Meditation

When I was young, I had zero interest in meditation. It was constantly mentioned in the context of achieving enlightenment, especially in Buddhism, my previous religion. Whenever I hear the term ‘meditation’, the immediate mental association was people who had severed ties with mainstream society and were living solitary lives in pursuit of enlightenment. People like monks, priests, martial artists and hermits.

Not only that, meditation seemed pretty boring and useless. The thought of just sitting at a spot, doing nothing, by myself, in my own world, seemed like a total waste of my time. There was no immediate, tangible output I could associate with meditation. Why do that when I could be actively doing something with tangible, concrete output?

After years of putting this off, I finally decided to give it a trial and see how it works out. If it was really beneficial, I would keep it as part of my daily routines. If it wasn’t, I would have learned from the experience. Lately, I have been meditating as part of my daily schedule. In the first day I did it, there was a subtle difference – not really noticeable, and perhaps arguably attributable as a placebo effect. However, as I continued to meditate the days after, the benefits became apparent. I experienced clear changes within myself (my thoughts, my emotions, my inclinations), as well as my interactions with the world (my view of reality, my reactions toward external events, etc).

With meditation, you begin to live fully in the present moment. This lets you react better to the situations around you. It includes being more focused, efficient, attentive and receptive. You maximize every moment of your living life by living in the present moment. You stop getting caught up by what happened in the past or what might happen in the future. People who are not present are often bogged down by many other things on their mind. They are too busy handling the thoughts in their brain to function in their full capacity in their present moment.

And how often do you clean and tidy your room? When you don’t housekeep your room for an extended period of time, there will be so much dirt accumulated that it becomes an unpleasant place to live in. The air you breathe in will be unclean. The things will be untidy and disorganized. You can’t get things as productively as before.

Imagine your body as a room. Every day, there is lots of junk that gets piled into ourselves – our mind, body, heart and soul. These junk come in the form of negative thoughts, emotions and energy. They can come from all sorts of different sources – the media, interactions with people, our environment, our work, or even self-generated from within. If you don’t meditate regularly, these junk accumulates over time inside you. You become a living trash container with junk thoughts and emotions. Ever have occasions where thoughts seem to spring out of nowhere in your mind in a time when you do not require them? Occasions where negative memories crop up and you didn’t want them to be emerging? These are all part of the clutter that you should be disposing of, but haven’t.

During meditation, you clear all these junk out of your system, just like you cleaning out your room. You expel the negativity and return it to the earth to be converted into positive energy. In the end, you are no longer bogged down by them. For people who don’t meditate, it takes a longer period of time to remove all the compounded negativity from the past. But just like cleaning a very messy house, all it takes is slightly more time and more effort before all the mess is eventually cleaned out.

After my regular meditations, it made me realize how noisy my previous ‘unmeditated’ mind was and I was not even aware of it if I hadn’t had this benchmark for comparison. This is a state which you can only experience for yourself after you start meditation.

PS: Bermeditasi bukan hanya mengambil sikap duduk dan menenangkan pikiran, tapi ada langkah-langkahnya bermeditasi dengan benar, sikap duduk yang benar, kondisi tempat untuk bermeditasi, suasana hati dan keadaan tubuh, dll. Saya menyarankan jangan bermeditasi dengan pengetahuan sendiri, bergurulah dengan ahli meditasi yang “benar”, benar disini adalah meditasi yang tidak mengarah kepada meditasi demonic dan sebagainya, tetapi meditasi yg bertujuan untuk kesehatan, ketenangan, dan sebagainya yg positif. Saya sendiri belajar dari ahlinya Chan Meditation, Master Guo Yan dari Dharma Drum Mountain. Selamat bermeditasi :’)