Throughout this article about Alan Watts how to meditate, you will read about Alan Watts and his idealism on meditation.
We will also try to dive into the life and works of Alan Watts. You will know about how he built himself as an idealist.
Meditation is a significant act when it comes to providing peace to the mind. We all have to accept the significance of meditation at some point in our lives.
In case you have never meditated even once in your whole life, this article about Alan Watts how to meditate is just made for you.
Even if you have experience in this arena, you need to go through this article once. Maybe this article will give you a new perspective.
But you will never know anything unless you keep reading.
Table of Contents
Who is Alan Watts
First, before diving into the main discussion, we must know a few lines about the man himself. In this section, you are about to read a small introduction about him.
Alan Watts was a priest by profession in South England. He was also a teacher of spirituality in the 1950s and 1960s.
But he was never a man of following the rules. Though he wrote more than 25 books about Zen, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, we won’t be able to label him.
Despite being a westerner, he explained eastern philosophy like no one ever did. He knew about his flaws, but he never placed himself above everyone.
To him, life was everything. He loved and adored life in every way possible.
If you ask his students to define him within two words, they would say he was a spiritual entertainer.
No one can capture all of his thoughts within one article. So we have decided to focus on meditation in this particular article. We will inform you about Alan Watts how to meditate throughout this discussion.
Alan Watts meditation
In case you are thinking of gaining something through meditating, we are sorry to tell you this. Meditation is not about gaining something important. It’s about just being in the actual moment in front of you.
If you start to meditate by looking at the benefits you can get, you are meditating to gain something. That is not meditation, my friend!
Alan Watts said that while we meditate, we become somewhat separate from the rest of the universe. That is only possible when there is absolutely no noise around us.
We have to deal with the environment yet tell our brains to shut up. That’s because our minds talk all the time. Unless we shut them up, there’s no way of meditating.
There is more information in this article called Alan Watts how to meditate. Stick till the end to know them all.
The art of meditation
In this section, we are going to discuss the art of meditation. Then we will look into it through the eye of Alan Watts. Stay with us to know about all that.
Our bodies and our minds both are two entirely different things. People sometimes fail to differentiate between these two, and that’s when the problems begin to show up.
Often our body wants something which our mind doesn’t. That’s because the mind is craving something the body can’t provide.
Sometimes your mind becomes clouded, and therefore you can’t think straight. At that moment, what you need the most is concentration.
At this point, meditation comes into play. Through meditation, you can put a leash on your mind. But first, you need to know a bit more about meditation.
What is meditation?
If we try to give a definition to meditate, it will go like this. Meditation is the art of sitting there doing absolutely nothing. It provides much-needed calmness to the mind.
Not many people realize this, but meditation is a general requirement of the mind. When you constantly use a particular thing, at some point, you have to cleanse it so that it can further give you results.
The same is applicable when it comes to our minds. You have to learn to let go of things, or your mind can’t handle them anymore. Therefore your body will also suffer.
To get rid of the daily stress and tension, meditation is a simple way to detox. It is also scientifically proven that the mind gets a chance to unwind significantly through meditation.
Types of meditation
Meditating may be a simple way to ease your mind, but it has several forms in reality. In the following, we have written about some popular forms of meditation.
Sahaj Samadhi
This particular meditation is performed by a pure tone that leads the mind into serenity.
Vipassana
It’s a 10-day long-form meditation where the practitioners need to obey some guidelines strictly.
Mudras
An amazing way to do meditation is to perform mudras. Mudra means to mark. When you start to perform mudras with deep breathing exercises, your mind also starts to clean up in no time.
Yoga Nidra
Yoga Nidra is just like it sounds. The mind gets intense relaxation as well as the body.
Pancha Kosha
Panchakosha is that kind of meditation that focuses on the five tiers of existence – breath, body, mind, environment, and intellect.
Sudarshan Kriya Yoga
Sudarshan Kriya Yoga or SKY is the most famous form of meditation. Here you need to breathe deeply to do this kind of yoga.
