Meditation is more than sitting.

Part One.

When I was much younger, my initial impression of meditation was that it was essentially a weird thing to do for "hippies." I pictured what it looked like: a bunch of people sitting around a room in silence for a long period of time, and I thought it was a very bizarre, odd thing. I thought it was just something for monks or something that "oddball" sorts of people did, and those trying to be "hip." Since then, I have certainly matured a great deal to say the very least, and I have since come to the realization that meditation is nothing like that at all, not in the slightest, not remotely.

In a world religions course at my college, a former professor of mine showed us few small videos. Within each, was a variety of accounts as to how meditation is practiced in detail. Each one of those short videos of just a few-minutes in length, consisted of different people talking about meditation and its nearly incomprehensibly profound and deep effect on them, and the way it has magnificently affected their lives. Some of those persons were Buddhist, but many of them were not. It gave me a entirely different perspective on meditation: what it is, and why people do it. The benefits those people have described, of which, they have each singlehandedly derived from very the simple act of meditating are not found in sitting or in being quiet, but are found elsewhere. The true heartfelt intense benefits of meditating are found in the ability of a human being to quiet their mind for sustained moments in time, and the ability to suppress that relentless endless stream of troubling thoughts and powerful emotions momentarily. It is in that way that a person achieves what they are supposed to in their first meditation, or within the first several.

While I am not sure of the titles or the locations of those particular videos that I have previously mentioned, here are some others which might help you:

Watch Meditation on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Before my first meditation at the Buddhist temple Ekoji, I was emotionally overpowered, feeling figuratively steamrolled into paper, over-worked, and on the brink of what might have been a miniature nervous breakdown. I was taking somewhere between 15 and 18 credits, very stressed out, and overwhelmed. I didn't think at all about any effect the meditation might have on me. I didn't think that I would feel it, I didn't think that I would feel anything. Instead of that happening, after a little more than 15 minutes of meditation (with my eyes closed while I was sitting normally with my feet on the floor in your average chair), I ended up feeling when exiting the temple that a heavy weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I felt so much relief, in a way that I have never felt happen in that short of a time period.

Sarah