Meditation is about finding your center.
Centering has three
dimensions.
1. Centering Your Posture
- Adopt a posture that enhances communication and improves the relationship between body and mind.
- Move your torso back and forth, then side to side, feeling and finding your center. Repeat with the head.
- Keep the chest open, shoulders relaxed and down, hands positioned such that it adds to your sense of stability.
- Natural breathing (baby breathing; inhaling into the stomach; stomach out).
- Sink-/sync-in; create a felt memory of being centered.
2. Centering Your Attention
- Your mind is constantly framing the world; you're not looking at your mind, you're looking through your mind at the world.
- Your frame (mind and attention) both enables and limits; you're looking beyond and by means of your frame.
- It's like stepping back to look at your sensations rather than through your sensations.
- Use the sensation of the in-out breath into your abdomen to help focus your attention.
- When your mind wanders, step back, look at what your mind is doing, label it (the process, not the content) with an "-ing" word, and gently bring your attention back to following the sensations of your breath. Every time this noticing occurs, it is a moment of waking up. This is meditation.
3. Centering Your Attitude
- Do not fight or feed your monkey mind (wandering mind). Find the middle path between mind wandering, ruminating, falling asleep, etc.
- Every moment is an opportunity to befriend yourself.
As taught by John Vervaeke.