Meditation Essay On Meditation

Almost everyone is preoccupied with happiness but yet the population seems to be increasingly unhappy. As society and human experience changes we can’t help but ask ourselves how can we fix an increasingly unhappy and dissatisfied society? Mindfulness meditation is a progressively popular solution to this issue. Mindfulness meditation stems from Buddhist tradition and is a practice that includes focusing one’s attention. Does mindfulness meditation have real psychological effects? And if so can they help improve quality of life? Many studies have been conducted proving that mindfulness meditation does have real psychological effects and can help individuals live a more meaningful and happy life. This can be proven through research related to neuroscience, depression and happiness.

Meditation is very difficult to describe and can only truly be explained once experienced. It is the practice of mental concentration leading ultimately through a sequence of stages to the final goal of spiritual freedom, nirvana. The purpose of Buddhist meditation is to free ourselves from the delusion and thereby put an end to both ignorance and craving. The Buddhists describe the culminating trance-like state as transient; final Nirvana requires the insight of wisdom. The exercises that are meant to develop wisdom involve meditation on the true nature of reality or the conditioned and unconditioned elements that make up all phenomena. The goal of meditation is to develop a concept in the mind.

This paper is about my experience with mindfulness based meditation and scientific inquiry of these experiences. Mindfulness based meditation is describes as technique used to cultivate nonreactive, non-judgmental and stable awareness of the present moment (Garland and Gaylord, 2009). The end goal is to sustain this meta-cognitive state for a long period of time. I practiced non-denominational form of mindfulness based meditation for the first time in my psychology class, which was devoted towards intellectual and experiential examination of meditation. The practice was conducted in a group it was instructed by our own professor and it begun at the end of class. There was one sessions per week and each session was structured meaning it was

Mindfulness is an act of learning to direct one 's attention to their experience as they unfolds moment by moment, with open-minded curiosity and acceptance. Katherin (2012) states that mindfulness trains us to respond skilfully to whatever is happening at that moment, be it good or bad, rather than worrying about what has happened or might happen. Studies of brain imaging have shown that the structures and function of the brain is reliably and profoundly altered to improve the quality of both feeling and thought by mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness is an incredible skill, it is a practice that is taking the world by storm and helping more and more people live in their present.

Mindfulness is another way of meditation. Meditation was used to seek to improve one’s psychological or physical health, or spiritual growth. (Brantley, 2007). The history of Mindfulness comes from Buddhism and his search for enlightenment and a foundation of the four noble truths. The Buddha teaching focus on the four noble truths which consist of knowing suffering exists, there is a cause of suffering, there is cessation of suffering and there is a path that leads to the cessation of suffering. (Van Gordon, 2015). The four noble truths were not only there to represent the Buddha’s experiential understanding of suffering, but also to express the truth (Van Gordon, 2015). Studies of Buddhism and the Four Noble Truths teach us that there is always going to be suffering in our life but to find ways to overcome suffering (Tsering, 2005).

In the practice of Buddhism meditation is the primary means of purifying ones soul and letting go of all worldly desires. Elimination of the desire to cling to works of the world such as judgments, possessions or pleasure by gaining wisdom serves to free the mind and gives one sense of peace. It is the clinging that limits the ability to be at peace. Buddhist who has obtained enlightenment are free from the endless cycle of birth and rebirth and have transcended. It is thru the process of this intense meditation that the ultimate goal of Buddhism can be reach, the achievement of Nirvana.

Mindfulness skills have their earliest roots in Eastern practices and pay homage to Buddhist Mindfulness Meditation techniques. These techniques teach people how to calmly and peacefully accept whatever happens to them with minimal emotional reactions, no matter what is happening or how severe the crisis.

Buddhists have many practices that all mostly focus on the ideas of purifying one’s self through the eightfold path. The practice of meditation in the Buddhist faith

Rooting back to its’ ancient times, meditation has been around for thousands of years, especially in the Eastern part of the world and has spread to the Western countries in early 1970s.

Buddhism is defined as “...a way of finding peace within oneself” (About Buddhism 2007). Buddhists work towards finding inner peace, kindness, and wisdom in all their practices in attempt to reach the ultimate goal of happiness (About Buddhism 2007). In this essay I will be discussing how Buddhism is practiced and taught through the process of, meditation, karma and its laws, the significance of the Buddha, and The Four Noble Truths, and finally what it means to be enlightened.

"The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt."

Sitting mindfulness meditation begins with mindfulness of breathing then expands to physical sensations, sounds, thoughts and emotions, and finally choiceless awareness. Expanding mindfulness practice with sitting meditation allows you to become more aware of your thoughts and feelings, also bringing more awareness to habitual patterns of behavior that may not be in your best interest. Looking at your behavior with a beginner’s mind allows you to explore other possibilities and chose a different approach.

come to the conclusion that there is a limit to what they can do. A conscious

Instead of seeing a "soul" or a "mind" as the seat of personal identity, in Buddhism, the self is to be found in processes. Meditation, then, has the therapeutic effect of disengaging the practitioner from self-consciousness, freeing the mind. The view of the world without the construct of a permanent essence enables one to "experience reality as it really is" (3). It is important to note that Buddhism does not distinguish mental processes from other senses. Just as seeing takes a visual object, the mind takes a mental object (1). Just as the eye is free to take in different visual objects, the mind is free, as well. While meditation aims to develop "single-pointedness of mind," it is ultimately to free it from external objects. The focus is on the process of breathing, in Zen, and, eventually, one can reach a state where one is not considering anything (2). Zen considers the "blank-mind" stage to be a higher form of consciousness because it is free from attachments.