People try every possible way to get rid of their haunting thoughts. They buy useless stuff, do things that do not really excite them, and attend unrelated events. They do everything but one: Facing the thoughts to get to understand them.
There is a perfect saying about our fears which I keep reminding every time I feel afraid of something new (which happens surprisingly often because I chase the things that might come up as a challenge to me). It goes like “I just let fear seize me for a moment. It makes me tremble like a child, then I let it go.” Applying this changed a lot for me because normally I feel an urgent need to fight back when I feel fear like most people. This is natural, more than natural, a basic need to stay alive, but it’s not useful for the majority of the situations we end up in. If we would fight back in a corporate meeting with executives, we would end up unemployed in the best-case scenario. Letting fear seize you for just a moment and realizing it’s actually a big shadow of a small issue is the right way to deal with it. Even if it’s a legit fear and you should be afraid of it as before, you still make progress and be aware of what are the actual problems in your life.
Meditation is exactly what this is: It’s the right form of observing what is going on inside your head that you overlook and cause fear without proper examination. It’s a way of lightening up to see what is just fuss and what areas in your life you should lean into. This critical step makes the difference between living the dignified life of a human who knows himself and living the miserable life of a confused wild animal.
If you know what your weaknesses are, you can work on them. This work can take up several different forms but again, the best way of solving most of the problems is nothing else but meditation as well as spotting them. This is because our problems are mostly sophisticated ones. Of course, we also have problems in lower levels of the hierarchy of needs, but they mostly do not require further investigation and reveal themselves in a peek.
Meditation can take different forms, but if you want to use it for general purposes, even the most well-known form makes wonders. It’s as how we all imagine the Buddhist monks: In a silent place, with comfortable and loose clothes, preferably clean, the body is in lotus position and eyes shut. Personally, I use only this form of meditation (if I am intentionally meditating instead of in a spontaneous meditative state). This being said, in my personal experience there are a few separate forms the meditation that can take place in your head as well. These can be evaluated separately, but they are more like a kind of dream that jumps from one to another in an untraceable manner.
The one I most intensely experience is visual meditation. In this state, I see abstract and non-abstract visuals in a mix, which are thoughts in visual form. Colors and vibrations also change a lot, and visuals perpetually change. These types of meditative states mostly happen if I am in a half-lit room which causes light fluctuations on my eyelids. Even though it is caused by the little light fluctuations, the things my mind chooses to see are a strong indicator of what it happens to be stuck with lately. The things I see are mostly relatable to my life, even in abstract forms. I try to catch especially meaningful visuals, and while doing that I do not force anything or any thought. I just let them come into my mind and then let them go. If I especially spot a strong feeling attached to some visuals, I go after them for a short while until I understand or have an idea of why they tingled such emotions in me. Then I also let them go. I try to always keep in mind to not get attached to any thoughts (which are not mine in the first place as I believe).
Another type of meditative state I often experience is thoughts in verbal form. I feel like I am sitting by a machine that generates random ideas and thoughts non-stop and just observe and listen to it. This type of state can also have some unrelated stuff, but there are a lot of gems to catch as well. Since verbal thoughts are more straightforward than visual ones, they are less open to interpretation. If I can catch a thought worthy of paying attention, I try to understand what it actually trying to tell me. I let the machine generate ideas around that chosen thought and try to spot the ones that explain it a little further.
And the last and least experienced type of meditative state is the sensational one. In this state, I directly feel emotions without verbal or visual cues. I just feel strong emotions tied to some events or people that evoke them, and it just appears in my mind. The more I focus on a single sensation, the more details start to appear in my mind. As I have already mentioned, this rarely happens to me but when it does, I clearly know what I need to work on afterward.
All of the meditative state types and understanding fear with meditation relationship is the personal experience that does not rely on any scientific sources. So, please be aware that it does not have to be exactly the same for other people since meditation and fear are both individual experiences. Hope it lets you find overlooked but important relationships in your mind.
