100 Ways To Live A Better Life – 64. Meditate Daily

It’s the easiest thing you can do. True meditation acts like a mind emptier, leaving you open to the whole flow of the sensations and experiences you would otherwise ignore. You don’t even need a complicated technique, meditate as you see fit.

In my experience, the biggest obstacle in experiencing the benefits of meditation is an overweighted agenda. We simply don’t find time to do it. So, scheduling some meditation time in advance will clearly help. I know it helped me.

Meditating first thing in the morning, for instance, before even starting the day, that would be quite an appropriate, and most of the time, free, time spot. Morning meditation always leave my mind clear and relaxed for the day.

Silencing you mind through meditation will open an incredibly powerful flow of energy reaching out.

3 Benefits You Get If You Meditate Daily

Let’s clarify a few things before going further. Let’s see first what meditation is and what is not.

I don’t claim I’m a master at meditation, I’m just a humble practitioner and I have a lot to learn in this area. But just by practicing for so many years I learned there are a few important distinctions between what we know meditation is, or, in other terms, the “mainstream” meditation, and what it really is.

First of all, meditation is not spacing out. It’s not detachment from the current reality. This is a big misunderstanding. Meditation is pure focus. When you meditate, you shift into what I call “real focus” and the world shrinks to that point you’re concentrating to and everything else loses consistency. That’s why sometimes we read that meditation “suspends” the world. It doesn’t do that by canceling our senses, on the contrary, it does it by concentrating our focus (which is, by the way, the energy we use to create reality).

Second, meditation is not context related. It’s not something that you’re doing only when sitting in lotus, in a quiet room. In the beginning, you may need a supporting context, but only because you’re not trained. As you progress in this discipline of training your focus, you will find it easier and easier to meditate in various other contexts. Even when you’re working, you can take a 10 minutes break, walk to the nearest bench and meditate for 5 minutes.

And third, meditation doesn’t have to lead us somewhere. It’s not a path. It’s a tool. A tool we use to erase the drawings we sketched on top of reality as we learned our way in this world. Everything we know now was learned at some point. The mere fact that you can read this now means you learn it in the past. But the fact that you read doesn’t mean you’re understanding directly. It’s just a convention. You recreate images in your mind, based on some signs we both understand. It’s an agreement between you and me that these words means something. Try to speak in English to a Chinese person: suddenly, the agreement is gone.

That convention, that type of agreement works on many levels in our lives. We built thousands and thousands of agreements that we use on autopilot each and every day with the only goal to put some order in our universe, to make some sense of our lives. To a certain point, we succeeded at it.

But that order is temporary and fragile. Beneath that temporary order lies something more profound, something that will survive more than we can imagine, or understand now.

So, what meditation ultimately does, by silencing, by erasing the learned structures of the mind, is to carry us deeper and deeper within those layers of acquired behavior, remove them one by one and uncover, or discover, if your prefer, our true, indestructible self.

Now, suppose you did incorporate this habit into your life. You’re meditating daily for at least 10 to 20 minutes. Here are 3 simple consequences of this.

1. Increased Clarity

As the drawing we sketched on top of reality gets more and more transparent, we start to understand better the inner workings of reality. It’s not something very obvious, like an a-ha moment (although you may have them, at least in the beginning) but more like an increased predictability of our universe. We start to know that if we do a certain thing, something is really bound to happen. Like, if we yell at someone, we will be yelled at.

2. Better Energy Management

“Energy management” is a rather pompous term for our daily level of presence. For instance, when we’re experience extreme feelings, like anger of exhilaration, we’re using a lot of energy. Anger, especially, is a big drainer. A good energy management will mean that we’ll go through the day with a constant, fulfilling level of energy. Meditation helps maintain that level. It will make us less prone to anger and frustration.

3. Better Focus At Small Tasks

As we learn how to focus (and silence the mind chatter) we will begin to translate this into our daily routine. It will happen naturally, we will simply become better at what we do, because we can put an uninterrupted focus to the task, for longer amounts of time. We will talk clearer and shorter, we will finish things faster and with less interruptions, we will have fewer moments of withdrawal or absence.

Curious already? Then go ahead and start meditating now. It’s the easiest thing, all you need is your mind and the will to bring silence to it.

further reading

The Diamond Cutter

2014 In Review




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