What meditation mean?

IN the wake of meditation retreat, my wife one day told me that she got difficulty in explaining how does meditation look like to her curious Singaporean colleague. It's not easy in foreign language if we are not excel in it. I try to answer myself as if somebody practicing other religion ask me one day. To me, meditation is knowing everything happening to our body concurrently with extra care. As an ordinary person, it is easier said to control our mind than trying to do, especially if we are beginner to meditation. At initial days, most of our time would be spent in taming our mind because without concentrated mind, we cannot scrutiny what's happening in our body. Our mind keep thinking one after another until we catch it. 

We are encouraged to know our breath basically. Just to know, breath-in & breath-out. Sound easy but not really. When we start to monitor breath in and out, we cannot focus in mind even for a few minute. Our mind cautiously or incautiously stray around regarding past things or imagine in future. Once we notice our mind is running away, we catch again. It is more like cat and mouse game. At beginning day, it is quite norm for freshers. With some theories we learned from teaching monk, we try to tame our mind first. Then we are suppose to monitor the temporary abstract pain happening to our freeze body. We do not notice that our body keep demanding with daily practice.

When we start meditation, our body is suppose to freeze at certain position for an hour. It's fine for first half an hour for us and second half hour is going to be battle zone. Because our body start to protest by making us painful here and there through the whole body. It might be various sign in protesting, itchy, pain, joint hurt, feel paralyze, etc. When body start pain, our mind start become chaos. Body want to change position in order to mitigate pain. Wisdom brain do not allow to favor body's desire so that we could able to understand our body keep demanding and it is not belong to us. We spent lot of our time to fulfill our body's desire from morning till night. Wash, Makeup, Wear suitable outfit, Eat, Go toilet and so on. But our body is not as love as we love it. It keep demanding. It's not easy lesson to understand. But it can be overcome through meditation practice. 

Once we understand that our body is total burden and hate it, our level of dhamma could be considered one step up against ordinary person. By practicing meditation, we can reduce our greedy mind, loving kindness, excessive wants, unnecessary needy and so on. The fact is that all physical properties are subject to malfunction/destroyed/ruin at the end of the day including ourselves. Our mind keep demand and we always try to fulfill it. But it never satisfy. Once we possess something expensive, the problem may not end there. Our worry in losing those precious things keep haunting us again. Then what's really value in our life? Knowing Truth Dhamma would be undoubtly the best asset which cannot be stolen by external factors/other. To know truth dhamma is to practice meditation. There is no other way to achieve it in this planet.