Today, I want to talk about why meditation is necessary and when does it become even more necessary. I would also make sure I make my points as clear as possible by defining what I exactly mean by meditation. Let’s dive into this interesting and meaningful topic now.
What Exactly is Meditation?
Before I talk about whey meditation is necessary, I want to talk very clearly about what meditation is. Some of you may think that the title of this blog post is a little too exaggerated as you may think that there are a lot of people that are doing just fine without practicing meditation. That’s only true if your define meditation incorrectly. If you think that meditation is the process of sitting still with your eyes close and clearing of your mind, you are not completely right, and your are not completely wrong either. The type of meditation that you are thinking about is what I call the formal type of meditation, which is just one type of meditation and it is a very effective way of meditation too. For example, for myself, I practice mantra meditation. What I do every morning is that I spend 10 minutes to sit still with my eye close and repeatedly read a mantra with my mind. That short 10 minutes of mantra meditation can already make my mind very clear. But that’s not all I can do to achieve the that clear state of mind. There are other forms of informal meditations that can help me calm my mind too. The big idea behind meditation is that you want to assign some easy task to your mind so that it is no longer thinking intensely and randomly. In the example of mantra meditation, making my mind repeated read a meaningless mantra is the little simple task to make my mind close to resting. A lot of people prefer practicing breath meditation in which the small task is to focus on the breathing in and breathing out action of every breath. In conclusion, for an action or an activity to be called meditation, there are only two criteria to meet. One, the activity assigns a simple task to the mind, allowing the mind to semi-rest. Two, the result is to make your mind think more clearly.
What are Some Informal Ways of Meditation?
My favorite way of meditation, except of my formal mantra meditation, is to have a long walk. By long walk, I mean walks that take more than 45 minutes to complete. As you may know, meditation is no where near exact science. I can roughly speak about what the long walk means to me and it can be different for everyone. For me, I feel that a 45-minute walk can make me my as clear as I can achieve with a 10-minute mantra meditation. From a time efficiency perspective, a 10-minute mantra meditation may be better as it takes less time and, also, it doesn’t require the weather to be nice. On the other hand, the 45-minute walk doesn’t only get my mind in shape but it gets my body in shape too. If the weather is not so bad, I would actually prefer having a long walk if I can only choose one. In reality, I try to do both most of the time. To do a quick check on whether a long walk should be classified as a form of meditation, let’s check if it is assigning a simple task to your mind and see if it relaxes your mind. First, the walking motion simply asks your mind to control your feet to move one after another, repeatedly, kind of like the way I repeat my mantra with meditation. Second, the result of a long walk is a relaxed and calm mind. So, the two criteria are met. Another ways to informally meditation are doing chores, sitting in front of a lake focusing on the surroundings. Fishing is a wonderful way of meditation too.
Why is Meditation Necessary Then?
I don’t care how good you are with handling your 9-to-5 job or your business, if you are an entrepreneur, small pressure here and there builds up and becomes stress. Even if you don’t really have stress, having your brain running all the time does make your thoughts cloudy if not messy. Think of your mind as a computer. If you have your computer open a lot of apps and overtime your computer becomes slow, even if you have a very good computer. The way to cope with it with the computer is simply to reset the company to clear its memory. The way to handle it for our mind is to press the reset button, which is to meditate. If we don’t meditate, either formally or informally, we can easily get into a high stress state and we do very easily make bad decisions in that state.
Some People Have Vacation When Stress is High
In today’s culture, many people do go on vacation when they can too much stress from work. They may argue that they don’t need to meditate but I would argue that their vacation is their meditation. If you can afford having a nice trip every time that you are stressful, it is all good as having a trip is fun and inspiring. If you have a trip simply to release stress, I would say that that’s too much waste of money and time. I would even argue that it is not that healthy to let the stress accumulate for so long, assuming that you don’t have a trip once a week.
When is Meditation More Necessary?
As touched on in the previous paragraph, having meditation when the stress is high is very necessary. But don’t wait until the stress is high to meditate. Instead, you want to meditate everyday to keep the stress and the clearness of your mind at a very optimal state at all time. Think about it this way. If your goal is to avoid having your house burnt, you want to remove the fire when you see a very small fire. Having your meditation only when the stress is high is like remove the fire when it is huge and part of the house is already burnt.