Mantras
Mantra meditation is when you start chanting words like a trance and vibrate into the ether. You cannot explain how it works. But it does provide you with a feeling of calmness.
Why should you meditate?
Many people around us have cool heads, which is pretty great. We all want to control our minds before the mind takes control over us.
In the following, we provide you with some pretty good reasons for starting meditation.
Meditation helps to vanish tension
The main problem most people have to face these days is tension. It’s not easy at all to get rid of it out of the blue. But through meditating, you can keep them at a distance.
Thus, so many serious issues like diabetes, panic attacks, hypertension can be averted.
Calms the mind
The most difficult thing to do is to put it on a leash to the mind so that it doesn’t get scattered everywhere at a time. Breathing is a simple way to meditate, and just by breathing, you can easily calm the mind.
Meditation is better than sleeping
It has been already proven that you can get more intense relaxation than sleeping by meditating. If you meditate regularly, you won’t need seven or eight hours of sleep daily.
Great for the sportspersons
Concentration is an absolute necessity for those who play regularly than the regular people. When you are a sportsperson, you always need to stay at the moment. If your mind roams elsewhere, your performance on the field will drop immensely.
It has the ability to change you forever
Meditation is an absolute recommendation for you in case you have anger issues. We all have to deal with it at some point in our lives. But by meditating regularly, you can invent a brand new you in no time.
Now that you know about the various forms of meditation and the privileges let’s move the focus to Alan Watts.
As we told you, that man broke all those stereotypes about meditation. He taught us that if you want to meditate, don’t think about what you can get out of it.
The art of meditation – Alan Watts philosophy
Now we discuss what Alan Watts has to say about the art of meditation.
To Alan Watts, both past and future are nothing but useless. What is done is done, and what the future has in store no one knows. So it would help if you remained at the present that you have some control over.
Remaining in the present is called actual meditation. You need to listen to the sound and feel the energy.
We all are human beings, and thinking is our instinct. But if we start thinking too much, we won’t see what is real and what is not.
The exact idea of what is real is still unknown. Nobody can draw a clear picture of reality.
All we can do is catch a glimpse of what is real. In India, what we know as yoga is a small attempt to catch that glimpse. This yoga is a form of meditation called Zen in Japan.
Meditation is an art. It is an attempt to shut the mind up, even if for a bit.
According to Alan Watts, you too can attempt meditation any time you want. You don’t need to do anything but sit and close your eyes. Just listen to the noises around you and try to process them.
You need to realize first that while you are meditating, your only thought is real. Anything other than that is the least of your concern.
Now let’s see what’s next in the article Alan Watts how to meditate.
Alan Watts on meditation
Now it is time that we wrote another thing or two before ending this discussion on Alan Watts how to meditate. You know that by now, he was quite different from his contemporaries. He always wanted to break the taboos about meditating.
So to do that, he wrote about his thoughts. Now you will read about the thoughts of Alan Watts on meditation.
You cannot make your mind meditate
The thing about meditation is that you cannot deliberately make your mind meditate. If you are present in that particular moment, you can meditate independently.
Meditation from the viewpoint of Alan Watts
Just because you won’t make your brain shut down, Alan Watts provided a solution to this situation.
Whatever noise you are hearing right now, you try not to make sense of them. You need to let them pass like they are nothing to you, not really.
The noises will always be there. Just like you breathe all the time and that’s a regular thing, noises too are a part of your life. You cannot shut them down; therefore, you need to let them pass.
At first, it would be easy for you to get distracted by all those noises. But when you become used to them, they will become somewhat different from you. They will no longer bother you.
So, when it comes to breathing, you have to act similarly. You wanted the noises to pass through your mind, and it’s a normal process.
Similarly, you are breathing without giving an effort. It’s a normal process too.
Unfortunately, the time is upon us. We have to end this article about Alan Watts how to meditate here. But before signing off, here are our final thoughts.
Alan Watts might have gone for like near about 50 years ago. But he has changed so many lives in the past few decades.
His books about meditation are a gem these days, and that too, without any doubt.
If this article has inspired you to start meditating, we would be thankful to you.