Gifts Of Contemplative Meditation
What is Contemplative meditation:
Contemplative meditation is about thinking without thinking. In this type of meditation , the reasoning and active intellectual thinking is out.
During contemplative meditation, the meditator pays intense attention to a subject while inhibiting cognitive thinking in favor of the perception. The meditator perceives the object rather than analyzing the object intellectually.
What is the biggest misconception about contemplative meditation?
Unfortunately, in our societies, values such as defining goals and getting over stressed and working hard to reach those goals are overestimated and in return activities such as meditation, or turning off reasoning and logical thinking temporarily are undervalued and sometimes discouraged.
Some critics regard contemplative meditation as a means that gets us detached from reality.
How does it benefit me?
Throughout the day, we are using and sometimes overusing our intellectual skills in our job, in our social activities and in our personal life to cope with some life challenges. There is nothing wrong with it. But, the fact that we miss sometimes is that our brain needs to rest after a full day of hard work trying to tackle lots of challenges and find a good solution to the problems. Our cognitive functions need to get numb sometimes.
It is exactly like sleeping. We all (or at least a big majority of us) need to sleep at night to recover from our daily activities. While we sleep, all the toxic proteins which have been accumulated in our brain during the day, get swept off the brain tissues at night.
The same way a good night’s sleep leads to a profitable day, a good intellectual thinking free quality time is required so that we can handle the life stresses and make a logical and correct decision for our everyday challenges.
Contemplative meditations offer us two big gifts. First of all, it provides our brain with a waking resting time to get recharged for our life’s next challenge. Secondly these intentional analysis-free moments make us more creative!
When we are actively thinking and analyzing the world around us, we are using our pattern recognition skills as a guide to survive.
As children, we learn that we will burn our hands if we touch a cup of hot coffee because that happened to us in the past and we have learnt and stored that pattern in our memory. Once we engage in contemplative meditation, we temporarily stop using acquired patterns as a guide to the external world, therefore we can think out of the box. This is the definition of creativity.
How can I practice contemplative meditation?
One way to practice contemplative meditation is by thinking about a poem of your favorite poet. Pick up a short poem and by reading each line try to put yourself in the shoes of the poet to feel his/her emotions (not thoughts). Ask yourself what does the poet mean by that sentence. What emotion was the poet traying to picture?
You can also listen to music and contemplate why the composer composed this part of this music. What is the composer trying to convey? What emotion or feeling was he/she trying to draw in listener mind?
Please remember to stay away from analyzing and logical reasoning as much as possible. But if your mind wanders, be gentle with yourself and happily remind yourself that this is your time to rest and recover, then gently bring your attention back into the contemplation.
The takeaway:
When we are practicing this type of meditation, we can get more creative and we can cope better with stressful situations in life.
By turning down cognitive function through contemplative meditation, we can see other dimensions of the objects and situation. This technique provides us with the ability to see the details of objects and situations which we’ve otherwise ignored under the influence of a pattern recognition-based cognitive mind.
Happy meditating :)
