Meditation without a plan like going on vacation without an idea where you go or what you will do. All that will happen is you will get lost and won’t reach anything. If you meditate without having a clear strategy, you will find out during your period of time to meditate it will decrease and you will only stop meditating. However, if you develop a strategy for what you want from your meditation, then you have a goal and this means you are more likely to stick with your meditation session until you reach your destination.
There are many reasons why you might want to meditate. The most common reason that I see people in Western society want to meditate is to overcome stress and excessive work. So, if you develop a meditation strategy to deal with this problem, your strategy must be like this –
1. Learn to meditate to bring yourself to a quiet point
2. Meditate to deal with stress
3. Reflect to overcome the element that causes stress.
What you can see in the basic meditation strategy above is that, meditating to be calm and stress free is only half the battle. If you emphasize your meditation strategy must include meditating by dealing with the root causes of your stress. For example, if someone at work becomes rude to you every day and is rude, your meditation strategy must include meditating by dealing with someone who is rude. Remember that to achieve this goal, maybe you need meditation months before you can overcome this problem.
Meditation When done during a period of time and effectively is a very cool tool because it allows you to develop in your mind that allows you to overcome whatever situation you want. For example, if someone behaves you, you can use reflective meditation to develop a strategy on how to handle rude people. To achieve this, first of all I will read various books on how to handle difficult people and you can easily get a book like that from Amazon.com or Dymock (if you are from Australia).
From the materials I read in books, I will then identify strategies to deal with this difficult person and then use reflective meditation to really work through techniques in books in your mind, using reflective techniques and learning to deal with it. Basically what you are trying to do is to use a scenario-based meditation. The cool part about this type of meditation is that your mind is open and allows you to try various ways to deal with various situations and see if the techniques will help you in the situation.
Another reason we use meditation to learn this type of material so that it tells the material into our minds and reminds us or encourage us about how to deal with difficult people when it happens rather than just entering panic mode and then becomes defensive and turns off our minds. Our thoughts are far stronger than we realize consciously and the more we practice our minds, the stronger they are.
The point is this, if your only reason for meditating is just relaxing and releasing stress then you only handle half of this problem. To really achieve the difference in your life, you must meditate to overcome what causes stress. If you meditate to help solve the problem, make sure you develop a meditation plan as I explain above so that you have clear results for your meditation session.
Just as in business and life, having a long-term meditation plan will help ensure that you maintain your focus when you meditate and that you have a reason to meditate.