Last night’s Yoga class was paid a small amount of time on passive meditation and introducing chanting. Within those 5 minutes sitting quietly, I personally found it very hard to control my thoughts not going “wild”.

The sounds around me seemed extremely loud, and I was easily dragged into some particular thoughts from one to another by anything even that was very subtle. I thought about what I should do after this yoga class? What I was going to cook tonight? Would I have enough time to make a soup? The uncompleted knitting project, the driving test, the falling flowers in our courtyard….My god! The girl sitting opposite to me was breathing so heavily…and the blinds haven’t been closed properly as I could feel the cool breeze right coming into the room. The clock was ticking like a timer attached to a bomb that was going to explode. When is this going to finish? And where am I? Is what I am doing really going to benefit my health and mind? etc…….

I just couldn’t stop thinking. In my opinion, passive meditation with extra effort seems even harder than those active meditations that I spontaneously do in my daily life when I was walking, talking, eating, reading or writing. I actually wrote a post about active meditation one week ago, which is quite coincident as at that time, I didn’t even have any idea about active meditation.

As for Chanting, I had an impression that I would probably find it more difficult to understand or handle them. But I did enjoy making a loud sound of “O” till it got faded to ”m” . It felt so different from a normal exhalation. My whole body simply dropped like a heavy rock falling from high, which was such a relief from the entire burden that I have been carrying around.