Meditation Technique.

Meditation. The holy grail of mental health. The ultimate solution to widening your horizon. But what is the correct way to do it? Well, like many, I also struggled to find the right way for most of my initial years since I started practicing it. In group sessions, people say, “Just remove all your thoughts and experience the nothingness.” And this idea of removing thoughts never worked for me. My thoughts are like an octopus, an octopus with multiple tentacles. If I remove one limb of this octopus, the other one surfaces, and if I remove the second one, a third one appears, and ad infinitum. So, I thought, how about riding along the tide rather than going against it? Here is what worked for me. If you also have an octopus, you can try this method.

Step 1: Find a place where you can be with yourself and your octopus.

Step 2: Sit straight with your backbone upright. The idea is not to stress too much. Find a relaxed state of body with your backbone straight and upright without any kind of stress.

Step 3: Come to the present. Practice the 5-4-3-2-1 method. Name 5 things you are seeing, 4 things you are hearing, 3 things you are touching, 2 things you are tasting, and 1 thing you are smelling. You can reorder these senses in whatever way you find it comfortable for yourself.

Step 4: Now that you are in the present, use one of the external bodily senses to initiate the process of deep focus. While using a sense to focus, the idea is to gently direct your focus away from other senses as much as possible. If you are using only one sense and doing it correctly, the other senses fading away in the background will happen automatically.

Step 5: This is a personalized step. You can choose your own. I am using a breathing exercise. Close your eyes, and let your mind or thoughts concentrate or circle around the breathing pattern. If you are doing it correctly, you’ll observe your breathing getting slower and deeper. This is a natural consequence of focusing on your breath. Soon your body and mind will start submitting themselves to a deep state.

Step 6: Once in a deep state, channel your singular unidirectional thought observed and felt during the breathing exercise to switch to other senses, either one by one or all at once. In the initial days, all at once will be difficult, so go one by one. Here is how I did it in my initial days. It is related to step 3 in a way that a last-in-first-out order will be used. Again, this is natural; if any other order is followed, go along with it.

Step 7: Observe the transition. Next is to sense all that you can taste; you’ll observe your body offering you much more than what you have been experiencing in your non-meditative state. Moving onto touch sensation, from earth to air to the sensation of temperature will be felt distinctly. Start from the bottom of your feet and move till your head. Next is to connect with the universal sound, the anahat naad.¹ As you do all these, you’ll find that the last sense and all others are merging together and escaping to a state where you’ll be able to see yourself, your thoughts, and much more.

Remember, this process takes time and patience. Start with 15-20 minutes a day and gradually increase the duration as you become more comfortable. Be gentle with yourself and avoid frustration.

If you have noticed, I haven’t tried the method of removing thoughts; rather, I have used thoughts as a medium to attain a deep state of focus. Maybe you’ll find the other process more comfortable, but this one, I found to be more in sync with me. If you also have an octopus that keeps floating around, give this method a try. There will come a time when this same octopus will be your companion, along with which you’ll enjoy the mighty boundless ocean.

¹ Anahat Naad, also known as the “unstruck sound,” is the subtle, internal sound that resonate within all beings and the universe.