Meditation Techniques for Concentration – Sharpen Your Focus
In this post, I am going to discuss with you a few meditation techniques for concentration that will help you to sharpen your focus so that you can carry out your day to day activities without letting your external circumstances to disturb your inner peace.
The definition of a busy life could be different to each one of us depending upon our roles in our family and society.
A working mom is busy managing home, job, kids, husband while striving for inner peace. Whereas a dad is busy in managing his work, finances, health, planning for the future requirements of his family. The roles of people however do change according to their situations.
You don’t actually need to be a female to be a mother nor a male to be a father; you may be even unmarried or a divorcee and still manage everything on your own. Yes of course the life is much easier when you have the company of your life partner but what matters the most is the kid inside us.
Before teenage we all are natural but the programming of a person’s subconscious mind starts from the birth itself. During our childhood our conscious mind is not developed, so our mind absorbs all the information from our environment and society which results as our hardwired beliefs that are responsible for the blueprint of our decision making capabilities and self-confidence.
Our beliefs are responsible for what happens in our inner world, if the kid inside us is happy then that happiness is reflected in our external world.
No matter how we see this but once we begin to play our roles, life requires us to multitask. The one who is good at doing many tasks at a time is not always the happiest person, they may be successful in terms of what they have achieved in the outer world but the more they try to prove themselves to the world and society, the more they make themselves suffer. Alas, there is a very common by-product of multitasking which is “stress”.
So, is there any pill that we can gobble up in the morning and multitask with perfection? No! Because “Perfection” is an imaginary word; it is born out of the illusion of control. ( I have written more on the illusion of control in my post named meditation to clear the mind)
We cannot control our external circumstances because the ego “I” is just a small part of ourselves that lives in the delusion that it is the master of our lives. Our subconscious mind/higher-self/universe handles everything apart from the one task that we are doing in the moment.
There two types of meditation; one is what we do at the end of the day or during times when we are disturbed whereas the other type of meditation is doing every task with our total focus on it. The latter one is also referred as the mindfulness mediation.
Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness meditation is a way to bring your attention completely to the present moment. Unlike other meditation methods this can be done anytime and anywhere.
One of the simplest methods to be mindful is when you are amidst of doing something,just pause and take 10 conscious breaths and then continue. Doing this resets your mind and enables you to get aware of the present moment, it also breaks the chain of any kind of unproductive thinking in which your mind was engaged before.Since, mindfulness improves your ability to focus on the present moment by clearing the thoughts of past or future, it helps you to get immersed completely in your current task.
Growth and improvement are possible only when a person trains their mind to be completely active in the task in which he is presently involved; with improved ability to concentrate a person can get better in any of their skills.
Who needs this help??? From a kid to an elderly person, just like medication is a catalyst for the healing of the body, meditation is a catalyst for the healing of the mind and emotions.
We all make mistakes of forgetting things and we blame it on our weak memory. There is no such thing as a weak or strong memory unless you have a clinical brain related problem. When you are fully focused in a task, you hardly make a mistake.
The mind cannot be “controlled” because the mind works in the direction where our actual focus is, the more we try to control our mind the harder it gets.
So what can we do?
We can either apply the mindfulness meditation to all our tasks or we can let our life to be as it is and prefer to meditate on any particular hour of the day when we have spare time to spend for taking care of our own inner peace.
Tratak Meditation Method
Tratak meditation is the most appropriate practice to increase your ability to concentrate. A few types oftratak meditations are inner tratak, tratak on a black dot, candle tratak and mirror tratak etc.All these forms of tratak meditation helps the practitioner to fix his focus on a single point and to keep his mind free of thoughts.
Initially it is very difficult to escape from the heavy traffic of thoughts but, gradually with practice you become very good at avoiding the mind chatter and thus you gain more concentration.
Chanting Mantra Meditation
This is not at all religious, you can chant any mantra (like Hakuna Matata) or even sing a song by focusing on your voice. Always remember that our ultimate aim is to use these techniques for calming our mind.
I am including this meditation here because I find it easy to stop my mind chatter for longer periods when I am meditating on my own voice.
Chanting mantra meditation requires you to choose any mantra or positive affirmation and repeat it while focusing on the sound. This mediation helps you to shift your conscious attention from saying the mantra to hearing it. (The first time I realized what being an inner observer was while doing this meditation, when you do this meditation you can observe that the action of “speaking” is handled by your subconscious mind when you put your conscious attention on hearing your own voice)
Chanting “OM” mantra is most recommended, but you can choose whatever is convenient for you.
At the end of the day, doing a thing with better focus would save us time, reduce our anxiety and provide a sense of accomplishment.
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