So many are talking about how meditation can cure depression, your ADHD, ADD, etc. It has so many health benefits, it's going to help you attract more money, It's going to help you be happier. You can Google meditation benefits and find 9 million of them. But what most people never talk about is I what I think to be the most important element. Let's dive into the truth about meditation ...
If you want to be able to use meditation to tap into a deeper level of enlightenment, if you want to be able to use meditation for the maximum benefits available, stick around until the end of this blog.
I figured this out when I went to a monastery in Thailand and meditated for 10 - 14 hours a day for a few weeks. Let's dive right into this blog!
First of all, it doesn't have to be complicated. The mind gets involved, right? And the mind thinks that there is a certain technique you have to do. It has to make perfect sense of everything to its own rationalizing capabilities. If anybody's trying to make it complicated, they probably don't know what they're talking about. That's just the truth.
Peace is simple. The point of meditation is to cultivate peace. Now you can utilize this increased energy to attract what you want to handle weather it's handling relationships better, stress better, or whatever you want to do with it. But peace is simple.
It begins with the rising and falling of your belly as you become aware of your own breath. The reason that you do this is to cultivate presence. The point of meditation is to be in the present moment.
Think about how much suffering we create by living in the past and living in anticipation of an unknown in the future. That's what robs us of so much peace, joy, happiness, and freedom. We're truly deserving of all those things and destined to have them. But you have to be present. Anything that over complicates being present is not about being present. Because being present is simple. It's not always easy, but it's certainly simple.
So you do not need to sit perfectly tall with your legs crossed. One time someone told me that unless you sit like a monk in full lotus pose, you cannot meditate properly or be enlightened. I thought, man, you're out of your mind. It doesn't matter the position.
Lie Down if you'd like. There's such a thing as walking meditations, too. The whole point is to just get comfortable and cultivate peace and get present. So right now, if just for a moment, go like this, rising with your own breath as you inhale it's rising, exhale and falling
Do this a few times. Inhale, exhale. Feel your shoulder blades relaxing and falling away from your ears and down your back. Breathing in, breathing out.
wasn't very hard, was it? Now imagine if you do that for five minutes. Imagine if you do that for 10 minutes. Imagine if you do it for three minutes twice a day for the rest of your life, you're going to feel better. That's the only purpose of meditation. Feel better. Cultivate more presence so you can apply that energy into the rest of your life.
Start today. Start today by focusing on the rising and the falling of your own breath. Remember, peace is simple. All the good stuff starts when you get uncomfortable. Why? Because that's the stuff you have/get to let go.
So often, we attach to the mind and the thoughts we have and the mind pulls us out of the meditation. So the whole purpose is when you feel a little bit uncomfortable when your back gets a little bit tight or, when you remember you forgot to call somebody, or you're pretty sure your dog just ate your homework, you bring your awareness back to the rising and falling of your own breath in Vipassana which is just the style that I shared with you.
Every time your mind wants to take you off on a tangent, be easy with yourself and refocus back on your breath and the rising and falling of your belly. It should be a continuous breath. As soon as the inhale meets the top or your breath, flow into the exhale and repeat at the bottom of the exhale. The more quiet and slow you can be, the better. But remember this takes some practice so be patient and consistent.
You can have an intense physiological reaction to anxiety that will never occur. Like someone may be dumping you, but then they end up wanting to marry you. But your insecurity thinks they're going to dump you in a week or you think you're going to get fired or you think the economy's about to collapse or you think someone's going to attack you in your house, but it never happens.
But you think it is and you're attaching to the thoughts. So then you fire the chemicals in your brain and you have the physiological sensation in your nervous system and you feel all the sensations of it like it were really happening. But it hasn't actually happened. these are the types of thoughts we get to release in practing meditation which is great news because those thoughts are keeping us in a frequency of lack and anxiety.
Muhammad Ali used to say "I don'tI don't start counting my pushups until I get tired.".
It's the same thing in meditation. When the monkey mind is starting to go the most crazy, is when most people stop and say they aren't good at meditation. When you breathe through the monkey mind and keep coming back to your breath, that's when you have the best time and the best ability in order to practice presence.
The monkey mind isn't necessarily a "bad" thing. The monkey mind will tell you what is holding you back and what the toxic patterns are if you listen. Most people's problem in life is they don't notice that they are not their thoughts.
They are not their thoughts. Your thoughts create reality, but you are not your thoughts. You're the awareness behind them. You're the soul behind the energy of them. but people don't know, so they believe everything they think. The ironic part is that most of our thoughts are abslutley ludicrous! A lot of your thoughts aren't true.
A lot of your thoughts are rationalizations that aren't relevant. But we start believing them and they create our reality.
So many people think they are too young, too old, too fat, too skinny, too pretty, too ugly, not smart enough, too short, and all these beliefs that bring us down and simply are not true. in Buddhism, they call this whole physical reality, Maya. Maya means the world of illusion.
So all of those reasons are illusions. But then we identify with the thoughts and you have the most powerful supercomputer in the world called your brain. So you create all these chemical reactions as if those things are real and then you're not in the present.
I'm not saying you need to go meditate for hours and hours. It just means that when your mind is telling you to stop and distracts you, maybe stay another 30 seconds or another five minutes. Your mind is starting to go on a tangent. That's the best time to be like, okay, this is thinking, thinking, thinking, rising, falling of my breath.
And as you keep going back to thinking, keep going back to the rising and falling of your breath and becoming more and more present. What you discover is how your brain is inhibiting you and blocking you from attracting what you want.
But we're generally moving so fast and there's so much stimulation and distraction that we can't discover the true nature of our own thoughts. And psychologists say 70% of your thoughts are negative and redundant. So meditation is a practice where when it gets uncomfortable, you can sit and really see your thoughts for what they are and and learn how to not attach to them.
So what I invite you to do is forget about doing meditation right or wrong. Sit down or lie down. However you are more comfortable. The whole point is to get away from right and wrong, right? Rumi has a quote, famous Sufi poet, and he said, "beyond right and wrong, there is a field. I will meet you there.".
That's the field that we're trying to tap into. It's within yourself. The Kingdom of Heaven is within and the only way to get to that field is to become present.
So we're no longer overly attaching to every thought that comes or pulls us away from surrendering. Remember, you are not your thoughts. If thoughts come up, feel free to say that to yourself and focus back to your breath.
Make sure to use my software The Second Mind if you haven't yet. I created a technology when I learned all of this. The mind carries the emotions of the past. It's memorizing the neurocircuitry of the brain. And so that's what stops us a lot of from attracting what we want and living the life we desire. It's that the brain has been wired to old limiting realities and old emotions. So I created a software, a technology, using the latest advances in neuroscience about neuro-plasticity Hebbs law that says that brain cells that fire together wire together.
Meaning when you feel emotions based on things happening, your brain captures that emotion and will continue to associate that negative emotion to the thing. So you can rewire your brain to attract what you want in life by rewriting those emotions through meditating with the second mind technology. It's free to demo. Just tap the button below to use it 🙂
I'm excited to hear about all the peace, joy, enlightenment, clarity, focus, purpose, and the great things that you attract back to you by raising your energy from this meditation practice. Have an absolutely amazing day. I'll talk to you soon.
