inner happiness
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Meditaiton is, firstly, a way of trying to get control of your mind. When unpleasant and worrying thoughts pop up in your head uninvited, the discipline of meditation will help you get rid of them. And when you want to summon up positive emotions and happy thoughts – when you want to draw on the reservoir of bliss that lies within you – you’ll have the ability. Meditation is an altered state of consciousness which involves freeing the mind of all thoughts and just ‘being’. It can also involve focusing on the present moment or on a single issue. Two of the four main categories of brain waves are associated with meditation. They are alpha (7-13 Hz), which is also associated with relaxation and reverie, and theta (4-7 Hz) which is also associated with dreaming sleep. You are now going to learn how to induce those states.
There’s a profound state of inner happiness that’s available to all of us. But, unlike ‘ordinary’ happiness, it’s not something we can create at any given moment. Rather, think of it more like a reservoir we can access. We only have to know how to get at if.
Meditation is one of the ways of accessing this inner happiness. Don’t go thinking that meditation is some kind of Oriental, quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo that has no relevance to your everyday life in the West. In one way or another we all meditate at times. In this chapter we’re going to take things a little further and learn how to meditate more profoundly. We’re going to learn how to drink from the reservoir.
So start meditating. Or, to put it another way: don’t just do something – sit there!
How could it be possible that sitting cross-legged and thinking about nothing very much at all could have even a remote impact on happiness? when you put it like that it doesn’t sound very likely. Yet the evidence is there. People who meditate regularly say they feel happier, scientists can measure the increase in ‘happy chemicals’ and several physical indicators of wellbeing also improve. Researchers have monitored the brains of people who begin meditating and found that, over a period of months, activity tends to increase in the part of the brain associated with higher moods and optimism.
You might access your inner happiness in your very first session, but it takes most people a few weeks. Thereafter, meditation deepens until, perhaps after a year or two, something very profound is experienced. Almost everyone talks of feeling calmer and more peaceful. Accompanying these feelings are those of patience and compassion. Later come feelings of intense joy. And all this, in turn, leads to a more positive engagement with life.
Meditating for happiness
So you’re sitting or lying down. Then what? Different people use different techniques and again you need to experiment to find out what works best for you. Some people, for example, stare at a candle flame or an image or a wall, others repeat mantras, still others repeat small almost imperceptible ges- tures.
Here’s a simple way of meditating for happiness.
1 Sitting or lying down with your eyes closed, notice your breathing. 2 Without forcing anything, gradually slow down your breathing.
3 Make your exhalations longer than your inhalations. 4 Empty your mind of any thoughts of past or future.
- Just concentrate on experiencing the present moment, which is your
- If any thoughts push their way into your mind just let them drift past; don’t pursue 7 When you breathing is slow and relaxed, notice your heartbeat.
8 Without forcing anything, gradually try to think it slower. 9 Next notice the sound of your blood in your ears.
- Without forcing anything, gradually try to think it
- In the same way, visit any other parts of your body that you choose.
- Now notice the little dots that ‘illuminate’ the blackness of your closed
- Imagine the dots are stars and that you’re floating in an immense space inside your own body. 14 Relax your jaw and let your mouth open into a
15 Continue like this as long as you like.
Am I meditating?
Beginners often wonder if they’re meditating correctly or even at all. What should it feel like?
Infact, there is no precise definition, but the stages of increasingly deeper and deeper meditation should go something like this:
- Stage 1. Your mind is no longer filled with everyday matters and you sense that you’re drifting towards sleep; you’re on the very fringe of the meditative
- Stage 2. As your go deeper, images may come at you from nowhere. You don’t actually fall asleep but start to feel as if you’re floating. You may feel like rocking and swaying; that’s fine at this stage but you’ll need to stop moving to go
- Stage 3. You become intensely aware of the functioning of your body – breathing, heartbeat, blood flow – but at the same time you no longer know where your body ends and other things Parts of your body may feel very heavy.
- Stage You feel ‘spaced out’ and quite detached but, at the same time, alert.
- Stage 5. You feel in touch with the universe and nothing else matters at
Meditating on the day’s events
This is a style of meditation that’s very appropriate for last thing at night in bed. The idea is to review what happened and how you reacted, not in a self-critical way but in an optimistic, forward-looking sort of way. In other words, your thoughts might go something like this: ‘I was a little bit brusque with someone at work; I’ll put that right by making a point of being more pleasant tomorrow. I spent far too long trying to get something absolutely perfect; I now realize I wasted a lot of time so I won’t do that again. My partner criticized something I’d done and instead of becoming annoyed, I looked at the situa- tion from my partner’s point of view, understood, and felt much better, which resulted in a lovely evening. Good.’
