Mind exercises

Passive Meditation Stills the Mind…briefly

Often connected to a ‘mind focus,’ passive meditation is also called, in Zen, Zazen, or simply sitting. One Zen Sensei I know was discussing counting breaths as a way of meditating. She said, "It seems simple… count your breaths on the out breath. When you reach 10, start again. If, while counting, you distract yourself with a thought, start counting again."

The Joy of Simple Presence

Zen is concerned with one thing only. It is living with simple presence, or "being present." The idea is, again, alarmingly simple.

• There is a ‘real’ world of which we are a part. It has no intrinsic meaning, and is therefore ‘empty’ of meaning.
• We interact with everything through our senses. We’ve mentioned this before. Sensory data also has no meaning.
• We interpret the sensory data. Thus, the world you perceive is not the world—the world you perceive is your interpreted version of the world. Our interaction with ‘the world, then, is always subjective, as we take the raw data and judge (interpret) it.

Zen Masters (and quantum physicists) say that we can never know, nor prove, objective reality. Everything we interact with is filtered by our subjective experience.

THE GOAL OF MEDITATION 

The goal is not to stop the internal chatter.
(Hint: you can’t. No one can.)
The goal is to notice it as it arises, and to get to a place where we ’simply notice’ without following the thought.
This is actually a great improvement, and a worthy life-goal. 

 NAMIG EXERCISE

Sit comfortably. Close your eyes for a minute, and have several deep breaths, evenly and comfortably. Open your eyes, and look around the room.

As you see an object, silently name it. Move your eyes, and re-focus. Name the object. Continue around the room in any pattern you choose. Let your eyes pause, focus, and name the object. Do this for a few minutes.

Now, very briefly. Look at one of the objects, and let your mind start to evaluate it. For example, I can see a flat panel TV. My evaluation starts up with "It’s smaller than the one I have at home. And it’s mounted so it’s hard to get at the wires." And on and on.

Stop. Go back to circling the room, just naming. Then refocus on one thing, and judge and evaluate. Do this shifting back and forth many times, and think about making it a daily, 5-minute discipline.

I’m attempting to get you to differentiate between noticing and judging. Noticing is a cataloguing process. It’s essential. It helps us recognize, for example, threats. A hot coil on your stove is ‘the same’ as a hot coil on mine—the category matches. I don’t have to burn my hand on yours to recognize it’s ‘like’ mine.

Vir: http://www.phoenixcentre.com/blog/2007/07/28/exercises-in-mind-emptying/