As I mention on my About Me page, I was meditating a lot using ancient vedic sutras. These are outlined in a Deepak Chopra book, “The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence” and I highly recommend reading it. One of the many aspects of the practice involves watching for coincidences in your daily life and once you understand the meaning then take action. The idea is to break through our probability patterns and let the coincidences guide us in the ways to act in order to make our dreams, our intentions manifest.

Well I was ‘guided’ by several clues to go learn the Kadampa buddhist meditations from one of their instructors. In all honesty, I was experiencing a lot of suffering during that time of my life so I dove as deeply as I could into the practice. What I learned was more than I bargained for and I will try to describe in part how meditation relieves suffering.

Buddha taught that the cause of all suffering is self-grasping. We grasp at things in the outer material world thinking if we can improve our external conditions then we will be happy. But if our mind is not peaceful, we will never be happy even if our external conditions are perfect. For example, say you go to a really fun party with your date and then you get angry for some reason, now you can’t even enjoy the party. This is why there is no real happiness without inner peace. The more we learn to control our mind, the more our inner peace increases and the happier we become. These meditations that buddha taught are the way to practice controlling our mind.

The mind has depth. You’ve probably learned or at least heard of the conscious, sub-conscious or even unconscious mind. There are different brainwave states such as alpha, theta, delta and so on. These range from the normal waking state of our mind to sleep and even deeper sleep states. So to really learn to control our mind we must dive into the depths and not just our daily conscious thoughts.

By learning simple breathing techniques, visualization and a lot of patience we can begin to calm our wild thoughts and settle into a more peaceful, clear mental state. This is only the beginning because once we can settle into this place then the focus of our meditation has a lot more power. One thing I found very interesting was that they teach to meditate from your “root mind” which is associated with the center of your chest at the level of the heart. This was very powerful when in the deeper mental states and the fact that it is our “root” mind the transformations that happen here affect our whole mind.

So how exactly does meditation help relieve suffering? I will try to explain the best I can. Buddha taught specific virtuous objects to focus our mind on such as compassion, self equal to others and more. By increasing our concentration on these objects eventually our mind actually becomes the object. There is no division between you, the meditator and the object itself.

You might dismiss this as fantasy or some kind of mind trick, but the reason it actually works is because those virtuous objects are really the mind’s most natural state. In other words, when our mind is properly purified from suffering what is left is real and permanent happiness. Some call it enlightenment.

If you want to explore these meditations or buddha’s teachings further there are many schools of buddhism to choose from. I highly recommend the Kadampa tradition.

Jeffrey Gilliam is the founder of Healing America and also a successful composer/musician. His mission is to help Empower others so they can heal from the past and live their dreams. He believes together we can create a new world where everyone wins.

Jeffrey Gilliam is the founder of Healing America and also a successful composer/musician.