ANYTIME - ANYWHERE MEDITATIONS🔗

Eating, sleeping, walking, working - every moment, you have a chance to transform your daily living into a spiritual practice.

Even driving, listening to music, playing and gardening can be powerful meditation techniques, if you practise them with awareness. The simplest of daily acts, performed by every single one of us, are presented here, along with tips for transforming them into easy and fulfilling everyday meditations.

This meditation is drawn from Zen. The Zen word Zazen, meaning just sitting, is a tough meditation. The most difficult thing is to just sit, doing nothing. To sit simply is to allow your mind free play. Your mind is going to come up with all kinds of arguments, reasons, excuses against this technique. It will try to convince you that this is a sheer waste of time. If you persist, the mind will become sleepy, it will daydream, it may even start hallucinating.

The whole purpose of this meditation is to let the mind play all the tricks it wants. Because one day the mind is simply going to get fed up of playing with you. One day the mind is going to realize that it can no longer control you with its games.

Then the mind drops of its own accord.

You can sit anywhere, but make sure that there is no disturbance. If there is too much movement, it might disturb or distract you.

Watching nature is a good thing. Even indoors, you can watch the sky through the window. You could sit facing a plain white wall. Or you could simply face a corner of the room and watch that corner.

Don't focus your attention on anything. Let your eyes be half-open and unfocussed, your attention diffused. Let your gaze rest softly in the distance. This will relax you.

Let your breathing be relaxed and natural.

Find a comfortable posture in which you feel sure you can stay without moving for at least half an hour. Use a mat or cushions if required. When the body is unmoving, the mind also falls still.

Keep your spine straight. Use support if required, but try to do without it.

Rest one palm in the other, with the thumbs touching to form a circle.

Remain alert and aware, be receptive without allowing your attention to focus on any particular thing. Be present in the moment, moment to moment.

In the beginning it will be difficult to just sit, doing nothing. But in a few days you will start enjoying this tremendously. Layer by layer, you can actually begin to feel the mind drop. And finally, one day the moment will come when the mind drops altogether. You will glimpse the state of no-mind.