Meditation and Awareness

Meditation can mean many things to different people. To me, it's a state of awareness attained by completely being unaware of your current state. Confusing, I know! How do you think about nothing when you're trying to make yourself think of nothing?

I've been practicing yoga for about three years, on and off. My experiences with meditation started in the yoga studio during the first Savasana of each practice. At first my time spent meditating turned into falling asleep and either jolting awake or scaring myself awake when I started snoring.To prevent myself from falling asleep I began to mindfully concentrate on my breaths. This kept me awake but also led to thinking about what I was going to eat after or what plans I had for the week.

Practice after practice was spent like this during meditation, I didn't know what it was supposed to be or if I would ever get anything from it. Eventually I would start lucid dreaming, being completely aware that I was awake but still dreaming. These dreams were silent. Most of the time they were irrelevant to my current situations, sometimes I think they were indications of what I needed or what I desired most. Sometimes it was people, other times just objects floating in black space.

One practice I decided to focus on my third eye with my eyes closed. I remembered just focusing, then my mind going blank, no emotions, no feeling, complete silence. The next thing I could remember was seeing subtle waves of purple moving across my mind like billows of smoke wafting from a cigarette or a long, slow-moving flame. I remembered thinking it was the most spectacular thing I have ever seen with my eyes closed in an awakened state. I watched it for as long as I could but the more I thought about it, the more excited I got and the faster I came out of meditation. The color quickly disappeared. The next time it appeared was about a week later, when I was awaking from a sleep on a Saturday morning - the time when our minds are at a standstill, in between knowing we are awake and not knowing anything at all. After searching the internet I discovered that seeing purple during meditation is quite common and is believed to signify opening of the mind. Very cool! :)

What happens when we meditate, we can't tell for sure. There are no tangible results to measure what has changed. I believe that it trains the mind to not focus on one thing and to let go. What we experience and how we react comes from inside after all. Seeing things with a clearer mind releases the weight and moves us forward. Being aware that outside forces can only harm us as much as we will allow them to. Things continue to eat at us for as long as we want them to. Only when we are consciously aware can we consciously make a change. Your soul will tell you. It's easy to be content and happy when you forget about everything else and realize life is ultimately about you but the events that happen in life are not always about you. Forget and let go but be aware. :)