To many people, meditation is some kind of impractical and/or esoteric ritual in which a person sits, closes their eyes and perhaps chants “Meditation is simply the act of concentrating. You don’t have to sit with your eyes closed to meditate. You can meditate (concentrate) on anything, like walking, reading, brushing your teeth, driving a car and even watching TV. To meditate all you must do is give as much focus as possible to whatever the task is at hand. Don’t allow other thoughts, feelings or judgments distract you. Try to give 100% focus to the task at hand. When you eat just eat and when you work just work. Don’t allow irrelevant, distracting thoughts to overtake your moments. Just concentrate!
That being said, sitting meditations clearly do have their places. It’s a great place to be for contemplative meditations in which you just focus on a thought or an idea. Additionally, it’s usually much easier to focus while just sitting, somewhere quite with your eyes closed. There are less external distractions and it’s usually easier to keep the bombardment of thoughts from overtaking the experience at hand. Sitting is a great way for beginners to start exercising their powers of concentration.
So whether you're sitting or standing or both, it’s all good. There are no rules. Do it whichever way feels comfortable and motivates you to continue practicing it. You may find that doing it often when in activities may begin to inspire you into sitting with it as well. Either way, just exercise your concentration as often as you can in everything you do.
In the near future I will post instructions on how to do several different types of mediation (both standing and sitting).
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