Clear Your Mind and Deepen Your Meditation Practice

Deepen Your Meditation Practice

Improving and deepening your meditation practice is not just about what you do during the time that you set aside to meditate. It is also about how you live your life.

Throughout your daily activities and interactions, the mind can either be scattered and fairylike, or concentrated and focused. A state of even-mindedness or equanimity is a space of being centred within, it is conducive to being present and not being pushed and pulled by the changing realities and dualities of life.

Evenmindedness is a state of mind that is cultivated during meditation. The more we can relax back into the seat of Self, that of the witness of the inner and outer world, the more we can become established within that state. This is so helpful as we can then see reality as it is, without the shades and clouded perceptions of past habits or experiences.

The foundation of evenmindedness is in being calm, still and centred. Like a tree that is not being swayed by the winds of change or Earth's storms. The personal or lower mind likes to be on the move and is born out of fear. It jumps around in the storms of life drama, from past to present, from likes to dislikes, cravings and aversions. These reactive moving energy patterns of thought and emotion take us away from our centre, from our innermost conscious Self and divine Truth. It's like rising and falling waves of thought and emotion on a vast still ocean that arise from within us and our surrounding environment. 

Beyond the busy thinking personal mind, also known in modern psychology as the psyche, is the higher mind. You could say that the higher mind is like the deep centre of a vast still ocean. One that has unified all reservoirs and contains all knowledge. Here we explore our true eternal nature, embedded in creativity, abstract thought, expanded consciousness and intuitive insight. With this superconscious awareness, we are tapping into the source of all knowledge.

As we move through the layers of mind, and the four aspects of consciousness that illumine the faculties of the mind, back to the centre or Source, we find the more unified vibrations of harmony, unity and deep peace.

A source of power and the sound of the creative vibratory sound of AUM.

1. Meditate regularly

Repetition helps to create new neural pathways in the mind and the mind likes to create these habit patterns. Eventually, once its new pattern is formed the resistance to meditate will fall away. Meditate regularly, meditate every day, no matter what your mood is make a commitment to yourself to meditate daily. Don’t listen to the sways of your restless mind and heart if they try to tell you to do otherwise.

2: Meditate each day at a fixed time

Have a fixed time to meditate, once in the morning and then once at night time. Once again, the mind is a creature of habit and it responds very well to this kind of training and rhythm. This also helps to make your meditation a priority in your schedule, no matter how busy your schedule or how distracted your mind is, you have your set time to meditate and then so it is.

3. Meditate each day in a fixed place

Create a sacred space in your home for your meditation. This can be a room, a section or space within a room, whatever you have the capacity for. Include a meditation cushion or chair in that space and set it aside for meditation alone. You might even have a specific set of clean and comfortable clothing that you use to meditate. All of these fixtures will help the mind to ‘obey’ its master (You) and to become used to the patterns of the space and time at which it is to become calm, turn inward and meditate. No matter what your practice might be, mindfulness, japa, or mantra meditation, sends signals to the mind that "now it is time for you to be quiet and follow the technique.”

Now with the fixed time, place and space, the mind will immediately associate this with meditation.

4. Avoid negative thoughts

The mind is a space for the flow of consciousness and therefore thoughts will come. Do not dwell on thoughts that are disturbing or negative, if they come they may try to take your grip, to consume your consciousness - I cannot emphasise this enough. Do not dwell on ‘bad thoughts’ or old thoughts such as guilt, resentment, lust anxieties or any kind of negativities as they arise. The mind has a habit of dwelling on these things and being negative. A secret of the mind is that it can dwell on only one thing at a time, and although it does this quickly, immediately gives it something practical to do. Focus on your technique and uplift your mind from its negative patterns. The mind likes to be engaged.

Meditation purifies the mind of its negative thought patterns.

5. Keep your company and environment energetically clean

Keep good company within your lifestyle, and spend time in harmonious places. The people and places that you surround yourself with have a major effect on your mind. Just like the initial stages of a seedling being planted, the seedlings need to be protected with covers so that the environment and animals do not damage them. Once they are grown and stronger, nothing unwanted can harm them. Be clear about whose company you want to keep, it affects your mind.

6. Practice high thinking and simple living

Enjoy a simple life, with healthy activities and mindfulness. Cluttered rooms and plenty of possessions occupy and scatter aspects of the mind. Keep a clear outer environment and lifestyle, without too much clutter to also allow your mind to become clear and centred.

7. Contemplate and cultivate a sense of vastness

Create space and vastness around yourself. You, pure consciousness are vaster than space itself. Explore the enormity of space itself and the vast periods in which creation exists. Reflect on your time, one lifetime a twinkle in time, in amongst the eternities of time. Have this feeling within you, Know yourself as this vastness, not as the limited creature only.

8. Yearn for inner peace, for spiritual freedom

Thinking of spiritual truths, realisations and wisdom helps to internalise and stabilise the mind. Feeling love for the higher Self, for God, inviting devotion and sentiment into your life and practice will help to uplift and liberate the mind from its mundane habitual thinking and give it some solace, some inner peace.

9. Elevate your life with a little bit of ritual and devotional thinking

Spiritualise your activities in the world. Your work, your household affairs, your daily duties. Offer your actions as a divine service. Bring ritual into your activities, this will help to elevate your mind, thoughts and actions. A little bit of repeated ritual and prayer can have an immediate effect on elevating your mind.

10. Keep the company of spiritual people and meditators

Enjoy the genuine company of others interested in spirituality, the enriching and deep conversations and Satsung.

Daily habits and attitudes that help us to cultivate inner peace, harmony and equanimity in daily life, within ourselves and with others, also help us to train the mind to let go of its dramatic attachments to disharmonious thought patterns, destructive thinking, and selfish behaviours.

Patanjalis Ashtanga (8 limbs of yoga), Buddha's 8-fold path, and foundational teachings from other spiritual paths all intersect with the importance of maintaining similar principles of ethical conduct, mindfulness, compassion, and spiritual growth as expressions of dharmic life.  This expression is the foundation for a deeper experience during your meditation practice. 

With this kind of practice and lifestyle, your meditation becomes deep.

The Journey Deeper Meditation coaching program is a journey toward inner serenity and profound self-discovery, where clarity, tranquillity and enhanced creativity move through you with every breath.

Join me in my Journey Deeper 1:1 Meditation sessions, either as a once-off or as a four-session program and discover your inner calm by developing a practice that you love.