Blog 13: Meditation – The Monkey Mind

27. August 2018

In the last few months I have started to meditate regularly. I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed at the beginning. There were two things that bothered me: The first one was that I could not get the hang of the Lotus Posture properly; the second one was that I could never really empty my mind during meditation. But I am a stubborn, or for a better word, a persistent person. I continue trying, even though I can still barely do a half Lotus Posture, and my mind is still full of  thoughts most of the time.

But slowly I can feel the benefits of meditation and would like to share with you what I have learned from it. Maybe you would like to start meditating too and my experience can help you avoid the mistakes beginners are likely to make.

Firstly, I have learnt that the soul of meditation is breathing. Chinese also say “From birth to death is only one breath“. As I have said, I was upset at the beginning that I couldn’t do the Lotus Posture. However, the position is actually not really important for meditation. You can choose any comfortable position to meditate.  So I just cross my legs and sit on the yoga mat, gently close my eyes and concentrate on my breathing: breathe in, and breathe out, slowly and deeply. In this way, your concentration slowly moves from the brain to the inside of your body. We get to know our entire consciousness – according to yoga meditation theory our brain is only the fringe of our whole consciousness. Because we live too much in the brain, the rest of our consciousness is asleep all around the body. Through meditation we reconnect our brain with our body. This reconnection helps us see what we really want (not what we think we want and want to be) and feel true peace in our heart.

Secondly, I learned to give up control and to accept. Accept the presence, no matter what it is (in the following blogs I would like to introduce a book: The Ecstasy of Surrender, which is exactly about why we need give up control and accept the presence). I watched a few meditation videos, all of which said that it is wrong to believe that meditation means thinking about nothing. No one can completely block their thoughts and emotions. When a thought or emotion arises, we should not control or judge it, we just need let it come and go freely. In a very inspiring video a monk called our mind “monkey mind“. The mind is chattering and giving an opinion all the time. The monk said that we need to decide whether to listen to the “monkey mind“ or not. To meditate, instead of refusing our “monkey mind“ we should befriend it and give it job to do. i.e. let it watch our breathing. When the “monkey mind“ is given a job to do, it stops being noisy. 

The morning and evening meditations have become a ritual my daily life. I realise that each day I get closer to my true self. Don’t you want to try it too?

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