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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.
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