If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then the journey of meditation begins with cultivating awareness or perception. Awareness is, in fact, the "mental muscle" that carries and supports you on your journey—not only at the beginning, but at every step along the way. To continue the meditation journey you began in the previous article, Tatmeen discusses the following here: the concept of mindfulness meditation, its benefits, and when its results appear.

What is mindfulness meditation?

Also called mindful meditation, it means developing a complete awareness of the present moment you are living. This awareness shapes your perception of the nature of your experience and the stage you are going through. It implies being able to sense what is inside you—your inner world—as well as the external world around you. Mindfulness meditation thus allows you to understand the present time and your mood and emotional state within it. This understanding is formed from the sights, sounds, and smells you encounter.

Although you may not yet know how to meditate, you have undoubtedly experienced moments of complete absorption in which the sense of separation disappears: gazing at a sunset, listening to music, creating a work of art, or looking into the eyes of someone you love. When you are fully engaged in an activity, whether work or play, time stands still and self-consciousness disappears. You enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow." Csikszentmihalyi argues that activities that foster "flow" capture what most of us mean by enjoyment. Flow can be unusually refreshing and energizing, and even deeply meaningful. It is an inevitable outcome of mindfulness meditation.

Benefits of mindfulness meditation:

1. Developing and directing awareness:

Regardless of the meditation method you practice, it will develop, focus, and direct your awareness. In meditation, you can use awareness in several ways. First, you can strengthen your capacity for awareness by developing concentration on a particular object. Then, once your awareness is focused, you can expand it through receptive awareness, like ambient light illuminating the full range of your experience. After that, you can focus it more closely to cultivate positive emotions and states of mind.

You can also use awareness to investigate your inner experience and reflect on the nature of existence itself. These four—concentration, receptive awareness, self-cultivation, and contemplation—constitute the principal uses of awareness across the world’s great meditation traditions.

2. Building concentration:

Buddhists like to compare the mind to a monkey—constantly moving and jumping from branch to branch and subject to subject. Have you ever noticed that, most of the time, you have little control over the whims and fluctuations of your monkey-like mind and do not know when it will leave one matter and become absorbed in another?

To do anything well, you therefore need to focus your attention. The most creative and productive people in every field—great athletes, artists, businesspeople, scientists, performers, and writers, for example—can focus their attention and become completely immersed in their work. Some people have an innate ability to concentrate, but most of us need to practice developing it.

When you meditate, you calm your "monkey mind" by making it single-pointed rather than scattered and lost. Many spiritual teachings present concentration as the fundamental meditation technique. Keep focusing your mind on the mantra, symbol, or visualization they recommend, and you will eventually reach what is called "absorption," or Samadhi. In a state of absorption, the sense of being a separate "I" disappears, and only the object of your attention remains. Practicing concentration can therefore lead to an experience of union with the object of meditation.

3. Gaining greater insight:

Although concentration and receptive awareness offer enormous benefits, they are ultimately important for understanding how your mind works, dealing with your problems, and expanding your ability to understand the events around you. In daily life, creative thinking—free from limited and repetitive habitual patterns—is what provides solutions to problems. This is why contemplation is the key element that transforms meditation from a calming, relaxing exercise into a means of freedom and creative expression.

After developing your concentration and expanding your awareness, you will eventually find that you can gain a more comprehensive view of the nature of your experience. You can use all of this to explore your inner landscape and gradually understand and undermine your mind’s tendency to cause you suffering and stress. If you are a spiritual seeker, you can use this capacity to inquire into the nature of the self or contemplate the mystery of God and creation. If your concerns are more practical, you might consider the next step in your career or relationship, or reflect on a problem in your life that seems impossible to solve.

4. Cultivating the self and state of mind, and achieving healing:

Some meditations aim to open the heart and develop life-enhancing qualities such as compassion, kindness, calmness, joy, or forgiveness. On a more practical level, you can use meditation to cultivate a proactive immune system or develop balance and precision in particular sports. For example, you could imagine yourself performing a dive without a single error.

These are the kinds of meditation I have chosen to call "self-cultivation." Meditation here aims at knowledge, inquiry, and looking deeply into the nature of things. Self-cultivation can help transform your inner life by directing the concentration you develop toward strengthening positive, healthy thinking and drawing negative energy away from you.

