Understanding what is meditation

It is impossible to describe what is meditation. The best one can say is that it is a state of mind where one is at peace with oneself, where one has silenced the ceaseless chatter going on in the brain and where one feels unqualified bliss.

Meditation helps people disengage from the outside world and communicate with their inner self. This creates a beautiful inner space, as people get detached from their ego and emotional baggage that they may be carrying.

Meditation can also be described as mind management where we control our mind. This gives us strength to overcome worldly desires and distractions. Suddenly, those desires seem less significant and are no longer the driving forces of our lives. The more we meditate, the easier we find to rise above the worldly desires.

While meditating we are detached from the world and start enjoying the present moment. But the moment we come out of our meditative state, we again return to the worldly state of distractions. So, we need to develop a meditative lifestyle, which helps us to observe and understand why we oscillate between a calm meditative state and a chaotic outside world of thoughts. We can then better understand which parts of our lifestyle disturb our calm, blissful state and try to make changes accordingly.

For successful and stable meditation, we should anchor ourselves to our breath or body movement while in the meditative state. At such a time, having a memory of where we are and what we are doing is a great help. It gives us stability even as the energy fields start changing.

There are four stages of meditation. In stage 1 of meditation, we experience sensory information; in stage 2, spontaneous thoughts; in stage 3, we create thoughts that need to be tackled; and in stage 4 we grapple unconscious forces as they arise. This makes us a master of our thoughts and feelings and we can thus feel more relaxed and calm at all times.

Meditation provides us with a time when we can work upon ourselves, tackle issues that may be preventing us from being in a perpetual meditative (or blissful) state - a state that is without any worldly fear, anxiety, insecurity and desire. Through meditation, we are able to understand our strongest of emotions and understand what they really mean and hence deal with them in a calm confident manner.