Calming the Mind
All too often, people are ignorantly instructed to calm their minds or clear their thoughts, in order to meditate, with very little instruction or tutelage as to how to perform such a feat or what it means to do so. Instructing someone to clear their head of thought would be similar to telling a person to slow down their metabolism or to sharpen their vision by squinting.
Meditation is an important practice to frequent during your journey to greater awareness and manifestation but, innerstanding what it is to meditate all too often is deemed less important than actually performing the procedure. Meditation is the act of measuring or contemplating on a particular subject matter. How we get to the place where we can benefit from composed thoughts on a particular matter is, and can be, of our own design.
For those who endure mental chatter/noise (over-thinking) I find moving meditations to be beneficial. Focusing thought on a particular subject while jogging, swimming, bathing, walking, while doing craftwork, or even driving can still the mind in a way that is enjoyable and effortlessly within reach.
I find a good meditation technique is to take a fruit, usually your favorite fruit will do, and to create an entire mental experience of enjoying that piece of fruit. Let’s take a mango, for example.
Visualize the Mango with five of your available senses. We’ll utilize sound, smell, taste, sight, and tactile feel.
Sound: Think on the sound of the Mango skin being peeled. The sound it makes as your fingers plunge into its cool skin. The sound your teeth make as you bit into the savory orange substance yielding the divine fruit nectar.
Smell: We can imagine the fruity smell of the Mango; the assertive aroma that only a Mango possesses.
Taste: The tangy taste of the Mango. Envision the sweet juice that explodes from each bite and fills the mouth with the saccharine mango syrup.
Sight: The Mango comes in so many varieties. In your mind’s eye you can envision the blending of the orange and yellow from skin to fruit meat that mirrors the tropical sunsets that the Mango has been consecrated to witness since its own dawn.
Touch: We can imagine the touch of the mango skin and the tenderness of the fruit “meat’ underneath the skin.
You can perform this exercise with any fruit and I guarantee it will clear out any residual mind chatter and make you prime and ready for focused thought and mental magic.