Meditation, a journey of self-awareness

In the past two months, I have tried many kinds of meditation methods, and my mood and the mood of dealing with things have greatly improved. Several meditations that are mainly practiced are the 478 breathing method, the progressive breathing practice, and a little mindfulness meditation practice. For two weeks, I also experienced the free trial of headspace, and did some vipassana and samatha exercises. Each exercise gives me different feelings and experiences, and supports my heart and body to different degrees.

For me a year ago, meditation had always been an area I was reluctant to go into. Because it feels painful to think about nothing, and it is difficult to accept that I meditate for more than five minutes. I always feel that my thinking will always be active and imaginative, so that it will not be boring. If you stop, you will feel restless. For example, I have to turn on podcasts or videos to attract my attention even when I am cooking.

I really started to learn about meditation because of a funny story. Looking through the diary of the previous September, I found that I have really become attached to meditation, and it has been a year.

At dinner with someone I didn't know, he asked me if I meditated. I answered that I do not meditate. But I asked him back when he usually meditates. He said that I meditate all the time, and I am meditating when I pour water. At that time, he said this sentence in a very aggressive tone, somewhat provocative, and a little serious. But because of this provocation, I started to notice words like "now" after that day, especially when I was reading meditation-related articles, I was especially aware of the meaning of meditation for the spirit of "now"; this indirectly led me to I began to notice a book called "The Power of Now"; if it was the previous one, I would definitely think this book was poisonous chicken soup; but after reading a few pages in the past two days, I felt a little enlightened;

"The past has passed, the future has not happened. The pain and joy of the past, the hope and fear of the future, in fact, everything is just a thought that occurs in the present."

The past doesn't define my self-identity; I don't need the vision of the future to give me liberation; only the present is in my control; I should be in control of what I can, letting go and accepting the uncontrollable. Meditation became simple once the meaning behind words was understood; it happened every moment, while I was reading, cooking, going to the bathroom, and I had my own sense of the power of this cleansing mind in meditation Understanding: As many people have said, it is to drag your thinking back to your current process. For someone like me who is often anxious, after going into a meditative state, I often believe more that I can seriously do what I am doing now, and I understand that any anxiety about the future and the past has nothing to do with the real me.

Although I really started to pay attention to meditation and began to think about the meaning of meditation because of a few provocations from others, I really started to practice meditation regularly after graduation this year. After graduating, the stress of finding a job and living, coupled with the rental crisis in London, came with my anxiety, which forced me to find a new way to balance my sense of crisis.

The meditation practice I tried for the first time was the 478 pranayama. This is a relatively simple method of meditation and is a breathing practice based on pranayama. The specific way to meditate is very simple, find a comfortable place to sit and keep your back straight. Focus on your breath, inhale through your nose, and count to four mentally. Hold your breath and count to seven mentally. Exhale through your mouth and count to eight mentally. This completes a cycle. The meditator can set himself any time, five or ten minutes.

The principle of this meditation method is to physically relax the entire body; deep breathing can stimulate the secretion of relaxation hormones, and as long as a few minutes of meditation every day, it should be able to reduce stress to a certain extent. Because the 478 meditation incorporates counting into the breath, it was an easy way for me to get started. Counting and counting, the brain will naturally exclude external sounds and focus on breathing.

After trying the 478 practice a few times, my interest in meditation gradually increased and I went to try headspace again. There are two forms of meditation that are drawn from Buddhism: Vipassana, which can be translated as "insight," is a clear awareness of what is going on. Samatha can be translated as "focus" or "quiet". It may be the reason why I just started. My understanding of its practice is actually very intuitive: that is, focus on your own breathing; scan the whole body from top to bottom from time to time, and feel the touch in every corner of the body .

I have to say that headspace is really a well done app. It has excellent animation, and the audio is rhythmic without being contrived. In addition to meditation practice, various philosophies are taught from a meditative perspective. In one video, they compare human emotions to a sea: what we want to do in meditation is not to make the sea completely quiet; maybe somewhere in the sea, there will be wind and rain, but in another part of the sea There will also be sunny weather in one place. What we need to do is not to change, but to be aware. For me, it's about sailing in as sunny a place as possible.

Another interesting point is that we should not have a negative attitude towards intrusive thoughts and mind wandering during meditation. This is what headspace mentioned in my meditation practice, and it's what my friends and I talked about in our chats. We don't need to push thoughts out or stop them from coming in during meditation. These thoughts are like clouds in the sky; we just need to be aware of it and watch him float away and let it go.

When I systematically practice 478 and headspace, I can clearly feel that in my daily life, my awareness (awareness) of my emotions and thoughts has improved, and when my emotions change, I can clearly know why Trigger something to remind yourself to relax and not hold your breath.

After two weeks of doing 478 exercises daily and headspace, I went back to progressive breathing exercises. The general practice method of progressive breathing exercises is to perform tension-relaxation exercises on the muscles of the whole body from top to bottom through breathing coordination. When you practice, you can think about something that makes you a little anxious. The logic behind this breathing meditation practice is to let the body fully feel the feeling of relaxation; and when you think of some anxiety, re-experiencing this feeling can bring some muscle memory to the body. And when I encounter trigger events, I still remember this feeling of relaxation.

What's interesting is that after I did this progressive breathing exercise, although I didn't know how the body reacted to the anxiety trigger, (the feeling is very subtle, my feeling is not particularly obvious.) But I The troubles in life, big and small, were counted out by me one by one because of this exercise, and they became my familiar friends. A week later, I knew exactly what I was afraid of, and I could practice mindfulness for myself in response to these thoughts; if mindfulness didn’t work, I knew what I would be anxious about, and when the anxiety came, I wouldn’t. Overwhelmed.

After doing these meditation exercises, my biggest feeling is that my awareness has improved a lot. Perhaps the magic of maintaining emotional stability and positivity lies in this: be aware of yourself, know yourself; change what you can change and accept what you can't.

Meditation is not a purpose, it is just a mental and physical practice, it doesn't matter if the practice is good or not, the important thing is that we are on the way to perceive and be aware of ourselves.