DOUBTLESS IN YOURSELF

Articles In This Section:

· MEDITATION WITH YOGA

· DOUBTLESS IN YOURSELF

· PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS OF MEDITATION

· CORRECT BREATHING IS ESSENTIAL IN MEDITATION

· MEDITATION IS AN ACQUIRED ART

· PITFALLS IN MEDITATION

· PURPOSE OF MEDITATION

Whether the load be emotional or physical, often the roots are the same. For instance violent headaches may be due to inadequate glasses, but may also be brought on by repressed resentments. Thus chronic migraines are frequently an expression of anger so violent that the super-ego is afraid to admit it.

The migraine sufferer presents a gentle face to the world while turning the anger inward. An ulcer case may be a man who has permitted himself to be maneuvered into a highly-paying job he hates rather than stick to the less financially rewarding but personally more gratifying work he once dreamed about. And what of the vague anxieties, the sleeplessness, the sudden fatigue most people experience at one time or another—what about that familiar inability to finish the tasks you start, or even to get started at all, because you cannot seem to overcome an ingrained conviction that you must inevitably fail, that nothing you do can possibly be good or successful?

You have doubtless recognized yourself in one or another of these descriptions. You also know perfectly well that the popular diagnosis for them all, as well as for a hundred other stumbling blocks in the path of human happiness, happens to be the correct one—it's all in the mind. Yet to bring about a change is like trying to lift yourself by your own proverbial bootstraps. The real problem eludes you. It is at this point that many people begin to consider psychoanalysis—at an average cost of $20 a fifty-minute hour.

And yet it is a fact that you yourself can change your mental attitude and remedy the physical manifestations these bring about once you learn to face and stay with your problems long enough to sort out the confusions. First you must discover what is the real you in the clutter of superimposed images. Next you must decide, just as you would with an analyst's help, which of your problems you are able to do something about, and which you must learn to live with in the light of objective reality. Once you have achieved such self-knowledge you will feel you have stopped beating your head against the wall. An inner sense of serenity will replace senseless turmoil, the need to build up complicated mechanisms for camouflaging rebellion and finding escape will vanish, and you will be free to direct your energies constructively.

By now you can readily see why true Meditation—the kind taught by Yoga—requires the preparatory disciplines which can only be learned through Deep Concentration. But once you are able to stay with any one thought long enough to examine its every facet and not go on to another subject until you are ready to do so of your own volition, you have enough self-control to proceed. Actually Meditation is less stringent than concentration. In Meditation, instead of staying sternly with one point, you are free to let thoughts flow into your mind, always provided they are germane to the main subject. Of course in order to keep from drifting into aimless time-wasting day-dreaming or even free association of ideas, the Yogi does start out, as in concentration, by deliberately focusing his mind on something specific—often a part of his body. Hence the common, grossly vulgarized Western concept of Yoga Meditation as the image of a man in a turban sitting cross-legged in contemplation of his navel; nothing, it goes without saying, could be further from the truth.