Massage and meditation

Massage helps you relax and you can focus on your breath to start a meditation process and achieve greater relaxation.

The greatest goal of a Buddhist is to achieve nirvana. The nirvana is a sense where one is freed from all connections and does not have to live through the cycle of living and dying. Meditation is a technique through which a Buddhist can attain the state of nirvana.

But mostly, meditation is a way to free the mind. Buddhism views meditation as a method of to reaching the state of mindfulness. Mindfulness is that time where the being is fully cognizant of his states of mind. He is aware of every one of his thoughts and each reply passing in and out his mind. He understands himself much more than an every day person.

Four noble truths

Buddha’s teachings revolve around the concept of ‘Four Noble Truths’. Primarily, there is pain or unpleasantries in our world. following that, the suffering is a result of our yearnings and obliviousness. The suffering is directly due to ourselves. Humans suffer because we do not wholeheartedly understand ourselves. As a lesson from that, if we understand who we are and the way the mind works we can eliminate this suffering. The next thing is that this suffering will be put to an end. Self-understanding leads to the salvation from suffering. Suffering is something we cannot avoid. One can have the state of nirvana, where one goes beyond the cycle of nature - the process of mortality. This is the expectation that Buddha promised the ones who followed him. Finally, the way to achieve this is The Eightfold Path.

8-fold path

The eightfold path consists of the proper speech, proper thought, proper livelihood, proper action, proper mindfulness, proper concentration, proper understanding, and proper effort.

The last of these, in fact, highly refer to the path of meditation. Buddhism, maybe, is the only method which provides the practicality to achieve all the things that is promised by it. Buddha urged concentrating on some thing that exists to reach the sense of being meditated. In meditation, the being is mostly encouraged to focus on breathing. One consciously feels the breath coming in and going out of the self. In addition, one observes all the feelings, sensations, and thoughts in one’s mind. One then becomes amazingly aware of the inner workings of the mind. This assists the practitioner to get to the state of mindfulness.

Typically, the Buddhist meditation is separated into two areas - the Samatha calm and the Vipassana mindfulness.

Samatha

The Samatha meditation is attained by concentrating the mind so much that mind and body both reach high levels of calmness. One finds three benefits through this form of meditation - calmness and enjoyment, a fortunate rebirth and the breaking of mental disturbances that are the reason for unhappiness. Samatha guides us in attaining a state of quietude and untroubledness with oneself that is best shown by the statues of Buddha himself. With Samatha we will not attain nirvana, but get prepared to.

Vipassana

Vipassana is the mastery of being observant of oneself. We become knowledgeable to our reactions to the senses of painfulness and pleasure. But in opposition to reacting with like or dislike, we become in touch with these turmoils of the mind. This technique makes us reach unfamiliar parts of our consciousness where physical body and mental thought, chemicals and senses, meet each other. At the end, we get aware of the orders through which our deepest consuetudes are formed. This awareness frees us from these habits and we become masterful of our minds. It allows us to realize the source of all concepts and feelings and makes one ‘wise’ in the literal sense of the word.

Vipassana helps one to attain the impression of mindfulness - the state where we take things for what they really are. Vipassana is the actualization, by direct intuition, of the existence of three characteristics of being - the definite, suffering and non-self, in each thing we encounter - including our physical and psychological processes. The realization is on a more focused and insightful level rather than a sophisticated understanding.