I treat meditation a bit like a power nap. I see it as a way to quickly recharge my brain and move into a state of mind where I’m silly happy. The big difference with meditation compared to power napping is I’m highly conscious of my thoughts and senses, whereas with power-napping I’ll let my mind wander in every which direction.
Meditation is usually associated with trying to reach some far off spritual realm and apparently you need to follow a whole bunch of steps to the letter or else you won’t get there. My goals are far less ambitious, I’m only stopping to recharge my brain and put myself in to a really good head-space, kind of like pulling into a service station to fill up your gas tank and eat a hot pie.
The standard method is to sit down cross legged on the floor. A lot of people don’t find this comfortable once they’re past the age of 12, so if you like you can sit in your favourite chair. You could even meditate while lying down, though you run the real risk of your body going into powernap or even sleep mode. You shut your eyes. If you’re really clever you do meditation with your eyes open while walking, or doing something physical like yoga. I turn the lights out though you may prefer to have them on. Your environment should be one you find relaxing and free of distration. You can experiment with different methods to find what works best for you.
For my seating arrangemet I sit cross-legged on a pillow on my bed with the lights off and my fan heater on (i find the sound very relaxing). As I sit on the pillow my legs are on the bed, it feels of like they’re sort of hanging. I put another pillow in my lap for me to rest my arms on. I find having the pillow makes the cross-legged thing a whole lot more confortable. I don’t bother trying to sit up straight and I let myself hunch over a bit. Depending on how I feel during the meditation I may stretch my back out by putting my hands on my knees and pulling my shoulders back.
When meditating I’m aiming to eliminate as much brain activity as possible because when you’re mind is fully relaxed, you’ll find sweet a sweet spot where the everything feels ridiculously good. You achieve this by becoming highly conscious which is the big difference compared to having a power-nap.
Eliminating brain activity means silencing the your inner monkey mind of constant brain chatter. When you first start meditating you’ll be surprised just how much you thinking you do automatically and how hard it is to silence it. The reason for this is you have two minds which work together, though you generally don’t realise this during you waking state because it feels like you only have one. You have conscious mind is the one which you control, the one where you can choose to do different things. Beneath the surface though you also have a sub-conscious mind which oddly enough is where you do most of your thinking. You sub-conscious mind operates on autopilot and has thoughts spontaneously without any prompting by your conscious mind. The funny thing is that both of these minds create a ‘voice’ inside your head and feel the same during waking hours. Most of your life you’re actually operating from your sub-conscious mind on autopilot.
You want to stop brain activity, but fighting your brain chatter is impossible because if originates from a place which you cannot control. I use a passive approach which results in your subconscious relaxing and ceasing to have so many thoughts. You do the absolutely strange thing of watching your subconscious have its thoughts from the sidelines. Imagine you’re watching a street parade go by, and your subconscious thoughts are the parade. Your subconscious will bubble up all these thoughts which you’d normally latch on to and your mind would goes off in that direction. The difference here is you see the thoughts happen but you just let them go by. You don’t follow them. Not following the thoughts is key to this method. You cannot stop your sub-conscious from bubbling these thoughts up, though you do have the choice of following them or not. Let them go right past you.
It’s really weird watching your mind having all these thoughts by itself, it feels pretty schitzophrenic 
My conscious mind, which I do control, I want put it into a balanced position where I’m relaxed with just the right amount of mindfulness to keep up the “watch but do not follow” procedure. I only need a very small amount of mindfulness to do this, and as I get into the groove I can relax even more. Soon I’ll I reach the point where my conscious is totally relaxed and I’m effortlessly watching the thoughts of my subconscious go by.
During waking hours your mind is [silence]…[thought]…[related thought]…[more thoughts]. During meditation your mind is [silence]…[some thought drifting by]…[silence]. After a while your body will relax, your meditation will go deeper and the silences between thoughts get longer, sometimes really long. When you reach this point your meditation can go one of two ways.
You can stay conscious and retain a level of sensory awareness about your body and the sounds in your environment. Your body and mind are totally relaxed and you’ll go into a state of bliss. It’s yummy like lying in bed during the weekend feeling like you could happily stay there forever. Everything feels as if it’s made of light. I prefer it when this hapens.
The other way you can go is to fall deeper and often you’ll start going to sleep. This tends to feel heavy and usually not as good as the first way though you may get some interesting insights in to the inner workings of your mind. You’ll often loose the use of your conscious mind all-togehter so your mind is on full autopilot. You can actually witness yourself starting to dream, though most the time your mind just collapses into mindless heap like you do in a standard powernap. When I find this happening I’ll just go with it.
You tend not to have a choice which way you go, the meditation will go whichever way your body feels like going and you should just let it to it’s thing. Remember the point of medtitation is to recharge yourself so let your body heal itself however it wants to.
