Using Meditation

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In Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Heart of Buddha’s Teachings, the importance of meditation in Buddha’s teachings is emphasized. Meditation is used to help calm and reflect. The five steps of meditation can be broken up into two main parts. The first of which is stopping and calming and the second of which is looking deeply.  

The first aspect of meditation is stopping and calming,“ When we have strong emotion, we know it can be dangerous… we have to learn the art of breathing in and out, stopping our activities and calming our emotions.”(25) This encompasses the first three steps of meditation, which are recognition, acceptance, and embracing. This aspect of meditation is used to take a step back from the situation and not get carried away. Using this time to recognize what your feelings are, accept that you feel this way and take a step back from them.

The second aspect of meditation is looking deeply. This aspect contains the last two steps of meditation, which are looking deeply within and insight. This aspect of meditation is used to look at your actions and analyze them we look at what caused the emotions “we reflect like this until we get some insight into what has caused our suffering. With insight, we know what to do and what not to do to change the situation” (26)

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I used this technique to help me deal with the stress of studying. When studying for tests and specifically finals I often feel very overwhelmed and agitated. When this happened I used the two aspects of meditation. I stopped and calmed myself, I began thinking about what I was feeling, in this case anxious and agitated then took a step back from them. I then thought deeply about why I had these feelings, because I was afraid to do poorly on exams. Because I was able to stop, calm myself, and rationalize I realized that my anxiety was being blown out of proportion. This technique greatly helped to minimize my stress and allow me to study more productively.

The second way I used meditation was to help me with my sister. My sister and I, like most sisters, fight often. Usually the fights are small but recently we were in a large fight. I was feeling very angry. Using meditation I was able to stop and calm myself and identify the feeling of anger and take a step back from it. I then could look more closely at why I was angry, this allowed me to realize that the fight we were having was silly and that I, in fact should apologize. Using meditation not only allowed me to calm my feelings of anger but to also make the correct decision in how I should handle the situation by apologizing to my sister.