Article: MEDITATION

Our lives are full of distractions; from our work, to the people in our offices, to attending to our kids and partners, to keeping up with our parents and the expectations of others in the society, noises of machines, cars, motorbikes that form part of our daily lives to more internal noise such as doubt, fear, anger, hatred, regret, guilt and so on. All this elements working together form the representation of a random life that we experience. But life can have order and simplicity if you can just start practicing a simple thing. Meditation.

Think about it for a minute, how many times have you ever been asked as a child or even as an adult to focus? But how many times did someone taught you how to focus? Chances are you’ve never been taught how focusing is done or achieved.

Our lives are filled with distractions both seen and unseen, both mysterious and unravelled. Such as the thoughts of other people escaping their brains magnetic field and getting attracted by yours Which could destabilise your focus at any point in time. Have you ever wonder where you thoughts come from??? Only a tiny fraction of it originates from your brains neurotic action. Most of it comes from other people who don’t even know they had it. No wonder why if you have an idea right now, and you didn’t write it somewhere it escapes your thought after a while and you go,. I just had it in my mind. But now it’s gone. Sometimes it does come back, other times it doesn’t.

If you’ve ever searched for something and couldn’t find it, only for you to discover that you’ve been holding it all along, you’ll know what am talking about. Sometimes you enter a room to do something only for you to find your brain blank. And you go, what did I come here to do? Sometimes the answer only comes back after you left the room. All of that is the action of unfocused attention.

You see, mind and attention and two different things existing in one entity. Think of your mind as a void of darkness. There is no single glimmer of light in it. And your memories and ideas, desires and thoughts as boxes inside your mind. Then there’s a ball of light, which is your attention. And you can shift that ball of light from one box to another. If you shift it from your the room you’re in right now to a memory of a wedding you had some months or years back, you begin to see all these images flashing in your mind. You see how easily it is to alter with your focus. Now shift that light back to an interesting lecture you once had. You see what I mean?

If you understand that you attention can always wander around in your mind entering endless number of boxes, then you will be able to focus it in the direction you want.

One of the most effective ways of redirecting attention is through meditation. The act of simply releasing all the thoughts in your mind that you don’t need at that particular time to attract the ones you need.