Most of us have heard about the benefits of meditation: relaxation, emotional release, inner peace etc. Some may even have tried doing meditation with a audio CD or DVD. In most people’s mind, meditation involves sitting at a half lotus posture, follow some breathing and mantra and try to quiet the mind. But for the majority, as soon as they close their eyes, random thoughts start to kick in: “What to do next?” “I forgot to pick up the laundry!” “Where did I put my purse?” In about five minutes, the hip or legs start to hurt and then the mind starts to ask, “Are we going to finish soon?”
In fact, sitting still meditation is actually a higher level of meditation. The mind is like a wild horse, it is quite challenging for a beginner to tame the wild horse while he/she is not even able to ride a well-trained horse yet!
I personally highly recommend learning and mastering moving meditation prior to progressing into sitting meditation. Moving Meditation mostly involves movement, breathing and controlling the mind all together. The simplest way to do it is just focusing on a body part, slowly move that body part, breath and relax. For example, we always do shoulder rotation as a warm up exercise for our muscle. Most of the time, we just rotate the shoulders without even paying attention to them. You may try, which I call, shoulder rotation meditation. Close your eyes, focus on your shoulders, breath out gently when you rotate your shoulders, imagine all the tension is melting away to the surroundings, just like melting a butter. If you may let your mind stay still for that 1 or 2 minute, you will feel refreshed and your shoulders will feel very good too. You can continue to do the same for your other joints: neck, wrist, elbow, waist, hip, knees,and ankles.
When you can master that, you may then start to progress to learn energy meditation such as Tai Chi, Qigong/Chikung, Dahn Mu etc.
Please see my next post for more about the details of moving meditation
