Meditation Through Origami

Through the practice of meditation, a person can become very relaxed and it can also help with finding inner peace. There are a lot of ways to go about meditating and one of them is through the practice of simple origami. Because of the focus needed to complete origami, it goes hand in hand with meditation as a way of relaxing the body and mind.

Throughout history, there have been many ways to meditate; one of the most famous is sitting in the lotus position, that means with your legs crossed, and chanting the well-known “ohm’s”. While this has been made into a great many jokes and parodies, it is one way of attaining a meditative state.

Origami and meditation have a few things in common which make them an ideal partnership:

1) Focus – in order to meditate or complete origami, you need to be focused on a single thing and let everything else slip away.

2) Quiet – meditation and origami are both best done in a quiet and relaxed area where there are few to no interruptions.

3) Practice – in order to make origami as well as meditate, you need to practice each art until you are able to easily complete the task at hand.

4) Less can be more – in meditation, a simple focus or thought can lead you deep into a relaxing state as can working on a simple, easy to make origami like a rose.

Each of these are important to both meditation as well as origami and because of this, the two work very well together. Take an origami as simple as a rose and practice making this until it becomes second nature to you, as if you could do it blindfolded. Now, while you are doing this you will be totally focused on the task at hand; namely making the rose.

You will find yourself only concentrating on the folding of the rose and it will take on an almost hypnotic manner as your muscles move without thinking. As you do this you clear your mind and only think of the rose and each fold as you do it. This is the essence of meditation. Clearing your mind of all distractions but one simple focus allows your body to release the stress of the day.

This type of practice takes time to master as you practice folding the paper over and over. The more you do it, the more you improve and the deeper your mediation will become which, in turn, will result in better origami and deeper relaxation. Over time, making a frog or crane and seeing it hop off or fly off will become another aspect of your meditation.

You will also find that your origami folding techniques and skills become better the more you are able to enter into a meditative state while practicing origami. The better you get at the origami, the deeper and more relaxing your meditations will become and you will find this continues to grow more and more over time.