Your journey into meditation has the power to reveal truth and peace in your life, and while relaxation is a by-product of meditation practice, it is just the tip of the iceberg. As things continue to get faster and more complicated in our world, it is even more important to get grounded and deepen your meditation practice.
Only with regular and consistent meditation practice, will you be able to go much deeper without much effort. The more you practice, the easier it will be to deal with distractions and reach certain depths of meditation in a short time. A consistent practice of 15 or 30 minutes each day will enable you to go deeper every time.
Your Meditation Practice
Deepening your practice means expanding your inner dimension or inner experience itself. You could compare it to feeling deeply in love with someone. As your love for that person grows over time, you could say that your love has deepened.
Strategies For Deepening Your Meditation Practice
Try these strategies to deepen your practice. They are suggestions that you can experiment with. Consider and test each one for yourself, use what works for you:
Focus: Improved Focus comes from consistently bringing your attention back to the object of focus. If you are struggling to improve your focus, try this:
- Experiment with your eyes open in meditation. Choose an object outside of you. Keep your gaze on the object you have chosen. When your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the focal point. You can also choose a scene to focus on, something that does not have a specific focal point; this might be easier, in the beginning, to keep your attention sufficiently focused.
- Keeping your eyes closed in meditation may initially be more challenging because it will be easier for the mind to drift off or even for you to fall asleep. Test both and see what feels right for you.
Breath: Your breath can also be a focus for your meditation practice. Your breath is the link between the conscious and unconscious mind and is a very good process to observe. There are several different elements that you can choose to focus on.
Length of the breath. Observe the natural rhythm and length of the breath. Allow your focus to be gentle and try not to control the breath. Go with what you are feeling and remain very aware of how this your breath reflects it.
Using a mantra. Create your mantra or chose from the many that are available. The guidance here is to choose one and stick to that, do not change your mantra very often.
Posture: The Position you are sitting in when you meditate is of great importance. Choose one that is comfortable and steady.
- Keep the back the neck and the head in a straight line. Do not slouch!
- Keeping the spine straight will improve the alertness of your mind, and you will be less likely to fall asleep. Remember that relaxation is only a by-product. The goal is to remain in the present moment.
Practice, Practice, Practice!
The most important thing is that you maintain a regular and consistent practice. Making small adjustments along the way is completely normal and necessary to go deeper. But you will only find these adjustments yourself when you deepen your practice. On the other hand, you may evolve without much effort by just doing more regular practice.