The concept of meditating for many people is that of hippies sitting out in the bush, high on weed, all chanting together or of Buddhist Monks in the high mountains of Tibet chanting their sacred text. Meditation can be all of that and more. Meditation is for everyone, not just a select group. When choosing to meditate, you must clearly define the purpose of the meditation session. Meditation in the western world is most commonly related to stress relief and to help ease the strains of everyday life but it does not have to be.

What is meditation?

Most people miss understand the purpose of meditation and what you can achieve with it. The purpose of meditation is to remove the demands the world places on your mind. It is about clearing your mind so that you can prepare for the next on-slaught the world decides to throw at you.

If you are stressed then meditation will help you to clear your mind of the stress so that you can better focus on the issues that are causing the stress. The cool part is that during a meditation session you can teach yourself or direct yourself to do anything you want.

In a book I have become a great believer in, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, the writer in his third secret of what millionaires know to become obscenely rich and successful, he talks about Autosuggestion. Autosuggestion is about programming your mind to become successful and achieve what you want.

Meditation is a great tool in helping you to achieve this objective. In fact meditation is the best way to help reprogram your mind to achieve anything. Buddhist monks for millenniums have been using meditation to help in their path to enlightenment and in becoming a better person. During their meditations they reflect on where they are in their life and based on the sacred texts provided by Lord Buddha they use these during their meditations to reflect on what they have done and use the teachings to become a better person and achieve enlightenment. They use the sacred texts to help their reflections in changing who they are to what they want to be.

This leads me to an important statement, do not meditate for the sake of it, have a clear purpose for your meditation session.

If you are stressed then your meditation session should be focused on helping you to overcome the stress and get back to a point of calm. Once you have got to the point of calm then your next step is to meditate on the issue that is causing you the stress. For example, if someone in your office is causing you stress through bullying or being rude to you then you should be using your meditation sessions to retrain your mind on how to deal with these bullies.

The retraining meditation session could be achieved through using lessons or repeating text from people who are experts in this area and then reflecting on the lessons during the meditation session. Alternatively, you can reflect on the actual situation where you had a run in with the person who is causing you issues and then during your meditation reconstruct the situation and work out ways you could have made the situation better. Essentially you can use the meditation session to role play and work out a strategy to ensure you maintain control over the situation the next time someone is causing your pain and suffering.

Using meditation in this way will help you in dealing with situations more effectively. The reason we do the reflections during meditation is because that is when our mind is without clutter or impacted by the stresses of day-to-day life. Before doing the reflection you should always deal with the stress before beginning the reflection or you will not achieve your outcomes.

Look, what I wanted for you to get out of this article was that, before you start your meditation, you should always have a clear outcome that you want to achieve with the meditation. If you do not meditate with a purpose, then your meditation will not be effective.