While meditation has become synonymous with spirituality, it's widely misunderstood and distorted.
Which is a shame, because the way this tool is brought to light and life in the mystical tradition of Kabbalah, it's very powerful, doable, and holds the key to overcoming depression, taking control of our lives, and achieving emotional, spiritual, and physical success in life.
Let's start from the source.
The Hebrew word for meditation is hitbonenut, which literally means to work towards further understanding something.
It's related to the word binah, which is the second of the soul's three intellectual faculties.
The first, chochmah (wisdom), is the flash of insight or initial comprehension we have of a concept that is powerful and raw, yet superficial in that we don't perceive the details as separate from the totality.
You can forget trying to explain it to someone else.
Next, comes binah (understanding) which entails considering and dissecting the subject in all its details and subtleties.
Here's the point at which you could finally convey something intelligible to your friend who's been wondering what's on your mind.
So, meditation really refers to contemplating a concept ever-deeper, plumbing its depths and forging a stronger and stronger connection to it.
Breathing might help you focus on the concept, but the movement of air, on its own, is not the Kabbalah's intent by meditation.
Things get even more interesting with the third stage: daat.
And it's here that Kabbalah's approach to wisdom differs from other spiritual paths and forms of soul wisdom.
While daat literally means "to know," Biblically it's used to connote intimate relations between man and woman, which in effect is a powerful bonding, union, and coming together of energies and purposes.
That's exactly the ultimate goal of wisdom: learn the general concept well; delve deeply into it via meditative contemplation, pulling it apart and dissecting while forming a relationship with its every movement; and then become one with it, make it your thoughts and feelings, become the concept and attach yourself to it until it's the air you breath and the thoughts in your mind.
And then what happens? You get emotions.
Deeply contemplating something until you unite with it produces emotions.
Why? Because according to Kabbalah, one's emotions lie dormant within the mind until they are born out of a related intellectual contemplation.
Contemplate fear or awe producing thoughts and that's the emotion you get.
In other words, if after deeply considering a subject you don't feel at least some inkling to move towards something or away from something else, your meditation is lacking.
But you already do this, except you don't realize.
You walk down the street on a hot day and see someone else walking with a chocolate ice cream cone; your favorite.
Although you keep waking and look elsewhere, you continue contemplating the ice cream until you can taste it in your mouth and are now scanning the stores for ice cream - chocolate of course.
Or, the last movie you saw that really moved you.
If you closed your eyes right now you'd be able to bring up the scenes and sounds, and even re-experience the emotions you felt when watching the movie, the sadness and loss when a character dies in the end.
While a movie does the work for you and makes it easy, but less real, the formula is the same: learn something, review it several times until you can contemplate it in your mind with needing the words in front of you, and then fasten your mind to it like a nail in the wall...
and the emotions will come as you connect to the concept and it becomes what you think about.
Tired of the negative thoughts, self-doubts, fears and worries and anxieties? Then change them, by meditating.
We'll discuss specific meditations in upcoming articles.