Can You Stop Your Mind and Your Daily Activities?

Meditation is a state of consciousness that separates a person from everyday attitudes and practical actions. Based on self-reports from hatha yoga practitioners and interviews with teachers, the study identifies distractions and aids during sitting meditation. Three interrelated aspects—emerging thoughts, body sensations, and emotions—are key when entering the meditative state. Practitioners use tactics to eliminate barriers or redirect attention, incorporating them into the background of the concentration point. Teaching plays a role in this process. Effects of meditation are described from the practitioner's perspective, including the author's own first-person observations.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The paper investigates meditation as a state of consciousness that isolates an individual from the attitude of everyday life and the perspective of practical actions. It is an “ethnography of the mind” instead of the place. The paper analyses self-reports from meditators’ self-observations as part of hatha yoga practice and data from semi-structured interviews with hatha yoga teachers. Elements that distract or help people meditate were analysed and interpreted. The features of the meditative state during the practice of sitting meditation are also reconstructed. Attention is paid to three essential aspects that are related to each other when entering the meditative state: emerging thoughts, body sensations, and emotions. The analysis focuses on how practitioners deal with these obstacles; what tactics do they employ to eliminate barriers or redirect attention and include them in the background of the concentration point? What is the role of teaching meditation? What are the effects of meditation from a practitioner’s point of view? Empirical materials obtained from the first-person perspective of the researcher, the author of this article, and his collaborators in the study were also analysed.