How To Cultivate A Meditation Practice

What is a meditation practice?

Simply put, a meditation practice is the act of softly paying attention to the whole of your experience. Oftentimes when initially sitting for a meditation practice, the mind will seem to suddenly become very anxious, and reveal all of its activities of thinking, calculating and running about and want to do anything except sit still in the container of the body that it lives in. For this reason it is highly beneficial to use a centering technique to guide the mind into focusing its energy into the body, or some element of the body at the initial beginnings of meditation. As the mind directs its attention back upon the body, the very space the mind is inhabiting, the awareness of the body can have the opportunity to soften and expand. It is through the expansion of our awareness, through the refinement of our receptivity, that we access the meditative presence. The meditative presence being that of paying attention to, or rather, fully receiving, the whole of your experience.

What is the value of having a meditation practice? Why is it desirable?

Meditation is an incredible asset to infusing your life with greater presence. After all, the more we cultivate an attentiveness to the whole of our experience, the more alive we feel, the more embodied we become, the more authentically we can connect with others, and the more frequently we notice and can respond to the subtle signs that life gives us.