Master Your Mind With Meditation (Full Training)

It’s a lot easier to meditate if you take some time first to set up a really nice place where you can do your daily meditations.

Of course the ancient Tibetans have thought of what we’re going to need here; and there are also some common-sense additions that people living in the 21^st Century should make.

In this lesson you are going to learn the five traditional qualities of a good meditation place.

The ancient Tibetan tradition lists six conditions that create the perfect environment for meditation.  The first of these is an outer condition, but the rest describe the inner environment for meditation, and we need to pay as much attention to them as we do to things like noise or good friends.  

Now that we’ve got the environment—both the one around us and inside us—ready for a good meditation, we need to put our body into the best possible posture to promote deep concentration.  The idea is that we “park” our body in a super-comfortable way so that we can go deep into the mind and not have to worry about the body.  

Here then is the traditional Eight-Point Meditation Posture.  Sometimes this is called the Meditation Posture of Vairochana.

What time of day is best for meditation?  And how long should our meditation session be?

Like yoga and almost every other discipline, it’s a very good habit to meditate every single day, even if you only get on the cushion for five minutes.  There is a kind of continuity that takes place if you do this.  It will feel as though you are simply continuing with the same meditation, and you’ll “slide” back in very easily.

Meditation is all about “burning” an image, or an idea, into your mind.  As we’ve seen, it’s a very active and beautiful process that ends in a deep and joyful absorption in its object, very much like how you feel during the most moving moment in your favorite movie, or book, or piece of music.

What meditation is not about is spacing out: going off into some place where you’re not aware of anything and not thinking about anything, as if you were very drunk.  You know that everything we do plants a mental seed—and those mental seeds later open up to create the people and the world around us.

This is a very deep meditation object for everyone who wants to cultivate a more compassionate mind towards every persone in their life. We take as a meditation object, the challanges that a close friend goes through in this period of his life.

This is a good example of a meditation object that is considered the of the highest value to you as a practitioner. The image of your mentor/guide that inspires you in your spiritual journey is also the best object to use if you want to develop shamata (single pointed concentration of the mind).

This meditation contains all the preliminary steps before the main meditation, and at the end, the dedication part of it. 

Enjoy it !

Alright!  So you’ve got your meditation space set; you know how to sit correctly; and you’ve chosen your meditation object.  Guess what’s next!  That’s right—meditating!

The minute you close your eyes to start counting your breath, you’re going to start running into the classic problems that all meditators run into.  It’s been that way for two and a half thousand years.  So to help us out, the ancients have left us a list of the problems that everyone can expect, and some solutions or fixes for them

The 9 Stages of Meditation: inner mental states that we pass through, as we get better and better in our meditation

This is a perfect list of things to be mindful of in order to have a good practice of meditation. Review this lesson as often as possible, its best if you can make the precepts of morality objects of your daily contemplations.

The problem, as we all know, is that it’s just very difficult for us to do something every single day, even if we are very aware of how much it will help us.  Call it laziness, or whatever—there is just a very strong resistance in almost every one of us to starting and maintaining a new discipline like this.

I have been through the same challenge, and we know that without constant work the challenging part can return at any time.  So what I’ve done in this section is to give you some suggestions for how to get yourself to make your meditation and yoga practice daily, every single day.  Because that’s the only way to experience everything that these can do for you: the taste of the apple.

Taking our own thoughts as our meditation object, say the ancient books, leads to a high degree of awareness—and then we switch over to a meditation with important content; in this case, we’ll be transitioning on to the Golden Room Meditation.  The reason that Mahamudra brings on such awareness is that our own thoughts are a constantly moving—interesting and engaging for us, and very “close,” object: we need go no further than our own head.