Meditation: Introductory Post
Many people feel meditation is rather silly: who chooses to sit there and do nothing? Why would anyone waste their time like that?
The truth is, those silly people aren’t just doing nothing, or acting like a monk of some kind; what they’re doing is practicing something very difficult for many of us, which is stillness. There’s so much going on when we are living our lives, our brain has to learn to manage all of that, and it doesn’t always do it in an efficient manner that leaves us feeling good.
Meditation allows people to use their body to take control of everything their brain is trying to manage automatically. Your conscious experience is only 5% of the information your brain processes on a regular basis, so there’s an entire 95% that most people aren’t in touch with whatsoever.
Think about it, there’s images popping into our heads about things we are talking or thinking about, there’s the actual processing of ideas as we talk, there’s a countless number of bodily functions being ran simultaneously giving your brain information to process, there’s the knowledge behind tasks you’re focusing on, there’s planning going on for the future and thoughts of the past…. All of this going on. All at once. Every single day. If we were consciously aware of every single one of these things at the same time while trying to live life, we’d go insane and would not function very well.
Our brain is extremely powerful and blocks out a majority of our experience for us to be able to function. Meditation is turning the volume down on everything we normally do and think about, and creating space in our awareness for what frequently gets blocked out, drowned out by the stimulus of living life, or brushed aside due to an unwillingness to think about certain thoughts or emotions that may be difficult to process with everything else going on.
So why would someone sit there and do nothing? It allows them to become an observer of their experience as a passenger, rather than the active participant sitting in the driver’s seat. It’s like enjoying the scenery as a passenger instead of being the driver who can’t take their eyes off the road without endangering everyone involved.
This process is not only extremely therapeutic for the body and mind, but it also builds stress resilience, body awareness, self awareness, emotional intelligence, and imagination. This cascades into affecting every part of our wellness, which is why you’re probably used to seeing it in the “earthy” or “spiritual” scene of society, whereas it’s less practiced and discussed in a corporate environment, for example.
Meditation is a Practice
I’ve heard many people tell me they avoid meditation because “their mind won’t quiet down”, or “they can’t do it right.” These are two popular, well intended, but misinformed views on how to approach practicing meditation.
When something is a “practice”, that means your goal is never mastery, it is to continuously be a student. You are always practicing out of the idea that when we believe ourselves to be a master and have nothing left to learn, it robs us of our opportunity to continue our growth. Instead, the idea of mastery instills us with a sense of superiority that detracts from our ability to help contribute to the growth of others.
When you practice meditation, you start where you are and improve more with each repetition of the activity. To relate this into something a little more commonly understood, think about doing meditation like going to practice for any sport; if you’ve never played soccer before, you’re going to have a really hard time running drills, coordinating your feet, directing the ball in the right place with a forceful kick… all of these get better with practice.
I’ve found people lose this mentality when it comes to meditation. They could have extreme practice in a given sport and when they talk about meditation, they don’t see it through the same lens. All of a sudden, a perfectionistic ideology takes over that they have to be great at it the first time they do it, and because they can’t be, they avoid it entirely, despite understanding the principal of practicing something in another arena.
Where I’m going with this is if you feel these reasons for not meditating apply to you, recognize that the point of the meditation is to sit with what is happening. Release the expectation of what you believe “should” happen and accept and allow what is happening to take shape. For me, it was the first steps out of living a delusional reality and seeing what my actual reality was like.
If you can’t stay focused on your breath to save your life, and notice you’ve been lost in thought for 15 minutes, that is the point of meditation: to notice. It’s not being perfectly zen, it’s noticing where your awareness is, and directing it back to your breath by your own choice.
Some people say “I’m not able to get comfortable enough to meditate.” The point is that you can’t get comfortable, indicating you are not comfortable in your physical body. Learn to sit there with that discomfort and control your focus by coming back to your breath when you get distracted by your positioning.
My Own Experience
When I began meditation, I literally had to lay on the floor and tie my ankles together, and it took me 2+ hours to actually relax my mind. Why? Because I had such severe muscle compensations in my body along with severe weakness, my hips would rotate my legs outward and put severe stress on all of my joints, leading to my breathing making things worse. I had severe anxiety with panic attacks, bipolar disorder, and ADHD running rampant in my brain while focusing on the discomfort of my body; I had every excuse in the book to not meditate… but I chose to persevere because it was the only thing in my entire life that actually gave me a moment of bliss where I wasn’t in pain and wasn’t thinking non-stop. I could just “be.”
While it was impossible to get my mind quiet at first, I had to begin with learning how to make my body comfortable so I could take my focus off of it. The practice of meditating taught me what my body needed to relax, and I only made progress by listening to my body’s needs, which I had neglected for my entire life.
So even though sometimes I’d lay there for an entire hour with my ankles tied together and not be able to relax my mind at all, and other times I would completely relax inside and out, the point wasn’t to have an outcome. The point was to be creating little windows in time where I could take my mind off of everything I was always consumed by thinking about. As one does this repetitiously each day, that window of time starts to widen.
It gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger… until eventually, you relax within a couple of minutes of sitting down and breathing. You find yourself just dropping into a meditative state like you flipped a switch, and your journey for the day’s practice begins. When you’re done, you find that this window of relaxation lingers with you, and your days begin to get easier.
You stop watching the time, you stop being attached to the stressful nature of your experience, and you start observing your behavior in real time. I remember a very specific moment where I realized how much of an effect meditation was having on my experience.
I walked out to my car that was parked in a parking lot as I was leaving from a shop I was at. I observed that there was a dent in my passenger door that wasn’t there before, and there was a small scrape on the paint: someone hit my car door with theirs, and left without leaving any information.
I swear on my life, there wasn’t even a moment where I felt upset. My mind immediately jumped to asking myself: “Am I going to allow myself to lose my peace and get upset at a dented piece of metal with a small paint scrape that doesn’t affect me in any way?” I was met with a quick, internal reply of “No, I’m not. It doesn’t make anything better and this is out of my control at this point, I chose to park here.” I got in my car, and happily drove home and resumed by activities, completely unbothered.
I know people who would have complained about that for a whole week before they were over it. Then they have to do something about it and start complaining about that part of the process. As I had others interact with me in this way, I recognized how different my reaction was, and how my reaction gave me energy rather than having it taken away from me. This reaction I had to my car being dented illustrated to me just how important meditation was in my life, and what a big difference it has made in my experience.
I’ve used meditation to completely transform my life. Having so much muscle and nerve damage throughout my body has led me to retrain my breathing with meditation, because I have to teach my muscles how to breathe properly. It’s also led to having very high body awareness, as I was intentionally focusing on particular muscle groups and stretching them individually using my breathing and concentration.
I’ve used it to visualize mental experiences that have allowed me to release and process early childhood trauma that gave me C-PTSD, which changed the emotional relationship I had with myself. I’ve used it to increase how long my mind’s focus resides in the present moment, which removes that feeling of the day dragging by slowly and my work shifts feeling like days instead of hours. Instead, I just do my work and before I know it, it’s time to leave and go home.
I’ve used meditation to learn the difference between voices that speak up in my mind that motivate certain actions. We all have influences from authority figures over our life that we attach to, and when they become engrained enough, it becomes a voice in our head that motivates us to take action. Not all of these voices are kind, loving, constructive, or rooted in our true values as an individual, but rather the values of the person who spoke to us earlier in life. It has taken practice to identify the different motives of these voices for me, where they come from, and “un”learning listening to the ones that don’t point me in the direction I want to go.
Only in the silencing of my mind can I observe these voices pop up as separate beings so I can identify them. Only in that space can I consciously identify if one of those voices shares my values, or if what they say doesn’t feel right in my body, a voice created by someone else, and it isn’t a voice worth holding on to. Only in releasing my attachment to the values these false voices have taught me to believe can I unearth the values, desires, dreams, and power of my authentic voice that creates natural action in the direction I feel great about going in.
Conclusion
Meditation is a practice anyone can use to better their life. It recalibrates the body and gives your authentic emotions and physical body a chance to align and come to the surface. We are consumed by so much stimulus in life, it’s necessary for us to take time to be with ourselves in silence to allow our body, mind, and spirit to heal from everything that has been tucked away inside ourselves from growing up in a world with so much going on.
I feel this is how many people end up working so, so hard in life to get to where they believe they want to go, only to get there and be tragically disappointed. Whether it’s because they want money, fame/notoriety, a relationship, or experiences that they think will make them happy, they haven’t evaluated the voices that drive them there. They’re doing all of this work that’s motivated by voices that are invested in values that don’t belong to the individual. When that individual reaches the point where they’re “supposed” to be happy because THEY GOT THE THING, and they’re not happy or fulfilled, they have a crisis on their hands.
Some people get lost and have no idea what to do, turning to drugs and substances to fill their void, or the next relationship (or a series of relationships), or some astronomically unrealistic purchase. Some just chug harder on the kool-aid and keep going towards an even more exaggerated version of what they’ve already achieved, thinking maybe they haven’t done enough, still with no idea that what they’re seeking is an emotional experience that they believe is on the other side of something external.
In reality, what they’re seeking is on the other side of something internal; a house cleaning of values that they didn’t consciously choose as their own, a detachment from ideas that don’t actually leave their soul feeling nourished and valuable. They haven’t undergone a rebirth of vitality in their identity, and what the purpose and direction of their life really means to them.
To get there, I just encourage each person to sit with themselves, every day, and just watch their breath as often as possible. Be with themselves for some time and watch what that is like as an observer rather than the person in the driver’ seat. Learn to like and love who you sit with. Your mind, body, and spirit will do the rest for you, even if you have no idea what you’re doing. All it needs is time and space to become what it is capable of being.
Trusting that your body knows the answer, even if you feel intense fear being with it, moves people miles forward ahead of the average person. All you have to do is give it the opportunity to be trusted to do what it needs to do to restore itself to the best it can be, and you as the conscious being inside the body gets to enjoy the experience of being alive, rather than tortured by it.
