If you are sitting by the seashore and you happen to witness the most beautiful sunset of your life, for a moment you are awestruck in wonderment with the beauty of nature. Your mind goes quiet and you experience stillness and peace. Any breathtakingly beautiful sight or sound or unexpected experience may bring about a cessation of mental activity and you would find yourself in meditation.
Meditation always happens without any effort. When you stop all efforts and just be aware of all that is happening in this moment with active acceptance and simply allow it to happen as it is, you are meditating. Here efforts mainly mean mental efforts.
The problem is that we are always continuously engaged in our mind with our thoughts. It has become so deeply habitual that it seems effortless. And not doing this mental effort starts to seem like the most difficult effort because we don’t know how to be without thinking.
Please read the linked article below to understand this more deeply.
Selvan Srinivasan · 2y
How can I meditate if I don’t believe in anything?
When you do intense physical activity do you sit down for some time to rest your body although you don’t believe in anything? Do you sleep every night to rest your body although you don’t believe in anything? Similarly meditating is merely rest to our thinking mind. One of the aspect or path to meditation is connected to religious and spiritual pursuits. The core point of meditation is to simply rest our thinking mind. Let us see what meditation actually is and then it would be easy to realise that it doesn’t depend on any particular set of beliefs. Meditation is when you stop doing and simply be in a state of non-doing being. The doing referred here is the mental activity. When you engage with the outside world, mental activity is happening in the form of communication, listening to others, understanding what is being said, analysing it and coming to a conclusion and finally speaking out your response. Even when you are not talking with anyone, mental activity is needed all the time with respect to the world around you, to decide where to go, what to do, how to do, etc. Reading or studying or watching a video or listening to a podcast are all mental activities. When you are with yourself alone, the mental activity does not stop. You might find yourself talking with yourself or talking with someone else in your mind, planning the future or worrying about the future, thinking about the past, replaying the voices of others in your mind, etc. There is a constant and sometimes repetitive mental activity going on all the time. Even during sleep, mental activity goes on in the form of dreaming. The energy vibrations in the mind become restless and scattered due to this constant overactivity and we do not know how to stop it. The mind is exhausted but we do not have a measure or means to find out how tired our mind is. This mental exhaustion shows up as stress and all the stress related ailments we experience. Our work becomes ineffective or unproductive. Our relationships turn sour. Meditation is the only process which can give rest to the mind. One can be in meditation while walking in a quiet garden or beach or while engaged with energy movements or yoga. When the mind is quiet you are said to be in a state of meditation. It is a state of being, a non-activity (mental non-activity). I suggest that you just sit with focused gazing and conscious breathing (FGCB) for a couple of minutes and then listen to a short audio (link pasted below) and do whatever is being said there. You will experience what it is to rest your mind just for a few minutes. FGCB is explained here: Short Meditation – Witnessing the Four Simultaneous Activities
You can find more resources here:https://awarenessjourney.org/