How to Transform Your Life
Learn How to Meditate
To learn how to meditate effectively we first need to know what meditation is, and to understand its many benefits. This will encourage us to engage in regular guided meditation practice that will enable us to experience greater peace of mind as well as deeper understanding and insight into ourself and our experiences. Through training in meditation eventually we will be able to remove from our mind the underlying causes of all our problems and suffering, and experience purer and purer states of happiness.
In his book How to Transform Your Life, Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso explains clearly how to meditate effectively and how to carry this positive experience into modern, daily life. Extracts from the book, also available as a free eBook download, are included in the explanation that follows.
“These instructions are scientific methods to improve our human nature.”
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What is Meditation?
In the chapter entitled 'What is Meditation?’ the author defines meditation as follows:
‘Meditation is a mind that is single-pointedly focused on a virtuous object, and whose function is to make our mind peaceful and calm. Whenever we meditate, we are performing a mental action that will cause us to experience inner peace in the future.’
Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
How to Transform Your Life
Since our happiness depends upon the experience of inner peace, which in turn depends upon the mental action of meditation, we can see how important meditation is. As Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says in the chapter entitled ‘Inner Peace’:
‘The real source of happiness is inner peace. If our mind is peaceful, we will be happy all the time, regardless of external conditions, but if it is disturbed or troubled in any way, we will never be happy, no matter how good our external conditions may be. External conditions can only make us happy if our mind is peaceful. We can understand this through our own experience. For instance, even if we are in the most beautiful surroundings and have everything we need, the moment we get angry any happiness we may have disappears. This is because anger has destroyed our inner peace. We can see from this that if we want true, lasting happiness we need to develop and maintain a special experience of inner peace. The only way to do this is to train our mind through spiritual practice – gradually reducing and eliminating our negative, disturbed states of mind and replacing them with positive, peaceful states. Eventually, through continuing to improve our inner peace we will experience supreme permanent peace of mind, or "nirvana". Once we have attained nirvana we will be happy throughout our life, and in life after life. We will have solved all our problems and accomplished the true meaning of our human life.'
Benefits of Meditation
Meditation has so many benefits because it is the best method for generating positive views and intentions - mental attitudes that cause us to develop a peaceful mind. The benefits of meditation are explained in How to Transform Your Life, and can be summarized as follows:
- Our mind gradually becomes more and more peaceful, and we experience a purer and purer form of happiness
- Eventually we will be happy all the time, even in the most difficult circumstances
- We create an inner space and clarity that enables us to control our mind regardless of external circumstances
- We develop mental equilibrium, a balanced mind that is happy all the time, rather than an unbalanced mind that oscillates between the extremes of excitement and despondency
- We are able to eradicate from our mind the delusions that are the causes of all our problems and suffering
- We will experience the supreme permanent inner peace of nirvana
Guided Meditation
In How to Transform Your Life, a free eBook download, Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso gives practical instructions and guidance for progressing through the many stages of developing inner peace and happiness. With practical examples, analogies and personal experiences, he helps us to understand how to apply these instructions in our daily lives.
At the end of each section, and at other points in each chapter, the author provides a guided meditation through which we can deepen our experience of the main point or conclusion he wants us to take away from the section.
How do these guided meditations work? They include, as Venerable Geshe Kelsang explains, two essential stages or types of meditation that enable us to take the instructions deep into our mind and make them our own. Here he explains the function of each stage:
'There are two types of meditation: analytical meditation and placement meditation. Analytical meditation involves contemplating the meaning of a spiritual instruction that we have heard or read. By contemplating such instructions deeply, eventually we reach a definite conclusion, or cause a specific virtuous state of mind to arise. This is the object of placement meditation. We then concentrate single-pointedly on this conclusion or virtuous state of mind for as long as possible to become deeply acquainted with it. This single-pointed concentration is placement meditation. Analytical meditation is often called ‘contemplation’, and placement meditation is often called "meditation". Placement meditation depends upon analytical meditation, and analytical meditation depends upon listening to or reading spiritual instructions.'
How to Transform Your Life - A Blissful Journey
How to Transform Your Life, by Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, provides all the necessary techniques and practical advice we need to make real, inner development and transformation. In the Introduction, he says:
‘Through practising the instructions presented in this book we can transform our life from a state of misery into one of pure and everlasting happiness. These instructions are scientific methods to improve our human nature. Everybody needs to be good-natured with a good heart, because in this way we can solve our own problems as well as those of others, and we can make our human life meaningful. Every living being has the same basic wish – to be happy and avoid suffering. Even newborn babies, animals and insects have this wish. It has been our main wish since beginningless time and it is with us all the time, even during our sleep. We spend our whole life working hard to fulfil this wish.’
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