The Art of Meditation

Nupur Gandhi
Nov 6 · 4 min read

My purpose in writing this to you today is to share my experience of meditation. When I went for Vipassana, I meditated for 100 hours in 10 days. Honestly, I won’t call it 100 hours of meditation, cause believe me this is difficult. In the beginning, I think I was only meditating for about 10 mins out of 60 minutes sessions.
An untrained mind is like a monkey. It jumps from one thought to another. Then after wandering for a few minutes I would snap out and be like oh look at your breath. My mind kept wandering, you have all this time to think, you find all your life’s biggest problems surfacing. You find yourself anxious and worried and helpless, as there is nothing you can do about aspects that are beyond your control. You think and think harder, you cry, you go through a huge emotional ride. This goes on for days. You go back to thinking about all the things that are in your subconscious mind. You think about your childhood, some incidents that you may not remember somehow manage to come afloat.

And then suddenly you see someone thinking these thoughts and you wonder who am I? You become the thought, you see the thinker. These fraction of worth of moments make you ponder on the most fundamental concepts of your life.

For years and years, you’ve been carrying all that baggage and now you just experience that you can do nothing at all about what has happened. Your outlook on those incidents makes a huge impact on everything. I learned how to make peace with it and respectfully move on from those events.

Learning the right art of meditation requires a lot of patience and persistence. When I first started meditating sometime in 2016 I used to get frustrated in the beginning and would stop practicing it for some time. But eventually, I realized the value of patience, for anything to mature it needs to be nurtured and grown. I learned to become kinder to myself. I stopped being so difficult all the time.

Being able to meditate is not the ultimate goal, but what you learn while you master the art of meditation is quite remarkable. It may take years but if you consciously start making it a part of your lifestyle it can do wonders.

The idea behind meditation is to get fully aware of your senses, which means fully aware of your surroundings. You learn to look at your breadth. You learn to look at yourself from a third person’s perspective. This is a profound experience. This experience of awareness makes you understand Nature’s Law of Impermanence. You look at the sensations on your body when you’re meditating, and you just observe it with an idea that this is not permanent. This shall pass.

This prevents you from increasing what they call it ‘Sankhaaras’. This can be understood as your karmas. Much rather your desires and aversions. Every human has sorrow in life. Every human being you meet will have something or the other that is bothering him. Ever wondered why is that the biggest problem that no one has ever been able to eradicate from society?
We tend to quickly have an opinion of any situation in our life. Any experience that gives us a pleasant experience, we try to cling on to it. In the same way, any experience that gives you an unpleasant feeling, we develop an aversion for it. This is called increasing your Sankharas. We fuel our sorrows. Understanding the fact that nothing is permanent saves you a lot of miseries. Our mind constantly dodges from past to future and future to past and is barely in the present. So if you can commit to this art and begin working on your soul or just paying attention to your soul, you will have a very sorted and beautifully carved life.

Our soul wants us to attain our highest good. If you live your life on a higher vibration from others you automatically shine out. You make yourself proud. You align with your higher self and live a purposeful life.

The key is to experience the sensation that happens on your body. This then can be thought about from the perspective of our emotions, be it positive or negative. If someone makes you angry, just try and watch your breath. I know what you’re thinking, how do you remember to watch your breath if you are furious with anger, well even if you do it one in ten times that you get angry I think my job here has been successful. Your breath becomes heavy and fast, this is the first punishment from Nature for going against its laws. It makes you restless and steals from your present moment. You might think about it for a good 4 hours while the person who made you angry probably even forgot about it. So you see the trade-off is just not worth it. Your outside world is the reflection of your inside and not the other way around. You keep running after the next big thing in your life without realizing that working on the inside will shape your outside.

Meditation will give you a perspective and a new idea of what life can be.

Nupur Gandhi

Written by

I write about life and my epiphanies. Striving to make this world a better place to live in.

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