I have asked this question so many times. At times I feel that I understand what it is and at other, I don’t. This time I planned to write down what I understand about meditation and maintain a record and refer back to this in future.
We have a monkey mind, as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it. It likes to talk and gossip and keep suggesting things based on its likes and dislikes. When we forget that we are not our thoughts and become the slave to whatever we think bad things can happen. Only when we realize that thoughts are just a form of suggestions, mostly based on past experiences and survival needs, we can free ourself from the slavery. When you know that you are not the thought you avoid being influenced by it and let it be. Our monkey mind has one very bad habit that it loves to work and solve hard problems. When we don’t have any real problem in our life it will try to exaggerate the small ones and try to solve them. Mingyur suggests that we need to make friends with our monkey mind and give him work. He has to do some work, the question is either we give him or he chooses what to work on. When we decide to employ the monkey mind and give him work we are his boss and things start to fall in place. And the best work to give to our monkey mind is meditation.
Meditation is the practice to increase awareness. There are different ways to meditate but all have the very same goal. You might inquire what it means to have awareness? Am I not aware at the moment? We all have some sense of awareness but it’s very limited and doesn’t exploit the complete potential of the power we have. Just to explain with an example how often are we aware of our breathing. We leave it on autopilot mode and never think of this. There are many things going through our body and outside we can be aware of. Awareness is the magnifying glass which will help us understand how our mind works. Only when you understand the behaviour and the symptoms can you cure the disease. It helps us understand how our body and mind works. How related or unrelated they are.
This awareness then leads to the wisdom of impermanence. Impermanence is the universal law that everything of this world is created and then destroyed. Life, planets, stars, mountains, rivers, thoughts, pain, happiness, pleasure, fun and the list goes on. Name anything that you can think of and you can surely come to a conclusion that they are not permanent. Impermanence is understood by many but known by very few. The knowledge we have is at the surface of our brain. Yes, we can reason about it but that is not experiencing. Just like to really know if the sugar is sweet you have to eat it. You might read a lot about what sweetness is like and how it feels but it is only when you taste it yourself you really know. So is the wisdom. It has to be experienced. In meditation when you focus your mind and start being aware of your body, thoughts and everything inside and outside you start to see that everything has this nature of impermanence. This is then your own realization and thus you have the real taste of this.
The other side of the coin is Equanimity. When meditating you will experience a lot of things good and bad, funny and boring, irritating and pleasurable. We need to view both of them in equal light. One of the behaviours of the monkey mind is to want for things that we like and avert things we don’t. In meditation, you are aware of all your experiences and treat them all the same. This helps us fix the behaviour pattern of our mind from the roots. With our old habit of judging things and having a desire to have things our way, this is the key part to self-improvement.
I hope I come back to his post in future with more wisdom and appreciate what I have. :)