Medication before meditation is my motto for dealing with stress, anxiety, and depression. This excerpt is just one of the many lessons in my Stress & Anxiety eCourse now available online, just click on the image below.
The Stress & Anxiety eCourse contains many powerful techniques to handle your stress and anxiety problems, and gain a new balance in life.
Included in the eCourse is a bonus, the "Personal Upliftment Plan" that outlines a 14-day plan to put the techniques from the eCourse into a daily practice. This knowledge can change your life, just like it changed mine.
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"Meditation before medication"
My personal preference is to avoid medication whenever possible, which means you need hack the brain to get the stress-relieving results you want.The most powerful brain hack we have for dealing with stress is meditation.
Fear is at the center of our fight/flight/freeze response, yet fear cannot exist in a calm and quiet mind.
There are literally hundreds of different kinds of meditations out there, some that want you to focus on a word, sound, or image, and some that want you to become like a silent observer in the flowing river of your mind. Others, like Tai Chi, are a sort of moving meditation that offers a calmness like none other. In this course I will recommend two different kinds of meditation:
1) Sitting Meditation (Shamatha)
2) Standing Meditation (Zhan Zhuang)
If all you did to improve your situation was to practice these two meditations you would achieve great results. Together, these practices will give you strength in the face of great adversity. All will be for nothing if you don’t put it into practice, so with everything I’m saying in this course you must apply it to live the results!
Sitting (Shamatha) Meditation
Shamatha meditation was introduced to me by the Tibetan buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, in his book The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. I stumbled upon this in a thrift store one day and it changed my life forever.
My nervous system was so high-strung at that time that sitting calmly for just a couple minutes brought on great inner tension. It’s almost like my mind itself revolted against what I was doing! Eventually something clicked for me, but it wasn’t a sudden sense of enlightenment, it was more like I was quietly aware that I had become aware of my own mind.
The incessant flow of thoughts, many of which were half formed and subconscious, became like a great, internal river that I was standing in the middle of as it rushed past me. The feeling didn’t last very long but it was enough to know that something in me had changed— I saw the goal of this meditation and it altered my practice forever.
The goal is simplicity. The goal is the practice itself.
With Shamatha meditation, you do not focus on any one thought nor do you seek to eliminate thought altogether. Instead, you become a silent observer, neither judging or attaching to anything that floats by on the River of Mind. With practice, you will find that the meditative mind can be engaged and bring calm to turbulent situations.
This practice is the bedrock for all of the things I do to deal with my stress.
When things start to get too out of hand for me, and those old feelings of anxiety start creeping in, I immediately adjust my surroundings so that I can disengage from conversation for a few minutes and I go into this silent observer, meditative state.
It’s a pressure release valve in my consciousness, and it works.
The hardest part about meditation is actually sitting down and doing it, so while I’ll give you the basics of what you need to get started, getting started is really what you need. . .
The Technique
In Sanskrit, Shamatha means, “peacefully abiding.” This type of mindfulness meditation is as simple as the translation suggests. Your goal is the technique itself:
1) Sit down comfortably, spine erect, either on the edge of a chair or on the floor with a cushion or pillow. Sitting on carpet will work as well. Place your hands comfortably on your lap, no fancy hand postures here.
2) Mentally relax the body, inviting it to become calm, noticing any tensions or strains, especially in your facial muscles and shoulders. As you breath out, allow those tensions to release themselves leaving your entire body feeling vibrant and alive.
3) Now either close your eyes, or bring them almost completely closed, and bring your awareness to a point just beyond your nose.
4) As you breath out, “follow” your breath outwards past your nose, allowing the stream of your thoughts to “move” out in that direction.
5) Breath in normally, very relaxed and never straining.
6) While you simply breath, you will notice that your thoughts do not stop, nor should they. Simply be, breathing, thinking without attaching to thoughts. Let them “float” on by. Do not judge the thoughts or deny them, accept whatever comes up without attachment.
7) When your mind wanders, simply bring your awareness back to your breath, to letting it go out past your nose. It is okay if you find that you have to bring your attention back to your breathing numerous times. Eventually you will be able to hold the appropriate state for longer and longer periods of time.
Do the exercise and do not focus on the results. Your effort will bring you to the place you need to be which is, again, a very simple place. Just sit and breath!
Eventually work up to twenty minute sessions starting with a goal of five minutes. Do not strain or try too hard. Just sit and breath, let go of engaging thoughts, become the silent observer, and don’t forget: the Buddha is almost always portrayed as smiling!
To quote from the Myth of Freedom:
“The ‘lion’s roar’ is the fearless proclamation that any state of mind, including the emotions, is a workable situation, a reminder in the practice of meditation. We realize that chaotic situations must not be rejected. Nor must we regard them as regressive, as a return to confusion. We must respect whatever happens to our state of mind. Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”
For more information about Shamatha meditation, seek the articles written by Sikyong Mipham Rinpoche, son of Chogyam Trungpa on the blog site, www.lionsroar.com.
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