Listening to Sounds
When we listen to the sounds around us without analyzing or judging them, just simply listening, it becomes an effective meditation practice. Whether it’s the chirping of birds or the sounds of construction, they are all vibrations in the air, and we listen to them with the same level of concentration.
Allowing Emotions Space
Acknowledging pleasant emotions is easy, but it’s challenging to acknowledge and give space to painful emotions. Therefore, this type of meditation requires constant training to challenge our instincts. Rejecting, ignoring, or controlling negative emotions may seem effective at the moment, but these emotions often resurface or harm us in more subtle ways. In meditation, it’s important to give space to all emotions. Acknowledge them, coexist with them, and simultaneously expand the space of awareness so that they become just a part of it, rather than consuming our entire consciousness.
Managing Attention
The hustle and bustle of the external world constantly strive to grab our attention—phones, TVs, commercial advertisements, all of them. As our control over attention weakens, we lose ourselves more and more, losing control over our happiness and experiencing the pain of anxiety, depression, or even losing the meaning of life. There are many ways to practice managing attention, such as stopping the behavior of reaching for your phone or turning on the TV when you notice it and instead observing your breath. Training attention is a long-term process of constantly wandering away and bringing it back, wandering away and bringing it back. Through continuous training, we can gain more freedom in body and mind.
Simply Being
Give yourself moments where you do nothing, have no goals or expectations, just simply exist, alive, and spend time with yourself. At first, this may feel uncomfortable or unfamiliar because we are more accustomed to focusing on something tangible. However, you’ll eventually discover the wonder of doing this—you might realize the meaning and value of existence, or find that what you’ve been desperately chasing after, such as peace, joy, and happiness, has been within your own heart all along.
