Over the past couple of months since school began again I started from not being able to follow a regular meditation schedule to really not even meditating at all.  I think that a big part of it was the fact that I was afraid to even start due to the fear of being distracted during mid-meditation.  The biggest problem is that I have not really been aware that meditation can be done anywhere in any situation.  Meditation is simply mindfulness.  Though it is good to sit down in our meditative posture and send out good energy through prayer every day, I have found that there are multiple levels of meditation.  If we are mindful of all the clutter running through our heads when we are walking, working, and partaking in our everyday lives, then we can easily filter and and get rid of those bad feelings, thoughts, and emotions that we start to experience.  After we do this then everything we do becomes smoother and more efficient due to the lack of distractions holding us back, and with efficiency we learn to work at a much quicker pace as well, allowing us more time to actually sit down and go into our deepest forms of meditation.  After I started doing this again I felt the world lift off of my shoulders.

I guess this is just my advice through experience to those who practice the Buddhist walk without meditation.  Many of those people are still pulled into the negativity and distraction of everyday life and find it hard to be truly happy.  Enlightenment is a step by step process, and if we don’t take every step and skip one, then we will eventually be exhausted by taking large quick steps and stumble to a stop.  If we keep stopping over and over and time keeps catching up with us, then we will simply have to start over and over and Nirvana will seems like nothing more than an inaccessible goal.  Buddhism is made of pieces, and if we are missing pieces, then the puzzle will never be complete.  We wouldn’t want pages to be missing from the book we are reading, or nails to be missing from the house in which we live in would we? The book would make no since and wouldn’t be entertaining nor enlightening, and the house we are living in would fall to the ground much quicker than that with all of it parts.  So I ask you:  think about the importance of meditation, and ask yourself, why am I struggling and rushing up a stair set skipping multiple steps,  when smoothly taking one step at a time would making my life experience so much easier?

The Buddha that sits in the tank of my crowntail beta "Stravinsky."

First off, I would like to tell you why I am making this blog. I am in no way trying to teach my own form of enlightenment, and I don’t claim to be any kind of monk or guru in Buddhism.  In fact, I have just started the path of Buddhism myself.  My over all goal with this blog is not just to give something for others to read on Buddhism, but to provide myself with more understanding of my path by expressing and documenting my findings and ideas.  From past experiences, I’ve found that writing down what one has learned and experienced has made learning so much easier and it even makes one think and discover even more in the subject they are delving in.

Over the past couple of years or so I have referred to myself as a Buddhist, but I had never really understood what the path of Buddhism was.  I just gave and took what I wanted from it.  Don’t get me wrong: an individualistic approach to Buddhism is not wrong at all, and in fact the Buddha never claimed that his teachings were right, he did however invite people to challenge his philosophies in order to prove the legitimacy of them, and when one does this self research, it brings the individual to discover self enlightenment.

For the time that I have been a Buddhist I discovered much information about the subject, and I probably know just as much about it as a religious scholar would, but over time I realized even if I know the book work of Buddhism, I don’t understand what the Buddha was truly trying to teach.  In order for an individual to completely understand Buddhism, one must live the Buddha’s teachings, for the true understanding of what the Buddha was teaching is enlightenment, and for one to be enlightened about something, one must discover everything about it.

After saying all of that, I plan on trying to post here on a daily basis.  For those who read, I hope that I have helped you in either your general lives or your path to enlightenment if you have decided to walk the path for yourselves.  Consider this day one of a new walk on a pathway to enlightenment.