Informative

Meditation with Hobbies

Meditation brings in a positive perspective, helps manage stress, increases self-awareness, and reduces negativity while improving imagination, creativity, patience, and tolerance within us.

Millennials can’t get enough of meditation. We come across a huge number of people, saying how it changed their lives, how refreshing, overwhelming, trippy, transformational, or transcendental it is. But, behind every person praising meditation, you will find another, saying, I just fell asleep every time I try meditating. It’s just not for me. This post is for every one of them.

Swamiji says, “Root of meditation is being in the present”. If sitting in a calm, comfortable position, closing your eyes, and concentrating on your deep breaths makes you fall asleep in the present, you might have to rethink your approach towards it.

Meditation is all about focusing. Focusing on your breath, focusing on a single object, being aware of the thoughts, or immersing yourself in your subconscious. 

Hobbies

Are you getting exhausted with your dreary, planned life? Do you need some changes that can help you break free from your monotonous schedule? Hobbies can bring that change within you.

Hobbies could be a first step towards exploring your spirituality. Before you start seeking a Guru out in the world, you have to be ready from within. When you have a spiritual experience, you feel fresh, relaxed, calm, and peaceful. Few hobbies will bring you the exact experience that meditation can bring.

What kind of hobbies can give you a start with meditation?

Painting: Canvas is like a mirror, reflecting the state of the mind of an artist. When we paint, we get in touch with the inner self, on a more profound level, developing greater self-awareness. Every stroke, every shade we put on the canvas is the part of our spiritual exploration, immortalized on that piece of paper, without confronting our distracting thoughts.

Gardening: Savata Mali, a great saint in Maharashtra, was a Gardner, who found his divine while taking care of the gardens. Seeking potential, from planting a seed is like working on a Sankalp. It’s like losing yourself in the present moment, appreciating the potential of transformation for the things to bloom. Swamiji compares pulling out the weeds to removing all the distracting thoughts from your mind while meditating, to gain bigger and better fruits.

Walking: As we try to feel our body and breath while meditation, a mindful walk is not that different. Concentrating on our breathing, we become aware of our body and physical sensations as we move, while focusing on our path, being in the present moment. While doing so, we can take an account of our feelings, thoughts, and moods as well, without analyzing it, being in a Sakshi Bhav (observer mode) as Swamiji calls it.

Reading: Many avid readers often compare meditation with reading. When you open your eyes after a brilliant session of meditation, you start to see the world differently. The same thing happens to us when we hold our favorite book. Have you ever been so engaged with a book that you have completely forgotten about the outside world? It’s an example of extreme focus on single activity- reading.

Three things comprise a human being. Body, Mind, and Soul.

Most of us get entangled with our bodily needs, never to look beyond a physical point.

Few of us proceed further, working on their minds, we call them intellectuals. Meditation comes into this picture.

And then, very few of the intellectuals transcend beyond mind and body, reaching towards the soul with the help of spirituality. Even though the focus is the first step towards meditation, spirituality is much more than that.

A fisherman can concentrate very hard on a fish to catch it. His concentration to catch a fish is very close to meditation. But, since his objective of catching a fish is very much different from meditation, it cannot replace the objective of meditation, that is, cleanse one’s mind to liberate itself.

We must keep in mind that the activities suggested above, can replicate few results of meditation, but cannot possibly replace the meditation. Meditation enhances our capacity to look well beyond the materialistic world. The goal of the meditation is to go well beyond the intellect, to transcend our consciousness, beyond our body, and to become one with the divine.

Hence, we can say, that hobby can be a good foundation stone, on which we can build our spiritual meditation practice, to achieve a higher state of being.