What is Meditation?

Meditation is a term being used more frequently but it seems that few people actually know what meditation is or what it is to meditate. So, what IS meditation?

Meditation is a practice where a technique is used to calm the state of a person’s mind, it encourages a positive state of being. When finishing a meditation, you may feel relaxed, calm, your thoughts may seem clear and you may feel restored, as if you’ve just woken from a refreshing sleep.

Meditation is an actual skill that you must learn to do and practice doing, it’s taking responsibility for our own state of mind and has been found to help calm anxieties and fears. Mindfulness is being present, in the now and engaged, meditation is a practised skill. The practice is also the reward.

Meditation Practice

A meditation practice might take 5 minutes, 20 minutes or longer, it might occur once a day or twice a day, it should be regular and committed. A practice might involve focusing the mind on an object or a thought, it might involve repeating a mantra (a sound repeated silently in the head), or it might follow a pre-recorded, or live, verbal guide.

Sometimes when you meditate time might go slowly, chatter might enter your head, thoughts wander, then other times, your meditation will finish and you will feel as though you just started. Every practice is different, meditation is unique to you and it might be great one day and another day seem tough.

It’s difficult to explain what meditation is or to encourage people to start a meditation practice. You have to do this yourself, out of your own initiative. Meditation is a personal practice that has to be self-initiated.

People ask all the time, ‘What is meditation?’, the only true way to get an answer is to start a meditation practice and learn for yourself what meditation can be to you.

Regardless of the answer, people who meditate regularly would agree that it can lead to a more self-trust, awareness and a focused and energised state of mind.

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash