What is meditation?

I first started meditating in 2019. It was not my conscious choice, but rather a forced search for tools that could at least somehow help me. My first meditations resembled the book and movie "Eat. Pray. Love" - the more and more diligently I tried to stop my thoughts, the more actively they attacked me. It was impossible to calm down thoughts even for a few seconds, the whole body twisted, I couldn't sit straight and calmly, and when it seemed to me that I had already been meditating for an hour, in fact only one minute had passed. Then my meditations went into a new phase - I just began to sleep after two minutes of meditating. It took me years to get to a level where it helped me and I began to meditate and not pretend to meditate.

This is not how people meditate. This is how people take a picture )))

Meditation calms the mind, balances the nervous system, restores strength and energy, reduces stress, tension, and anxiety, refocuses, teaches to be here and now, in this very moment, helps to become more conscious and as a pleasant side effect expands your creativity and makes you a more creative person.

According to Wikipedia Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear emotionally calm, and stable state.

"Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is the way of entering into the quiet that is already there - buried under the 50000 thoughts the average person thinks every day." ~~~ Deepak Chopra

"The thing about meditation is: you become more and more you." ~~~ David Lynch

Meditation is not about tension but about relaxation, not about control but about observation, not about internal struggle and resistance, but about letting go and dissolving any internal struggle and resistance.

For me, meditation is:

Diving into the depths of yourself, your consciousness, getting to know yourself, not the limited Personality that we all are here on Earth, but the limitless Soul that we all came here to Earth.
Communicating with Soul and all higher aspects.
Observing thoughts, not getting stuck in them and not developing plots in your head, but simply O.B.S.E.R.V.I.N.G. Observing your body, all internal organs and systems, every cell.
The realization that you are not your body or your thoughts, you are much more.
Going beyond the limited ego that controls us.
Finding the point of your inner silence and balance, where there are answers to all questions, where there is knowledge and deep wisdom. Where you can get this AHA moment….
A journey that cannot be predicted and controlled and every time reveals some new aspects of you (your strengths, hidden potentials, and talents (things that need to be strengthened and revealed more), on the one hand, and negative and dark aspects (what should you let go), on the other hand).
Finding your path for evolution and development.
Establishing contact with your body, soul, and mind.
Calming the inner voice of Monkey Mind.
An effective technique for dealing with panic, fear, panic attacks, aggression, criticism, dissatisfaction, condemnation, indignation, etc.
Returning to the moment, here and now.
.... here could be a huge list .... but each person has his/her own....

Meditation cannot be understood by the mind, it must be felt by the heart. To understand and practice it, you need to start. Everyone has their path and experience in meditation and it is impossible to say that this is right and this is wrong, it is a very individual and intimate process. The more you try to do everything correctly, the less you will succeed. The more you stress, the worse it will be. One should not try but simply do. Do not control, but allow the process to happen. But this is practice and experience, and for this, you need to take many steps. To get a negative experience and dissatisfaction with the fact that nothing works out, your body hurts, thoughts bombard your mind, your skin itches, etc. To go through the stage of refusal, because nothing works out and why do you need it at all, if there are no results? To oppress yourself so that others succeed from the first time, but you have your 120 times and not succeed. To play the game that everything works out and you are already a pro. To inflate your spiritual ego to the size of a super guru and mentor.... The huge advantage is that the more you practice it, the more you change yourself and become yourself, and the more you reveal yourself and expand your consciousness. And then one day you simply cannot live the way you lived before. Many people do not endure the stage with patience. Others seem to be at the stage of the spiritual ego, because they already consider themselves as enlightened masters, and this is Maya, that is an illusion. Some generally say that they succeeded from the first time and flew away somewhere in the 5th or 7th dimension, well, if you are the Dalai Lama, then you will probably succeed from the first time. But in general, everyone, even those who have become spiritual masters, has spent on this process not one year.

Most importantly, meditation is not the tool to inflate your ego even more, only now it is already spiritual ego, it is to silence the mouth of your ego and give voice to your inner silence, that is, your Soul. Meditation is not for glamorous photos on Instagram in a nice fashionable suit somewhere in Bali in a lotus position with a straight back and a smile on your face. It is your intimate journey to find and reveal yourself and for this, you do not have to be in a special glamorous and expensive suit or somewhere in Bali, Sri Lanka, or in a luxury yoga center in the center of the capital.

So, try to dive into this process and reveal yourself)))