Why meditate?

Why meditate?
Why dance?
Why Sing?
Why make love?
We can attach a reason to each of these questions, the mind loves a reason for doing something. Meditating, dancing, singing, and making love can all be a means to some end. Yet, they are unique in that they are also ends unto themselves. You need not dance to become better, nor to arrive at a destination, or to work on coordination, or to let go. You don’t need a reason to dance, dancing is purposeless. The same can be said for meditation. You can go into meditation with a purpose, as a doer, with an end in mind.
Or you can simply sit.
You can shift from doing to being.
Without a goal, without the desire for enlightenment, or inner peace.
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Why meditate?
Meditation teaches concentration and awareness.
Pure attention
focused, body, mind, and spirit.
As one first learns to sit they will experience discomfort. Their mind will distract them.
Why?
Because most people live in their heads. They live in the intellect. They talk to themselves incessantly. When a zen master sits, he simply sits. When he eats he eats. And when he sleeps he sleeps. Most men and women do not sit, they sit and think about ten-thousand and one things. They do not simply and mindfully eat, chewing their food the appropriate amount of times, and allowing for digestion.
To meditate is to check in with the body
body, mind, emotion, and spirit are one. Yet most people spend time in their mind, get swept up in their emotions, rarely check in with their spirit, and hardly live wholly. To live wholly is to be connected to the bodymindemotionspirit as a unity.
Meditation is a means to find peace
Inner stillness
If one regularly finds peace in the morning, and peace in the evening, soon their day will be spent in peace. Picture a spectrum, on one end there is suffering, and the other is pleasure, and in the middle is a place of contentment. Most people seek pleasure, they are caught in a never-ending desire to pursue, achieve and follow rewards. When inevitable tragedy and suffering strike they are quick to push in the positive, and get back to pleasure. Yet meditation teaches the middle way. Mediators reside in the center, calm and content. When pleasure comes they are happy, but they are not attached to it. When suffering comes, they suffering.
stoic.
their peace is undisturbed by the waves of emotions that roll over.
Emotions are just that, waves of energy, quick to come, quick to wash away.

Do not become swept away in emotions, joy or anger.
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Why meditate?
When one learns to turn their eyes inward they come to know they are infinite
Inner vision
inner sight; insight
When one learns to meditate, they learn to witness.
if one learns to watch the breathe without interfering, without guiding the breathe, without guiding the mind, just letting go, they realize they do not breath, but rather there is breath, and they are a witness.
you are what you are aware of.
Most people’s awareness is identified with body, mind, and emotions. Yet when we become a witness we have an oppurnutity to transcend. Most people live in their heads and look out from their eyes, as if their consciousness was coming from the brain. This position can be described as ego-centric processing. The self is the center, looking out at the world.
Yet imagine this, picture yourself sitting on a bench looking at an apple. Now take the apple’s perspective. You are an apple looking at yourself. Your awareness is displaced from the ego-center, and you are seeing things beyond yourself. This is allo-centric processing. Over time, as you continually meditate and become a witness of your body you begin to shift your awareness. No longer looking out from two eyes, you are wholly aware of your bodies position in 3-dimensional space. Because your awareness is lifted beyond the body, there is a distance created from your thoughts, emotions, and even the mind. This is not a dissociation. It is more akin to an objective looking at oneself, a truer way of knowing thyself. For how can we truly know ourself unless we see ourself from outside in. When we become aware of ourselves objectively, our problems, limiting beliefs, and blockages become apparent, just as when you look at someone else and their problems seem simple to you.
Because your awareness lives beyond the ego, or self-identification you will also experience a shift in your relationships. For we usually look at the world through our own biases and prejudices. When we lift our awareness beyond ourselves we see the world, and others more clearly. Truth, is to see things more clearly.
The disidentification with the body, mind, and emotions is primary to meditation and volumes could be written on the resultant happenings of this shift in awareness. When we are no longer identified with our body, mind and emotions we don’t take things personally. We become less attached to our looks, for they will fade. We become less disturbed by our emotions, for they are passing waves. We become less concerned with the constant negative thoughts that arise, they are just passing waves too.
no longer do things happen to us, or for us, they just happen. They happen just the way they should, and we can be at peace.

zen
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meditation is thinking
There are many forms of thinking
Say you have a mathematical problem you are trying to work out
most people’s approach to the problem would be to sit with pen and paper and try to work on that problem. They will sit there and try to work it out with the mind. Nothing wrong with this, the conscious mind is great for thinking.
here is another way to approach the problem. Work on it, then go to sleep. Research proves that your brain will continue to work on the problems your conscious mind deems important. you wake up and the problem is solved. Or maybe not.
Try again and try it this way. Work on the problem, then meditate. Out of the silence the answer will come.

When learning guitar (or any skill) one can try and try, then they take a break, and come back and viola
things to note:
Your brain has different electrical states ranging low to high. When you drink coffee you put you brain into a beta state, or a high arousal state, this state allows for outward focus and concentration. Meditation drops the brain wave states lower and this state is good for relaxation, healing, and processing of information. Sleep and trance drop the brain into even lower states of arousal, also having benefits for recovery, healing, and processing of information.

Using this information, it is clear that a good strategy would be as follows. Enter the higher arousal states for thinking and learning and taking in of information, then balancing yourself with lower brain wave states to process and utilize that information. It’s about balance.
Work, play, rest
Remember how I said your brain continues to work on the problems your conscious mind deems important. I should express it a bit different, you brain will continually work on problems, all kinds of problems. It does with subconsciously, but it uses your brain’s resources. Think about all the problems you encounter during the day, your brain has solutions to all kinds of problems and is continually working on them. But its disorganized, our modern world has too many problems, too many alerts to memorize, too many things to remember. Your brain has a limited amount of resources. If you lived in a cave and only wanted to write, your brain would have more resources to focus on just writing, instead of writing, living, family, working, and ten-thousand things.
Meditation helps to organize the brain
The analogy is thus, all the problems you encounter during the day are tabs you are opening on your computer. When one meditates at night the stream of thoughts for the 10-20 minutes will be about your day, your thoughts, and the problems that you have encounters. By meditating and simply allowing these thoughts to pass without interfering allows those tabs to close and the brain to get out of problem solving mode, and into a place of peace. Most people don’t even know what peace feels like. They don’t understand what it is to have an empty mind. Always ten-thousand things. No silence.
When your mind is not full of ten-thousand things, you are free to become more present. When you focus, you have more resources, you become more creative, your problem solving capabilities increase, when you take on a task you can put your mind, body, and emotion into it.
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Meditation and the breath
most methods of meditation involve the breath
the breath is the bridge to the subconsciousness
the breath is life energy
the breath is the vehicle
The breath is conscious and subconscious
By bringing our awareness to the breath we can follow it into the subconscious
What is the subconscious?
the subconscious is you
the subconscious part of you regulates your heart, your body, it contains all your reflexes
It contains your urges, desires, memories, etc.
the conscious mind is but a spotlight, it is a sliver of awareness
the subconscious is the vast ocean of self
Tapping into your subconscious will change your life
In your subconscious are programs and conditioning, they are reflexive responses, limiting beliefs, prejudices, etc. Meditation allows us to enter the subconscious and decondition all the poor programming we have been acquiring unconsciously since birth. This is awakening. Coming into consciousness.
Programing the subconscious will alter your perceptions. It will expand your awareness.

meditation is beautiful

meditation is boring

meditation is
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