#mindbodycalm

To know where your effort should be directed in meditation, you must have a clear understanding of the goal. The goal of this meditation is beautiful silence, stillness, and clarity of mind. If you can understand that goal, then the place to apply your effort and the means to achieve the goal become much clearer. The effort is directed to letting go, to developing a mind that inclines to abandoning. 

One of the many simple but profound statements of the Buddha is that “a meditator who makes letting go the main object easily achieves samadhi,” that is, attentive stillness, the goal of meditation .1 Such a meditator gains these states of inner bliss almost automatically. The Buddha was saying that the major cause for attaining deep meditation and reaching these powerful states is the ability to abandon, to let go, to renounce.

During meditation,we should not develop a mind that accumulates and holds on to things. Instead we should develop a mind that is willing to let go, to give up all burdens. In our ordinary lives we have to carry the burden of many duties, like so many heavy suitcases, but within the period of meditation such baggage is unnecessary. 

In meditation, unload as much baggage as you can. Think of duties and achievements as heavy weights pressing upon you. Abandon them freely without looking back. This attitude of mind that inclines to giving up will lead you into deep meditation. Even during the beginning stages of your meditation, see if you can generate the energy of renunciation—the willingness to give things away. 

As you give things away in your mind, you will feel much lighter and more free. 

Studies show that the ways we intentionally shape our internal focus of attention in mindfulness practice induces a state of brain activation during the practice. With repetition, an intentionally created state can become an enduring trait of the individual as reflected in long-term changes in brain function and structure. 

How do we make sense of this science of mindfulness? Here is a brief foray into the emergence of an independent way of knowing called interpersonal neurobiology.

Everyone has a mindset default setting. Mine, for example, used to be ruminating on bad experiences from earlier in my life and seeing if there was someway I could avoid having a similar experience in my future.  It meant I was constantly distracted from being here in the present by old, sometimes decades old events and mishaps that really had no place in my current life.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a microbiology Ph.D. then teaching at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, was inspired in the late 1970s to apply the basic principles of mindfulness meditation to patients in a medical setting. His work developing the MBSR program proved effective in helping alleviate the suffering of chronic and previously debilitating medical conditions such as chronic pain.