimes think of GOD as standing for "Good Orderly Direction" and if I follow the three guides in the post above I will go in a good orderly direction.

 

I'll sum up for you a video I saw on youtube ( How to meditate- the no bullshit guide to mediation )

1. Sit with your back straight on a bench or on the ground ( make sure your back doesn't make contact with anything, you want to stay awake )
2. Close your eyes and concentrate on your breath for 20 min ( use a timer ), try not to move or scratch yourself at all.
3. Do it everyday.

 

bro do this meditation, .This will transform your life

 

through this meditation you r going through different aspects of your life

 

You are your best teacher. Just remember to keep it pure. Meditation is reality as it is, not as you would like it to be.

 

see when u r going to meditate , don't think like 'i want to concentrate on breathing' and get frustrated ,instead be calm , let go of everything that is making disturbance in your life . Do box breathing , that is the best breathing technique to focus and to feel your present moment which is the gift of your life

 

Alright let’s keep it simple:
Sit down on the floor, chair anywhere. The usual convention is to sit on the floor with legs crossed, back straight. (You do realise it’s about the posture, the posture affects the state of the mind)

Now there’s a lot of ways this is done, but let’s keep it simple:
Close your eyes, breathe in any way you feel comfortable. Just keep a calm and peaceful mind. Don’t try to think about anything purposefully, but Let your mind float as it likes. If random little thoughts come to Your mind, just gently end them like ending an app. Just let it float and you come here, tell us your experience with it, yeah?

This has helped me a lot to calm myself, stay balanced.

 

I’m pasting this from my post in the thread: ‘Meditation?’ By @Unworthy_cuber
You should check out this thread too if you feel so.

Meditation not about closing your eyes and breathing but all about the attitude and the way you decide to handle your emotions. All the sitting down in a specific way, Breathing is not the heart of the affair, it’s just there to help make you comfortable. If you’re comfortable sitting on a chair, with your eyes open and still get a calm feel, that’s perfectly alright. But usually this dosen’t happen, we get distracted by some petty things..Hence Closing eyes and stuff. Processing Vision is a big task and the I feel that if brain were the CPU, then it would be under constant Medium to High Usage due to interpreting the senses.

 

I would strongly recommend an guided meditaion app called Waking Up from Sam Harris(i'm using it right now). It's a meditation centered about observing things and developing awareness through the day. The app is normally paid but during the pandemic if you will write to tthem (on the site of the app)he will give you a free 1year subscribtion. It has an introductory course, and there are few other kinds of meditation, it also has the theory section where he explaines a lot of concepts(there is some phylosophical stuff but it's nice). I use it i love it.

 

Sam Harris is a real revelation. I have the app as well. I hope one day he would do a meditation recording specifically for nofap or dealing with sexual energy. I have thought of maybe writing my own. It really does help, although still a very difficult journey.

 

Yes, agreed. I've been working with the Waking Up app for two years now and it has had a huge, beneficial, effect on me. Even my family has noticed!

-EK

 

I tried meditating but i ended up almost sleeping or thinking in other stuff

 

I spent a half a year in India, meditating with 300 others at dawn - depending on who felt like getting up early - and again at sunset, after which there was always a dance, and, most of the time, a band. "Good times." Afterward, people would go for dessert and a beverage or such. It was India so everything was cheap cheap cheap.

I don't know what to say to anyone who wishes to start in a casual way, except to put yourself around like-minded people in the real world, safely, of course, and as appropriate. It's much harder to do it alone - too many distractions. Same with joining a gym where everyone's working out and you're all moving your bodies and getting in shape, or buying dumbbells or a treadmill and trying to do it at home. You'll quit after a couple of days and then the treadmill becomes a place to hang clothes. (I realize some people do quite well working out at home, so please don't flip ya wig if you're one of those.)

Sit in the lotus position - google it - and close your eyes and let your mind go nuts, because it will. But it's nuts all the time, chatter chatter chatter. Meditation alerts you to your busy mind. It is not the cause of the busy mind. It'll say things like "this is a waste of time" and so on. But once the mind understands that nothing it says is going to move you from that spot, it'll give up and you can dig your breathing, the air floating over your face, the sound of the wind and the birdies outdoors, etc.

Once you get into it, it'll be your friend for life. And it has a side benefit if you're a single, straight man in that most groups of meditators are comprised mostly of women, who, in my experience, if you're not a creeper or such, are glad to talk, go out for coffee or whatnot, and they tend to be sensual people overall, as you will be if you dig deep into it, eventually, maybe.

 

Please do not listen to this advice. You are purposefully putting a person on a dangerous path if unguided...