You start the day off with a cup of coffee and click on the morning news or Sports Center to catch up with last night's events. Pop in your headphones and set out in to the world to navigate the traffic lights, honking horns, and arriving & departing subway trains. You check your voicemail, send an email, and update your face book status before walking into work to deal with the clatter of your boss' expectations mixed with the clamor of your customer's demands. Amidst the cacophony of life's frenetic soundtrack, it can become easy to lose touch with the stillness of silence.
A great tool for helping us get back in tune with this stillness is meditation. Meditation can sound like a daunting or downright silly proposition depending on your worldview. People either think it's for hippies or hyper intellectuals. Meditation, however, is for everyone. While it can be a powerful tool, it is a remarkably simple thing to begin practicing. Meditation is the act of effortlessly concentrating on one point for an extended period of time. It is the gateway to inspiration, intuition, insight, well-being, and regeneration. Simply put, it is sitting quietly, preferably with your eyes closed, and trying to focus the mind.
This focus can be on a point, visualization, a sound, movement, or one's own breath. New practitioners can become frustrated or intimidated by this at first, but only because they feel like they are not "doing it" right. This belief is brought on by the confusion between meditation and Samadhi. Samadhi is the divine state of connection and healing that one may hope to attain through meditation. Only through bringing your mind to complete stillness will you be able to come in to the awareness of that state. The average person; like you or I; would probably not be able to come in off the street, plop down and jump right into a state of Samadhi.
Thankfully, however, meditation is not only a means to an end, but an end within itself. Just the act of sitting down, eyes closed, and bringing your awareness to your breath can have remarkable effects that can be felt in every aspect of your life. At the very least, ishtayoga.com/class_descriptions meditation will give you the break from the horns, songs, shows, bells, whistles, screams, cries, curses, complaints, and message notifications that you so desperately deserve.
Roque L. Rodriguez III is a poet and yoga instructor in New York, NY. He practices ishtayoga.com/class_descriptions meditation with Yogiraj Alan Finger at ISHTA Yoga NYC.
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