This is a great article by Lauren Cahn, one of my favorite yoga bloggers. You can read more of her posts at www.laurencahn.blogspot.com .
I have been meditating a lot recently, and have discovered that meditation and movement go beautifully together. You can gain some of your best spiritual insights during seemingly mundane activities like driving, walking, eating, or house-cleaning. Even diaper changing can be meditative if you allow yourself to be fully present in the moment and quit fighting the experience. I guess, if you are religious, you could call it keeping a prayer in your heart at all times. Feeling gratitude for the little vicissitudes of life. Finding a connection to a higher power, or to your deepest and most authentic self. Letting go of expectation and desire. Being alive and aware in each moment.
You know who you are. You never do less than two things at once. You read while you eat. You check your email while you’re on a conference call. You’re restless, and it works for you because you get things done. And when it comes to calming your mind, you have no interest in meditating because that would require you to sit still and do nothing.
Right?
Not right.
You don’t have to sit to meditate.
To meditate, you only need to focus the mind. In some forms of meditation, the focus is on NOT focusing on any one thought. When the mind realizes that it has attached itself to a thought, the meditator tries to “let go” of the thought and allow it to drift away. In other forms of meditation, the focus is one one thought, a mantra (such as “relax” or “let go” ). When the mind realizes that it has drifted from the mantra, the meditator tries to come back to the mantra.
Meditation is used as a relaxation technique because it helps the mind to rest from its usual state of frenzied thought. It doesn’t make life’s problems disappear, but it gives us time away. Meditation is like a vacation from our thoughts. Taking time out for meditation can make us more productive in the long run in the same way that taking a vacation from work can make us more productive when we return: time away allows us to come back refreshed. Distance from our thoughts — our worries, our planning, our soul-searching — affords us more clarity when we return from our mental vacation.
For some, knitting is a form of meditation. For some, gardening. Many people find that practicing yoga brings them into a meditative state. Personally, I garden throughout the spring and summer and practice yoga on a daily basis, and generally speaking, I find myself calmer for having done so; however, I feel that both of these avocations are flawed as reliable platforms for meditation (and I would imagine that knitting would have the same flaw). The trouble is that inherent in these activities are goals and desired results, which can make a meditative state elusive, if not impossible.
So then what activity can we do that doesn’t require analytical thought, that doesn’t require us to judge our progress, that doesn’t contain a built-in goal?
Walking.
If you can walk, then you can meditate…
[...] Read more at Huffington Post
