Awareness & Thought

[piedwagtail91]

i think bemindful are pretty good, mark williams is behind it or has some involvement i believe.
we put all our courses on their website.
if you can and you have the time i'd go for a course where you can meet the teachers and meet other people in the same boat as you.it can be a revelation just being with others.
if thats not possible then online is good.

[Metaphysical Me]

Hi Mike,

You've probably heard of the meditation analogy of the mind being like a jar full of water and sediment taken from a river. If you shake the jar, the water is really cloudy. But if you leave it to settle, then the sediment starts falling down, and the water becomes clear.

This, then, is what happens to the mind during meditation. Daily activities and (actively) thinking are what "shakes" your mind, keeping it busy/ cloudy.

When you focus on something like the breath or a mantra during meditation, thoughts and sensations continue to arise. But by asking your mind to keep coming back to "just the one thing that you're focusing on", you start reducing the mental chatter, bit by bit... (Of course, this doesn't always work smoothly!)

If you are lucky and have a really deep meditation experience, you would expect to stop being aware of visualising your belly as you breathe... All sensation becomes sort of odd, intertwined, streched, vacant... (hard to describe!)

So depending on the phase of the mediation, it's normal to "be aware of" or to "visualise" your belly moving.

If you are lucky, then as you continue to practise, you'll experience states where that kind of stuff just "dissolves", tho.

Wishing you well with it!
XXX
Janey