What is Meditation?

Meditation: Origin, explanation & exercise

What I am going to try to do with this post to is to demys­ti­fy Med­i­ta­tion, talk­ing about its ori­gin, its def­i­n­i­tion, how you do it and how do you mea­sure suc­cess in meditating.

So what is med­i­ta­tion and where did it come from?

Med­i­ta­tion was first men­tioned in very ancient scrip­tures in what is today India, the ear­li­est men­tions date back from 1500BCE. The orig­i­nal term was named dhyá­na. If you want to do a bit of your own research you can find the ori­gin of the term and the con­cept in this wikipedia page. This page can also lead you to the main page for med­i­ta­tion on wikipedia. It is there that you can wit­ness for your­self the incred­i­ble rich­ness of inter­pre­ta­tion of this sim­ple technique.

So what is meditation?

One of the best def­i­n­i­tions I have encoun­tered of med­i­ta­tion is that it is “lin­ear intu­ition”; in oth­er words, that it is a tech­nique which allows you to gain access to your intu­ition at will.

What every­one does agree is that med­i­tat­ing is a per­son­al expe­ri­ence and the only way to under­stand the process of med­i­tat­ing is to expe­ri­ence it for yourself.

In the DeRose Method TriBeCa we teach the tech­nique for med­i­ta­tion in our reg­u­lar class­es. While this tech­nique is sim­ple, we must train it to become good, there­fore we run addi­tion­al half hour long ses­sions in which we train vari­a­tions of this technique.

So how do you meditate?

The eas­i­est way to get start­ed med­i­tat­ing is to focus on either a sym­bol or a sound. In order to exe­cute the tech­nique the prac­ti­tion­er will first con­cen­trate on a sym­bol or a sound for a few moments allow­ing this exer­cise of med­i­tat­ing to take its effect.

So let us try to expe­ri­ence this tech­nique with a very short exercise.

First we need to be in a posi­tion which allows for com­fort and which will help you to con­cen­trate. So sit up on your chair or sofa, or bet­ter sit down on the floor with your legs crossed. For the remain­der of this exer­cise try to inhale and exhale slow­ly and deeply using your nos­trils exclusively.

An object for train­ing the tech­nique of med­i­ta­tion from DeRose Method TriBeCa

Observe this image for a few moments and then close your eyes. The imprint of the image should stay in your eyes allow­ing you to observe the image even with your eyes closed.

For the next two min­utes sim­ply focus on this image, with­out judg­ment and with­out analy­sis. observe this image almost as if you were a two year old who is see­ing it for the first time and con­tem­plates this image.

There!