Meditation is a mind exercise that can help us to achieve inner peach. It helps us to bring our mind back to the present moment and spend less time feeling worried about the past or the future. On Sunday 20th March, CandleX held its second Intro to Meditation session at the C!Here space in the MOMA complex.
19 participants joined in this event, which was comprised of two sections. We began the session with a discussion about different kinds of meditation and followed on from this by following an online guided meditation led by Porchlay Seng, an experienced meditation master and peach coach from Peace Revolution, Cambodia.
The discussion focused on four different types of meditations: Attention, Mindfulness, Passage and Benevolent. We discussed how to practice each type of meditation. For example, in Mindfulness meditation people think about their ‘happy place’. People were also advised to begin with trying to mediate for short stints of 5 – 10 seconds. The length of an individual session can be increased with time. The idea is not to stop thinking but to resist grasping onto the thoughts and rather allow them to simply slip away.
Benevolent meditation focuses on creating a sense of love and belonging. A suggested way to achieve this is through repeating a mantra over and over again such as “I am doing enough, I have enough, I am enough,” or “May I be happy, may I be free of suffering, may I be healthy, may I be at ease.”
About half of the participants were new to meditation and the other half had meditated a bit before. People discussed what parts of meditation they found difficult. When beginning a meditation practice, any starting point is good. Like all things in life it takes work and practice to improve and become comfortable with a practice.
We closed the session by providing resources for those seeking to develop a mediation practice.
Online Resources:
Offline Resources in Beijing:
Offline Resources out of Beijing:
The New Life Foundation, Thailand
