Do you find it difficult to focus during your meditation? In today's video,
I am going to share with you five different techniques that you can apply and that will
help you improve your focus and concentration. If you haven't subscribed to my channel yet,
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The first exercise in order to develop concentration is to first gather our energy
of mindfulness, to gather our attention around an object of focus like our breathing. So the
exercise number one is to simply recognize your in-breath and your out-breath. So your mind may go
a little bit everywhere at the beginning but then bring your attention to your breathing and label
your experience, so on your in breath "IN" and label your out breath "OUT".
Do that for a few moments. That helps to gather your mind onto one object of focus: your breathing
Exercise number two: Following your in-breath and out-breath all the way through. So the first
exercise is a little bit of a warm-up, you do that for some time, simply recognizing you're
in breath and out breath but in the second exercise we try to sharpen our mindfulness,
we try to sharpen our mindful attention of our breathing by following the in-breath from the
moment it begins until the moment it ends and the same thing for the out breath. We try to
notice when the out breath begins and when the out breath ends. In here, not only are we mindful of
our breathing but we also sharpen our mindfulness and that becomes concentration because we are
concentrated for the full length of the in-breath and for the full length of the out breath.
The third exercise is to count your breaths. So I have touched on counting
your breaths in a previous video, I will put the link in the description below
but here, I wanted to provide more tips on how to make it easier for you.
First, before counting my breaths, what i like to do is exercise number one and exercise number
two again exercise number one helps me to gather my mindfulness and exercise number
two helps me to sharpen my attention and develop concentration during the length of my in-breaths
and out breaths. So in the third exercise, we want to practice maintaining our attention across
several breaths. So how does a counting breath works? First breathing in and breathing out, it is
one count and what we do is that we set a number that we try to reach and maintain our awareness,
our concentration until we reach that number. The important tip here is to start small, don't try
to set a number like 20 or 30. Start small like 5 so that you can build your concentration and keep
warming up. As you reach that number, then you can start increasing the number little by little.
The very important thing here is that our mind tends to think about the number we want to reach
because maybe we think that if i don't reach that number i'm gonna fail the exercise
but when our mind starts to think about uh that number that we want to reach, then we start losing
track and focus of our breathing, our mind starts to wander off in the future. So the best
way to reach that number is actually to stay focused on our breathing and to stay present
for each in breaths and out breaths and this is a very useful exercise to practice with because we
set an objective and in order to reach, it we need to let go of it and focus on each moment, on each
breath. If those tips make sense to you, please let me know by leaving a like to this video and
also a comment in the description below and let me know also which of those tips resonates with you.
The fourth exercise is to alternate a focus attention, so say, counting
or following you in breath and our breath, with resting your attention in the open. This type of
meditation is called open awareness and basically you are just letting go of your object of focus
and you simply listen to what is happening in your experience. The noise, i'm feeling this sensation,
having some thoughts. So it is a very light attention where you rest your attention.
You are not necessarily focused on anything. You are just aware and listening to what is
happening in your experience. So the idea here is that you want to alternate focus attention
and open awareness meditation. So we are focused for some time and then we rest for some time,
then we focus again and then we rest again in the open.
The fifth exercise is to practice meditation
with your eyes open. So you can take a visual object that you can set in front of you
and you fix your eyesight on that object. And by having your eyes open,
usually we have actually less thoughts coming in and out in our mind and so when we practice
like this, with a visual object, we just want to explore what it's like to see that object. We can
explore the colors, the form and we maintain a relaxed attention on that object of focus.
The first benefit of having strong concentration is that instead of being carried away by our
thoughts or our emotions in our life, when we have concentration, then we can come back to our
breathing and remain grounded, remain stable and not being carried away and pulled left and right
and that in itself, can be a huge source of relief and can help us become more resilient
to the adversities of life. The second benefit of developing concentration is that with
concentration, we can gain some insights about us, about our suffering and find a way out of our
suffering. So let me give you an analogy for that. Imagine that it's very windy, you are on a lake
and there are many waves and when you stand on your boat and try to look down, you cannot see
the bottom of the lake because there are so many things going on. But when the weather is calm
and quiet then the water is clear and then you can see to the bottom of the lake. So in the same way,
when we are able to build concentration, we are able to calm our mind and when we have a calm
mind, it is easier to look into our experience and understand what caused our suffering,
what caused our challenges and find a way out, so we can better understand our mind and we can
also understand what caused us to suffer and we can so that is the insight that we really
want to gain in our meditation. Next week we'll talk about how to meditate more often and build
a stable and consistent meditation practice because one of the hardest thing that exists
when we start meditation is to build the habit of meditation. We may understand the benefits, we may
practice here and there, a few times, but establishing a practice is very fundamental
in order to experience the benefits of meditation. So thank you for watching and see you next week!