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Why You Should Start A Meditation Practice
“Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.” (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it?
The pill exists. It is meditation. It has been discovered by many religious traditions and was in use in India long before Buddha, but Buddhism brought it into mainstream Western culture. There are many kinds of meditation, but they all have in common a conscious attempt to focus attention in a non-analytical way. It sounds easy: Sit still (in most forms) and focus awareness only on your breathing, or on a word, or on an image, and let no other words, ideas, or images arise in consciousness.
Meditation is, however, extraordinarily difficult at first, and confronting your repeated failures in the first weeks teaches the individual lessons in humility and patience. The goal…
