Learn to Meditate: Find Deep Relaxation, Relieve Stress and Anxiety, Enhance Creativity

Making Friends with Negative Emotions

In fact, meditation can actually be used to enable us to watch our thinking, like a detached observer, and to recognize the tricks that the untrained mind habitually plays to distract us from what we are doing by setting off an irrelevant train of thought, or by recalling memories, arousing emotions or diverting us into fantasies and daydreams. One of the first steps toward focusing attention is simply to sit quietly and still the body, and then to become aware of distracting thoughts.

The Russian mystic Georgei Guridieff frequently pointed out that much of human misery is caused by the fact that we live our lives mechanically, never properly attending to what it is to be alive.