Mindfulness

This year marked the second year that I'm doing daily meditation. So far it's been an incredible journey, and again I see no reason to stop this practice. It even took me two years to subconsciously increase my meditation time to 15 minutes now heh. I don't measure my meditation time, neither do I limit them. I just meditate until I decided not to, or I feel super restless and my mind is going everywhere. This year, most of the time, I meditate for a minimum of 15 minutes, that's an improvement I guess.

As always, I can't really describe the things I felt after two years of meditation. Also, I feel that 2 years is too short of a period to "justify" results. But anyway like Sogyal Rinpoche says, practising Dharma/meditation is not an A to B journey. There is no goal to attain. We have to practice it from this lifetime to the next until we attain nirvana. So no complaints! Heh heh. Gonna continue practising.

Well I suppose I become more aware of my emotions and thoughts. It feels like I learn a lot about myself. About my thoughts and why I think and feel in such ways. Perhaps it's true when they say that when you learn more about Buddhism, you're just learning about yourself. 

I found a lot of different views about lots of emotions. Happiness, sadness, anger and so on. Just like our thoughts during meditation, our emotions are fleeting around too. They do not stay, they do not linger forever. And meditation helps us to realise this principle, and how we won't hold on to them. One day we won't have to rely on our emotions to react at a phenomena. No need for anger, no need for sadness, not even happiness! Sounds very weird but hmm let me elaborate.

You see I feel that our mind is a very powerful thing. It can build us a huge wall that imprison us, or a pair of wings that set us free. Like a fortress, a wall can help to defend us. But like a prison, a wall blocks us from everything and doesn't give freedom. Likewise when we have wings, we can be free to go wherever we are. But we can also get lost in places we've never been before.

When our mind is untrained, it can just build walls and wings whenever it wants to. But when our mind is trained, when we become mindful, and aware of our thoughts, we can control when the mind should build walls or wings. And the more we train it, the mind may even no longer have to build walls or wings. It knows just when and what to do when a thought/emotion arises.

This is why I feel that a trained mind wouldn't have to rely on emotions, be it positive or negative to react on a phenomena. I'm not trying to say that we should all just be emotionless. We shouldn't be happy when a something happy happened, shouldn't be sad when someone passed away, and so on. Because the problem with us is that we always carry these emotions along. It's important to feel. Just don't drag them on and on like as if we need to, like as it is justified to do so.

For example when something bad happens, I usually hold on to my anger/sadness for days. When something exciting happens, I usually feel unusually happy for days. Excitement and so on. Sometimes I lose focus really, I can no longer be in the moment when I feel happy about something that hasn't happened or sad/angry about something that has happened.

Like I mentioned in my previous post about emptiness, we let our ego make us feel too many unnecessary emotions and create thoughts we don't need. We let our ego justify our feelings, although most of the time these feelings are pretty unnecessary. For example, we hold on to our anger like as if our anger can change everything. But our ego makes us feel so good to be angry (when it never is).

So in meditation, we're slowly killing off our ego by not letting it justify these feelings. We no longer crave for these feelings. We don't realise that we're doing this. But when we do, we'll be liberated.

I can't really say verbally or in words about the benefits of meditation. You have to try it out yourself. It's never to late to start! :) I myself still have a long way to go and I don't think I'm going to stop. Alright that's all from me today. I hope you try meditation one day! :D