How to train that beautiful monkey mind with meditation?
Many people who come to my yoga retreats have never really meditated. The really in italics as most of them have tried the apps or even followed an 8 week MBSR course but then, falling out of practice.
For many, the retreat is a new start or a re-start with meditation.
A retreat is the perfect environment to start, restart or deepen your meditation practice. Far away from daily distractions and responsibilities, literally everything is being taken care of. You just have to look at the schedule and decide if you want to join an activity or not. How easy can it be?!
So, how do we actually train the mind?
When we train the mind, we often hear the expression that the mind is like a monkey or a puppy. Having a monkey mind or a puppy mind. Why? Because monkeys are always swirling from branch to branch, looking for more bananas.
Puppies are incredibly quickly distracted. You tell them to sit and stay and after a second of sitting, they will be distracted by anything that shines. And that’s ok for puppies and monkeys but we are not that.
Our untrained minds get very easily distracted as well, here’s a thought, and here is another one. We sometimes completely forget that we were concentrating on something.
The idea with meditation is to train the mind like you would train a little puppy. With kindness, non-violence, which is the first principle of the yoga philosophy. Consistent training is required but always while being kind.
Repetition, again and again. You tell the puppy to sit and stay. Again and again, you tell your mind to concentrate on the breath and nothing else. Every time, you wander off, you bring the attention back, just like you would do with a puppy. It’s better to train every day for a short amount of time than train once a week for an hour. Consistent practice.
Patience
There’s kindness and then there is patience.
Patience is a crucial principle in meditation. At times, it will seem like you’re not progressing at all. Or, you notice that you constantly wander off. It might seem impossible to relax or concentrate.
When you notice this? That is excellent! Really!
The noticing Is part of the practice! You are doing very well when you notice that the mind is busy!
Remember that 😊
When you think you’re really getting somewhere and the meditation is going very well, unfortunately, at that point it is not as your judging mind is in the driver’s seat.
As human beings, we all tend to be a bit impatient. Just look at kids.
Jon Kabat Zinn, a famous mindfulness meditation teacher often mentioned the example that kids are so impatient to see the butterfly emerge from the caterpillar that they want to speed up the process. Get the butterfly out of the caterpillar. As adults, we know that this doesn’t work so well, especially not for the butterfly…
We know that everything happens in its own time. At the same time, as adults, we sometimes forget but, it is in cultivating patience that we can completely be IN the present moment. It can bring us comfort to accept the present moment and that what is.
During the retreats, I teach different meditation techniques, some techniques you will like and others not so much. That is ok. Some meditations might even trigger your impatience.
The process of meditation
Meditation is a process, not necessarily a linear process of stages. After a first couple of rocky experiences where the mind is all over the place in the beginning, most people have a nice start with the meditations that I teach.
We go sloooow, all is well, you get used to the idea of meditation and there is absolutely nothing to reach for.
Sitting still or lying down without falling asleep is actually the main idea in the first couple of sessions. Being still and observing how you are. Nothing else.
No goals…
Non-striving is a prime principle in meditation and I can’t emphasize that enough in the beginning.
There is absolutely nothing to reach for in mediation. There is no such thing as a bad meditation.
Every single time that you sit down or lie down to take the time to listen to a meditation, you can assure yourself, it was a good meditation. We are not striving to become good at meditation. The only thing that meditation can bring us is to become better at life. Cliché but very true. If you are very goal oriented, this concept can be a tough one, and that’s ok.
How can we be motivated to do something, to do it every day even and not expect results?
It will become more clear, when you have patience.
No time for this
What we don’t want is that meditation becomes something extra on the to do list, something you ‘have’ to do.
For it to become a must. We have enough musts in life as we do.
For now, you will just have to take my word for it that body and mind love a bit of relaxation, to relax your shoulders and face, to take some deep breaths, just take my word for it now, body and mind will benefit from it. Sitting still IS probably the most difficult thing to do in the beginning. We sit still, we do not move. When lying down, we do not fall asleep.
As soon as the posture is mastered, it will be easier to go deeper in meditation. Because you’re not bothered any more by the body, you become neutral towards the body.
Stages of meditation progress
In a first stage, we will focus a lot on our respiration, becoming very aware of our inhalation and exhalation. Noticing the breath, doing some breathing exercises to slow the breath down a bit, we count the breath: full focus and concentration on the breath. You will have a different meditation experience, according to how you breathe before your meditation.
As we are so focused on the breath, the first thing you might notice when meditating for a couple of days is that your mental chatter will change. The voices in your head?
You know, your to do lists, your shopping list, the self-critique, going over the discussions you had with your partner or kids or colleagues, the last thing you saw on social media.
All of this, the continuous chatter will become more silent. This is the radio idea, you turn down the volume of your thoughts.
There are several phases when learning meditation.
Every now and then, you will experience little moments of bliss in your meditation where you can rest in awareness and feel completely content with what is. Again, the process is not linear so you could have this very quickly in your meditation journey and sometimes, when we progress more, we have less of these moments.
The most important thing is to continue with the practice.
Interested to start training your mind and feel lighter and more joyful?
Here are the upcoming Revealing Vajra Retreats (Morocco, Italy and Portugal) and here you can find free meditations.
Rachel Bonkink
Rachel is an experienced meditation teacher, a certified mindset coach and she very succesfully organised and hosted over 100 worldwide yoga and silence retreats. For the past 12 years, Revealing Vajra is seen as the standard when it comes to amazing retreats.
She is the author of the book Flex Your Mind, giving a practical and down-to earth approach to stress management, based on Yoga philosophy.
Sinds 2021, Rachel is working with Resilience to design specific meditations and mental health programs for cancer patients. On a regular basis, companies like the European Commission, Sanofi and Bayzat ask for workshops and programs around stress management and mental wellbeing.
In a previous (working) life, Rachel was an operational director for a medical market research company in Belgium, managing teams of around 100 people. After 4 years in Morocco and 9 months in Dubai, Rachel can be found hiking somewhere in Portugal when she’s not hosting retreats.
For workshops and meditations in English, Dutch and French, visit www.rachelbonkink.com
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