5. Designing your own practices:

As you begin developing and directing your awareness through meditation, you face the challenge of bringing all your parts together in an integrated practice suited specifically to your needs. For example, you may feel drawn to forms of meditation that emphasize concentration while having only minimal interest in forms that create greater openness and receptive awareness. Or you may prefer the peace and relaxation you experience when sitting quietly without any effort or concentration—not even the effort of being aware. You may also have a specific goal for meditation, such as treating an illness or resolving a distressing psychological problem, and feel drawn only to methods that help you pursue that goal.

The key is to try different forms of meditation and trust your intuition to tell you which is most suitable at this particular stage of your journey up the mountain. Inevitably, yin and yang tend to balance one another: you may begin with intense concentration and end with more relaxed, receptive awareness, or begin in a receptive mode and gradually discover the virtues of concentration. The journey of meditation has its own lessons to teach, and regardless of your intentions, you will generally end up encountering the lessons you were meant to learn.

Of course, if you intend to maintain your practice from week to week and month to month—the only way to reap the benefits of meditation—you will probably need to draw on the time-honored qualities required by every sustainable endeavor: motivation, discipline, and commitment.

Although these requirements have gained a poor reputation in Western culture, where people generally expect their needs to be met now, if not sooner, these qualities are not actually difficult to cultivate. They arise naturally when you are engaged in and passionate about what you are doing.

6. Exploring and resolving challenges:

As your meditation practice deepens and develops, you may encounter unexpected challenges that you do not quite know how to handle. This is where the mountain analogy becomes useful. Suppose you are halfway up the trail and reach an icy stretch of terrain, find rocks blocking your path, or face a thunderstorm that sends you rushing for shelter. What do you do now? Do you take out your equipment and review predetermined instructions for managing difficulties, or simply improvise as best you can? People have been climbing this mountain for thousands of years, and they have developed tools and maps for crossing its terrain as smoothly and effortlessly as possible.

For example, if powerful emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, or grief take over your meditation and make it difficult to remain present, you can rely on techniques that lessen their impact. If you encounter common obstacles and roadside distractions along the path of meditation, such as drowsiness, anxiety, elation, or doubt, you can draw on time-honored methods to move beyond them and continue on your way.

Whatever you experience on your journey, you are likely to find expert guidance drawn not only from practitioners’ and teachers’ own experience, but also from the accumulated wisdom of the world’s meditation traditions.

What is receptive awareness?

Chinese sages say that all things are formed through the continual interaction of Yin and Yang, the feminine and masculine forces of the universe. If concentration is the yang of meditation—focused, powerful, and penetrating—then receptive awareness is its yin—open, expansive, and welcoming. While concentration disciplines, steadies, and grounds the mind, receptive awareness softens and expands its boundaries, creating more inner space and allowing you to recognize the mind’s contents.

Whereas concentration prevents additional stimuli around you from becoming distractions, receptive awareness embraces and absorbs every experience you have. Most meditations involve an interaction between concentration and receptive awareness, although some more advanced techniques teach the practice of receptive awareness alone. Simply remain open, aware, and welcoming toward whatever arises, and eventually you will "find the truth." Ultimately, receptive awareness guides you in shifting your identity away from your thoughts, emotions, and the stories your mind tells you, and toward your true identity.

Of course, if you do not know how to work with attention, following these instructions is impossible. This is why most traditions call for practicing concentration first. By calming and steadying the mind enough for it to open without being swept away by a flood of emotions and irrelevant thoughts, concentration provides a solid foundation on which meditation practice can flourish.

When do the results of mindfulness meditation appear?

You do not have to wait long to notice the results of meditation. Of course, this does not mean that the results will be complete after the first exercise; rather, the exercises will produce gradual results that you notice over time. Many studies indicate that practicing meditation exercises for approximately eight weeks can create a better emotional state and change habits you have maintained for years.

Ultimately, developing and directing your awareness is only the beginning of establishing effective mindfulness meditation. The next step is to build your meditation journey and discover what does and does not suit you until your practice becomes rooted and stable. Returning to the journey metaphor, awareness is the muscle that propels you up the mountain. But you must choose your path, find your pace, and overcome the obstacles in your way. In other words, you need to design and maintain your own practices and explore the difficulties that arise.

For a better idea of how awareness works, consider another analogy inspired by nature: light. You may take light for granted, but unless you have developed the special skills and heightened sensitivity of blind people, you can barely function without it. Have you ever tried to find something in a dark room, for example? The same applies to awareness. You may not recognize that you are aware, but you need awareness to perform even the simplest tasks.

You can use light in several ways. You can create ambient lighting that illuminates a room softly and diffusely. You can focus the light into a flashlight beam to help you find things when the room is dark. Or you can concentrate that same light into a laser beam so powerful that it can cut through steel or send messages to the stars.