A few requisites of meditation and their explanation 1. Sit with crossed legs If possible, sit with crossed legs. Ease is the main criterion for sitting cross-legged. Sit on the floor or on a cushion as appropriate, balancing your body weight on your sitting bones, slightly tug in your chin, pull your spine long with slight effort to maintain head-neck-trunk straight. “Straight” means a vertical straight line looking from the front or back and a slight curve looking from the sides, keeping the spine in its natural state. In this posture, your body will not tilt anyway when you are relaxed. For details please refer to 南怀瑾老师的七支坐法 and Swami Veda’s description of sitting posture for meditation. The basic requirements of asana or posture are balanced, stable and easy. Thus, when sited, a wide base is required; sitting cross-legged helps to provide a wide base and a balanced body posture .The exact sitting posture to choose varies according to individuals but is to be guided by the ease that can be achieved. If you can not sit cross-legged, you may sit on a chair. The spine, however, bust be in its natural state and vertical. Once the spine is in its correct posture, your muscular-skeletal system and internal organs will be in their proper positions and you can balance your body at its lowest energy level. Tugging in the chin and pulling the head up is to achieve proper spinal posture. Closing your mouth and making a smiling face will relax your facial muscles and encourage release of saliva. Making a smiling face will make you happy and is conducive for positive brain moulding. 2. Pranayama Breath diaphragmatically-deep, easy and rhythmic. Shift from controlled to not controlled and then onto automatic breathing. Breath continuously without holding your breath. Please note that no matter how slowly you are breathing, you are still breathing. May be you breath once in 2 minutes. Kumbhaka refers to prana, not breath; breath continues, but is not noticed or volitionally controlled. Please refer to Swami Veda’s Yoga Sutra, chapter 2. Oxygen is brought into the blood stream through breath and reacts with sugar to produce energy for life maintenance. Without oxygen, there will be no life. Breath can be automatic or controlled volitionally. We think we can not control our autonomic nervous systems. But that is not strictly true; we can manipulate our breath to influence our autonomic nervous systems which in turn control our internal organs. When we practise pranayama, we make use of neural plasticity to inculcate good breathing habits which will result in influencing our autonomic nervous systems in such ways as to regulate our internal organs to function properly. In meditation, when we let go our breath, we will be breathing habitually and the habits we inculcated will be that which will ensure proper regulations of our internal organs to function efficiently. As such, in meditation, we will be sure of proper internal organ functions. The rates of breath depends on brain oxygen requirements. The less oxygen is consumed, the slower the breath. 3. Relaxation Having breathed diaphragmatically, we begin to relax our body systematically. The objective of muscular-skeletal relaxation is to reduce stimulations from peripheral nerves, thereby calming the brain. Both relaxation and silence are relative. There is no absolute relaxation and silence. Lets be clear on this. The brain volume is only 2% of that of the body, but 20% of our consumed oxygen was contributed by the brain. Hence, calming the brain is crucial to meditation. Besides, the brain is our information and control center. For us to calm down, we must first calm the brain. In addition, one prerequisite of deep meditation is to withdraw from our senses and to do that, part of the information systems must be shut down. When the brain is calm, oxygen consumption will reduce and breath will be slow. 4. Silence and focused Silence can be talked about in 3 levels. First, the physical level which is the stillness of body. That involves shutting down some motor neurons. Second, the level of speech, silent of spoken words which again involves some other motor neurons. Third, the level of thoughts, shutting off the thinking process. This third level is the most difficult to achieve. Having achieved the first 2 levels, there is little physical stimulation, we come to the third level. How to shut of four thoughts? One common method is to focus on one object to the exclusion of all others. When our mind is focused on a point or an object, we gradually let go other mental objects and given time, our mind will be more and more focused. When this happens, our mind will be sharper and will be more able to detect fleeting thoughts as well as our distraction by fleeting thoughts. At the same time, we are more able to notice the distraction and more able to focused. There is this speculation in neuroscience that our mind has the tendency to focus on physical objects to the exclusion of mental objects and vice versa. This speculation can be used in meditation to withdraw from our senses by focusing on mental objects. This speculation probably can be explained in term of differing brain frequencies when our mind is focused on physical and mental objects respectively. Another reason for focusing is to produce a concerted effort like that of the laser. Some meditators do not use this focusing method, they go straight to the method described in the following section. 5. Witness without reacting Fleeting thoughts are bound to occur in meditation. One method of overcoming this is to witness them without passing any judgment, nor to react to them. Note them and let them go and pay no more attention to them. It is just like having received the information, read it and put it aside without taking any action about it. Your sensory neurons receive the information and motor neurons take actions. Action is hard to avoid once judgment is passed. Once action is taken, chain reactions will ensue. Your mind will be agitated. Only when you are truly silent can you have discriminating wisdom which will differentiate the apprehender and the apprehensive and lead to liberation.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:16:29 +0000
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