The type of meditation I recommend can help you to be more relaxed and produce a pleasant, serene, contented mood. Developing this skill can improve the quality of your life. This type of meditation is sometimes called serenity meditation.
You can experience further improvement in your quality of life by taking your meditation practice one step further: by developing insight.
The pleasant state produced by meditation can be used to practice another type of meditation called insight meditation. One way to define insight meditation is that it is the process of observing the source of unpleasant emotions. Unpleasant emotions are often accompanied by physical sensations within the body. Noticing these sensations will help you to become aware of changes in your emotional state. When the mind is quiet and unpleasant emotions arise, the mind will also notice what caused the unpleasant emotions to arise. In many cases the mind will observe that the mind itself is the source of thoughts that caused the unpleasant emotions.
(Some unpleasant emotions might be caused by innate biochemical factors and not thoughts - I am not referring to those type of emotions here).
When you are in a relaxed, quiet, pleasant mood, any type of unpleasant mental state that arises and disturbs your pleasant mood will be very obvious to you. The pleasant state produced by meditation provides a background against which unpleasant emotions are readily noticeable. Being observant while meditating and throughout the day of what disturbs the pleasant mood produced by meditation will cause the mind to learn how it causes unpleasant emotions and it will learn to change the way it thinks in order to stop creating unpleasant emotions.
Related Reading
- One Tool Among Many: The Place of Vipassana in Buddhist Practice by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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