11. Meditation

Lately I have been very intrigued by the many different cultural . . . well, differences. I will probably be posting a little bit more about all of the fun cultural differences that I have been thinking about later, but today I want to focus on meditating. I heard about this first in my mission from a friend that I met in Argentina while on my mission that actually spoke English, and had a Buddhism background. That may not sound weird, but for being in Argentina those were two things that simply didn't really ever happen. (fun side-note: He claimed to know english through his extensive use of video game use, and only his video game use. If you ask me he spoke way too intelligently for that to be the case) So it already had some force to leave a big impression on me.
I kind of had this impression about meditation when I thought of it throughout my childhood:

That isn't exactly right. There are lots of ways of meditating, but the whole environment and clothing and what-not was not the intriguing part for me. It was the closeness that the idea of this kind of meditation has with what I understand to be repenting.

So the way that this new ideas was explained to me was was kind of a series of levels that one could go into thinking about themselves, and their effect that they had on those around them, and then to really think about how happy one is with his own life. You then proceed to take out the things that you don't like about yourself. This sounds easy but I think the number 1 thing that this friend emphasized about meditation was its difficulty to do so successfully because our minds have built up so many walls making it hard to see ourselves in a bad light, and really accept that there are parts of ourselves that we really don't like.

The only meditation that I really do now (and don't get the wrong idea, I'm super new to this, don't think me a master or anything) isn't so focused on that spiritual mindfulness, rather the physical, emotional, and mental mindfulness. I still think that the spiritual side of things is the most interesting, and that God gave us our bodies and emotions as tools to expound our spiritual experiences and understand our spirits better as well.