Meditation, fashion or necessity?
Meditation is in fashion. Whatever you call it, meditation (the traditional way) or mindfulness (the modern version), the truth is that it has gone from being the most geek to the most trendy. What’s more, for many it has become aspirational and has become a remedy for stressful situations.
In our day to day, the effect of new technologies is evident: mobile phones, Internet, WhatsApp, social networks, ephemeral conversation channels, speed of response, etc., and more and more people are looking for ways to achieve balance and compensate the stress generated. To counteract all this, meditation is a good option, since it helps us balance everything that overflows us in our daily lives.
Meditation will not carry you to another world, but it will reveal the most profound and awesome dimensions of the world in which you already live. Calmly contemplating these dimensions and bringing them into the service of compassion and kindness is the right way to make rapid gains in meditation as well as in life.
Zen Master Hsing Yun
We already know that our mind is scattered by nature. We get distracted very easily and it ends up exhausting us. Even so, a few years ago it was easier to enjoy small daily moments of rest, moments in which we did not receive as many inputs and our mind could rest. For example, when we went home by bus, we could read a book, look at the landscape or take a nap.
Now, that same bus journey is destined to read the news of the day, answer the pending WhatsApp chats, publish on Instagram or Facebook, read the Twitter timeline and much more. In short, we end up going through life as a racing car, in a thousand and one things at a time, without noticing where we are going and without enjoying the little things, a moment of rest, a relaxing bus ride, a couple of deep breaths.
To counteract all this stress, the large amount of inputs we receive, and calm that overexcitement that we feed throughout the day, meditation is the solution.
What does meditation offer us?
Meditation offers us a pause to reconnect with ourselves. Meditation ensures that little by little our thoughts are effortlessly organized, prioritizing what is really important. Although be careful! Let’s not confuse meditating with reflecting, because meditating is bringing our attention to the present, forgetting the thoughts that flood us and connecting with what happens here and now.
By practicing 5 or 10 minutes a day of meditation we will achieve the pause that our mind needs so that it does not saturate and, in addition, we will educate it to reduce the ease with which it is distracted and increase the speed with which it refocuses. After meditation we will see things clearer and simpler, and it is only that our mind has learned to be in the here and now.
When one meditates, one realizes that not doing it is wasting one of the greatest tools we have to make our life happier. At that point, one is glad that meditation is trendy.
