“Do you teach just meditation classes in Perth, seperately to yoga?” ~ We are often asked this question and it always interests me to hear people’s own ideas about what meditation is and how they might expect to learn how to “do it” and what the outcome might be. Is the goal really about finding inner peace?
There are so many different ways to “meditate” (I put that in inverted commas due to so many different definitions floating around) For anyone that has tried meditating before, it can be anything but peaceful! Congratulations though, because if you do yoga then you are already meditating! There you go, how easy was that!
What am I talking about? Well, many of us have this idea that meditation takes many years to perfect, you have to close your eyes, sit still cross legged, fight your thoughts, fight looking at the time, fight the pain in your body from sitting so long when you’re not used to it and then spend hours trying to clear your mind in order to find inner peace – it sounds great, now I see exactly why so many of you want “Meditation Classes”! 🙂 Seriously though, you can meditate like this if you want to, there are places that you can do that but it’s much easier and kinder to yourself to start with more achievable methods that aren’t such hard work.
There are many ways we meditate during a yoga class, meditation is a part of yoga and isn’t really seperate from it at all. Noticing sensation in the body is meditating, even whilst we are moving, it simply becomes a moving meditation. Focusing on the breath, hearing noises consciously, noticing thoughts and emotions and being aware of one’s self – this is ALL MEDITATION – you are meditating through the entire class and then at the end of the moving meditation, we come into a restful position and meditate for another 15 mins which is really just another way of doing it. Just like anything, it can get easier with practice, but then sometimes it can be hard again, this is not a backwards step at all. As you slowly cultivate an inner sense of awareness, it means you can notice when things are easy and notice when they are hard too but maintain some equanimity.
I look forward to seeing you at our meditation classes in Perth soon 🙂
