River Meditation: A Simple Visualization Practice for a Quiet Mind

Visualization is a form of creative concentration that helps you practice focused awareness, the first stage of meditation.

The initial stages of meditation require little more than quieting the mind and allowing reality to flow into your awareness. Quieting the mind comes through focus. Think of focus as the tool you use to distribute your attention, and thus your energy. You are an energy being, and the act of attention focuses your energy like a laser, energizing whatever you focus on.

When you focus on a thought, you give it energy, giving it more power within your brain and mind. Most of your thoughts are repetitious and cyclical. As each thought comes around and catches your attention, the awareness you place on it re-energizes it, which is where it gets the energy to keep returning. The more attention and emotional power you put on a thought, the more energized its neural pathway becomes. Let thoughts come and go without fixing your attention on them, and they use up the energy stored in their pathways and stop returning. Instead of a constant stream of thoughts, the mind grows quiet, and in time, reality flows in.

You might think of the brain and mind as having both transmitting and receiving capabilities, like a radio transceiver. Any time your mind is filled with thought or emotion, it is transmitting that energy outward. When the mind is quiet, it is not transmitting, and can act as a receiver instead. It is then that pure consciousness floods in, a state characterized by bliss and instantaneous insight.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? All you have to do is focus. The problem is that training your focus away from your thought patterns is difficult at first — you’re trying to break a lifelong habit of being entertained by the mental monologue running constantly in your mind, a conversation that’s about you, and therefore compellingly interesting, especially when emotions are attached.