Meditation and YOU MUST BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION

People seem to equate various practices with beliefs. I was once meditating in my room when my father entered and saw me there. Now, I had only recently informed him that I no longer wanted to practice Catholicism. In response to seeing me meditating he informed me that it was absolutely crazy to believe in reincarnation. At that time I had not known that the rebirth that Buddhism speaks of is not a literal transferring of souls. I was, however, meditating for more practical reasons, so I found it slightly far-fetched to see that he had equated mediations so hastily to believing in reincarnation. I don't particularly believe or disbelieve in reincarnation and I was only meditating to relax. People do often tend to assume that partaking in certain activities must necessarily have been caused by some ideological opinion change.

Meditation and Hearing

I practised meditation for two reasons that I can remember. The first was to relax after some sort of strong emotional distress. The second was to to focus on my hearing ability. I would sit in quiet-ish areas and try to focus on one noise that was distinctly more quiet than other noises, the hum of an electronic device is a good example. I would work on concentrating on that until it was easy to pick that thing out from others. Then I started to try focusing on more than one thing. I would find a recording of a simple drum beat and then I would concentrate on both the hum and the beat. After that, I started to try to count the drum beats and concentrate on the hum again. I continued with this sort of thing, until I was able to focus on three things with proficiency. After that, I tried to concentrate on things that were more distant from me. This worked fairly well, and at one point in time, I could sit in crowded rooms and listen in to one conversation over others.

Meditation to Relax

Response to Ryan - full post here

I practised meditation for a while. I was not doing so in search of spiritual experience so I never really had one related to meditations. It was, however, useful in relaxing and controlling breath. It helped to sort out problems that mattered from problems that didn't, and it helped to determine solutions to those that did matter. I used it countless (not really though) times in order to calm myself down after any sort of large emotional distress.