Mindfulness Meditaiton

From the book “The Social Animal: the hidden sources of love, character and achievement”

Mindfulness meditation

At first, I concentrate on my breathing, anticipating the exhaling and inhaling, and then feeling my body fulfilling my anticipations. I feel my nostrils open and close and my chest rise and fall. Then. I center my thoughts on word of phrase. I don’t repeat it over and over again, I just keep it in the front of my mind and if I find my thoughts wondering I bring them back. Some people pick Jesus, or God, or Buddha, or Adunai, but I just picked ‘diving within’. Then I watch what feelings and perceptions and images flow into my brain, letting the experience unfold naturally. It’s like sitting still, as various thoughts merge into consciousness. Often, in the beginning, I lose focus. Find myself thinking about my chores or the emails I have to answer.
            That’s when I repeat my phrase. After a little while, most of the time, the outside world begins to melt into the shadows. I don’t even have to repeat the phrase anymore. I don’t know how to describe it; I begin to be aware of awareness. My identity, my I-ness, fades away. And I enter the sensations and feelings that are bubbling up from down below. The object is to welcome them, non-judgmentally, without interpreting them, just welcoming them as friends. Welcome them with a smile. One of my teachers compares it to watching clouds, drifting into the valley. These puffs of awareness float by, and they are replaced by other puffs and other mental states. It’s like having access to the processes that are there all along, but are usually unseen. I’m not doing a good job putting it into words, because the whole point is, that it is beneath words. When I try to describe it, it seems stale and conceptual, but when I’m in that state, there is no narrator, there is no interpreter, there are no words. I’m not really aware of time. I’m not telling myself as story about myself - the play-by-play announcer is gone. It’s all sensations happening. Does that make any sense?

When I come out of it, I’m changed. I see the world differently. Daniel Segal says: “It’s like you have been walking through a forest at night, shining a flashlight to light your way. Suddenly, you turn of the flashlight. You lose the bright beam of light in a narrow spot. But gradually, your eyes start to adjust to the darkness, and you can suddenly see the whole scene.”

I used to assume that my emotions were me. But now, I sort of observe them rising and going through me. You realize that things you thought were your identity are really just experiences. There are sensations that float through you. You begin to see that your ordinary ways of perceiving are only a few vantage points among many. There are other ways of seeing. You develop what the Buddhists call ‘beginner’s mind’; you see the world as a baby sees it, aware of everything all at once, without conscious selection and interpretation.  

- - -

This is certainly a great piece describing the ways of meditation, which i have been practicing for a while now. I love the new perspective i gain upon coming back from 20+ minutes of trance. it's rejuvenating and the definition of the word awesome.