music, talking, or movement and are therefore denying themselves an important part of life. In fact, the opposite is true: meditators are generally more sensual and comfortable with the full range of sensory experiences than other people.
It is good to realize that, sometimes, decreasing sensory stimuli can be what a person needs. Normally we get so much stimulation that we cannot fully appreciate what we touch, eat, see, smell, or hear. Imagine going into a shop to find a perfume you like. By the time you get to the fourth or fifth perfume, you are so overloaded with input that your nose shuts down and nothing smells distinctive. This overload happens most of the time, in different ways, to all of our senses.
Ultimately it wears us out! However, through meditation you can shut out the daily bombardment (noise, TV, advertisements, all manner of sensory overload) and find mental quietness. When you are no longer inundated, you will be able to experience heightened pleasure from whatever engages your senses. So when you eat, you can focus your awareness on taste with much more precision. When you hug a loved one, your mental clarity allows you to enjoy every tender caress. You will be able to truly focus and enjoy all that your senses experience.
How Mental Resilience Training Enhances Your Love Life
We all know how to fall in love, but unfortunately not many of us know how to stay in love. Knowing how to listen is critical for staying connected and remaining in love. However, the mental chatter going around in our heads can make it difficult to focus on our partners. Also, heightened levels of clarity allow us to connect to our own emotions and our partners’. Practicing focus and clarity ensures that we keep love alive in our relationships.
Improved Listening Skills
Imagine that you have just joined your partner after a hard day’s work looking after the kids or dealing with your boss, and you start a conversation. Your mind will likely still be processing information, decisions, and conversations from your day. You might get a glazed look in your eye, leading your partner to ask, “Are you really listening?”
The truth is, you’re probably not. You aren’t really present because you couldn’t put down the thoughts wandering through your mind. Mental Resilience Training will increase your ability to listen with “unconditional presence, which is just being with what is, open and interested, without agenda.”11 This type of listening is very powerful. Your companion starts feeling connected to you, which opens up many avenues for the relationship to develop and deepen.
Emotional Awareness
Experienced meditators can pinpoint their emotions more immediately and accurately. Whatever they feel — whether joy, sadness, depression, or grief — they can understand and face with the appropriate intensity. Acknowledging all of your emotions (as opposed to denying or trying to numb them with too much comfort food or alcohol) is a sign of healthiness.
Emotional awareness means knowing when feelings are present in others and ourselves. This is obviously critical in relationships, especially when entering a new relationship. Most people start relationships with emotional baggage from previous relationships. Often we are not aware of the emotions that we carry around with us, and this can cause misunderstandings or defensiveness.
Through meditation we learn to notice, acknowledge, label, and accept all of our emotions. As we become aware, we can stop carrying around what is no longer useful to us, and in letting such things go, we feel lighter and happier, and become easier to be around.
Mental Resilience Training has a number of benefits that can enhance your work, health, and relationships. Meditation helps you make fundamental and positive changes in your life, not through willpower, which can wax and wane, but through awareness. A meditation teacher offers the following reason for learning to meditate:
You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes flow naturally. You don’t have to force or struggle or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. You just change. It is automatic.
GUNARATNA
There are so many times in our lives when we just cannot understand the right course of action. Sometimes we flit from one activity to another, without achieving anything in particular. We sometimes assume that if we keep doing various things, we will stumble onto the right path. Instead we often create more agitation and pain for ourselves.
The process of meditation can help us develop clarity about our decisions. Through this clarity, we develop our direction, which allows us to serve ourselves, our loved ones, and, ultimately, the world in an empowering way.
common misconceptions about meditation
I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird. I suddenly realized that anyone weird wasn’t weird at all and that it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.
PAUL MCCARTNEY
WHAT COMES TO MIND AT THE IDEA OF MEDITATION? Do you associate it with an attempt to reach a higher plane? Do you see an image of a bald man in orange robes sitting on a cold, stone monastery floor, chanting a mantra? Perhaps it’s a picture of hippies with legs crossed in the lotus position, breathing deeply and murmuring, “Ommmmm.”
Adding to the confusion is the fact that there are many different types of meditation practice — Transcendental Meditation (commonly known as TM), vipassana, zazen, stillness, or devotional meditation. Is each one different? Let’s say that they all share many elements and each has its benefits, yet some would be more beneficial in certain contexts than others.
Meditation is becoming extraordinary at nothing special.
ZEN ADAGE
When discussing my personal meditation practice with friends and colleagues, I have encountered some misconceptions about precisely what meditation is or what it achieves. One particularly memorable instance came in response to my telling my boss that I meditate. “Ah,” he ventured, “I don’t meditate, because that’s what cows do. I’m human, after all!” I’m still not sure what he thought cows really do. He was probably thinking more along the lines of rumination — hanging around all day, slowly chewing grass. Nevertheless, I am sure that cows are free of mental clutter, but they probably do not strive for the things that meditation offers: mental peace, mental resilience, and the skills to make better decisions in daily life.
Misconceptions can discourage people from beginning a meditation practice, or cause some to have unrealistic expectations about what meditation can provide. So, before describing the practical aspects of developing your own meditation practice, I’d like to address some of these misconceptions.
Misconception 1: Meditation Is Only about Relaxation
You could think of meditation as practiced relaxation — the process of concentrating the mind, calming the body, and shutting out external stressors. These are key relaxation techniques and are also the first steps in any meditation practice.
But meditation is much more than relaxation. It enables you to delve deep inside yourself, into the subconscious and unconscious levels of your mind. Through this, you gain an awareness of what drives your actions and what underlies your decision-making processes. This state is often called centeredness. Simply, it means that your decisions come from awareness, not from transient mental clutter or, worse still, destructive emotions.
Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Misconception 2: Meditation Means Going into a Trance
Meditation does not necessarily involve going into a trance state. It is not about zoning out, achieving unconsciousness, or escaping reality. In fact the opposite holds true — meditation is geared toward achieving a greater awareness of ourselves and our thinking processes.