.png)
THE APPROPRIATE MINDSET
Developing the 'growth mind-set'
The essence of the Razor's Edge Mindset is to recognise that effort invested toward making desired changes in all areas of your life pays dividends a thousand fold. You do not have to make gigantic changes immediately, a slight change in the trajectory of your path, now, will lead you to an entirely different destination over time. And the effort applied to making a small change will become self sustaining and even enjoyable in shorter than you would think.
A powerful tool to help achieve a strong and positive mind set is keeping a daily meditation practice.
Through consistent meditation practice you can gain a degree of control over the flow of thoughts arising within your mind, and direct them in such a way as to reinforce good habits and patterns of thinking.
If you are interested in following a spiritual path or learning more about Buddhist philosophy in general and how you can develop qualities of mind that improve overall happiness, get in touch with me and I can help you find your nearest Kadampa Meditation Center, or you can visit the NKT home page.
WHAT IS MEDITATION?
Finding Inner Wealth
Meditation is often thought of as allowing your mind to go empty, to think nothing or simply ‘being in the moment’. While such activity may lead to an experience of inner peace or state of calm, it is not true meditation, at least not as I understand it.
Meditation is familiarising your mind with virtue. This necessarily means that you are thinking of something, or more accurately, an object is appearing clearly to your mind, which you are focusing on intensely, to the exclusion of everything else. This is quite different from perceiving nothingness.
The point of meditation is to become deeply acquainted with a particular meditation object so that it begins to change your mind. Eventually, through consistent, regular practice the mind and it’s object mix and you are forever changed by it.
A good example of a meditation object could be a mind of universal love or compassion. Someone who has achieved this mind is never without compassion for each and every living being, and it influences his or her every thought and deed. Gaining a similitude of the mind of compassion would make you a generally more compassionate person. How wonderful the world would be if we all achieved this!
"Analytical meditation is a process of combining logical reasoning and personal experiences to achieve a particular state of mind. We engage in a purposeful process of investigation, or thought, about an object; analyzing its various aspects and examining it from various points of view...
...In placement meditation we concentrate on a virtuous object single-pointedly without allowing distractions to disturb our concentration " - Geshe Keslang Gyatso
