Three Honest & Empowering Insights on Meditation
What you’ll learn on the inside of a meditation practice
As an avid learner and lover of self-improvement, you crave the feeling of being fully present. You know life is full of demands, distractions, and illusions that can keep you stuck or pull you off course, but you’ve tasted the sweetness of flow and focus enough to want more and you know it’s possible to obtain it.
Meditation is a modest, but mighty pillar in the self-improvement community. Among its many other benefits, it provides a sense of calm focus, increased trust in your intuition, more self-awareness, and the feeling of gratitude for the opportunities that lie in every challenge.
Beginning a meditation practice is relatively easy. It doesn’t cost money or require special equipment or abilities. Maintaining a meditation practice, however, can be a challenge. We live in a world that idolizes productivity, so it can be difficult for us to “be” instead of “do.”
From the inside of your meditation practice, whether it’s the next time you meditate or months from now, something will shift. What you will discover is not mysterious or otherworldly, but it is grounding and empowering— and these are qualities we can all use more of.
Here are 3 honest insights on meditation and what you’ll learn somewhere along your journey:
1. You’re both the vehicle and the driver.
“It all begins with the breath.” — Possibly every guided meditation and yoga teacher, ever.
Chances are you’ve heard an expression before about how meditation is all about the breath. It’s so simple that it’s almost cliche, but I can’t dismiss how important using conscious breathing for meditation is.
Our autonomic nervous system is a control system that regulates many of our bodily functions, including our respiratory rate, heart rate, digestion, urination, pupillary response, and sexual arousal.
For a moment, think about how you breathe all day long. You don’t even notice you’re doing it, but you know it must be happening because you’re alive. Most of the breaths you take are silent, short, and shallow, going no deeper than the upper cavity of your chest.
Short and shallow breathing triggers the sympathetic nervous system — the part of our autonomic nervous system that is responsible for keeping you safe from danger — which activates “fight or flight mode” and increases the tension in your body.
When you breathe deeply, taking the breath down into the diaphragm, you begin to relax, your sympathetic nervous system is able to regulate, and then allows the “rest and digest” mechanism of the parasympathetic nervous system to take over. The parasympathetic nervous system ensures that in normal, safe situations, your bodily functions are running regularly.
These are automatic, neurobiological responses, just like you breathe and your heart beats without having to constantly think about them, your autonomic nervous system functions on its own.
On the other hand, you can also intentionally create some of these responses. For example: if you have a cardio-intensive workout or watch a scary movie, your heart rate and breath speed up, and if you meditate or relax on the beach, your heart rate and breath slow down. You chose to do all of these things to create a specific reaction in your mind and body, whether an exciting pump of adrenaline or a refreshing break.
You’re both the vehicle and the driver.
In meditation, you voluntarily bring yourself into a state where you can examine the conscious and subconscious parts of your mind. Controlled breathing or breathwork are techniques that can help you achieve heightened self-awareness and flow state.
“We try many ways to be awake, but our society keeps us forgetful. Meditation is to help us remember.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
2. Movement before meditation is medicinal.
When I first began practicing yoga 6 years ago, I didn’t realize that it was more than just postures. By going deeper into my practice and studying more, I learned that meditation is one of the eight facets that make up yoga.
Asanas (yoga poses) were actually intended to prepare the body for meditation. Savasana isn’t just the relaxation at the end — it’s the point of everything that leads up to it.
A lot of people have a hard time sitting still in meditation, and there’s a simple solution for this: get ready to meditate by moving.
“The body benefits from movement, and the mind benefits from stillness.” — Sakong Mipham
Everyone has both feminine (yin) and masculine (yang) energy. Through movement and exercise, we tap into our direct, actionable yang energy. By going into meditation, we tap into our intuitive and fluid yin energy.
At the cross-section of science and spirituality, movement and meditation meet to optimize your practice.
Physical exercise increases your levels of dopamine and serotonin, which help you feel happy, relaxed, and focused. You also release endorphins, giving you the infamous feeling of a “runner’s high.”
Exercise is even shown to reduce some of the negative effects of PTSD by desensitizing several of the physiological symptoms (such as rapid heart rate), stabilizing the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, which is the part of the brain responsible for the release of cortisol, and more.
When you move your body, stagnant energy and pent up emotions have a chance to be transformed into something positive and fulfilling. Even on days when working out feels like a chore, you feel more fulfilled and grounded afterward.
Sitting in meditation after a workout to observe your body, breath, thoughts, or emotions with an open mind may be the antidote to your restlessness and help you feel more balanced throughout the day.
3. Your worst (or best) meditation is not your final destination.
One day, I was sitting in meditation and had the spontaneous realization that my life was changing and that this moment in time would never happen again. There was nothing extraordinary going on in my life that prompted it, I just felt an overwhelming sense of joy in my rising consciousness.
In the instance I realized this, I could fully observe myself. I was aware of everything happening in my body and I felt calm, yet alert, and optimistic.
“In moments when you feel happy, do you also watch yourself being happy? When you happen to get angry, is some part of you totally free from anger?” — Deepak Chopra
During moments like that, time ceases to matter, expectations and rules fall away, and I experience my life from the perspective of my highest self.
I didn’t reach nirvana and now spend my life as cool as a cucumber with all my questions answered, but I did access a higher state of consciousness.
There are many times I still experience anxiety or sadness, but I know that I will not always feel that way.
My awareness frees me from the burden of having to fix feelings that my ego labels as being negative and instead allows me to just feel them.
Sometimes, I fall back into the trap of wanting to do anything to make uncomfortable feelings stop, which leads to more frustration and feelings of inadequacy. Anger is especially good at tricking people into this thought pattern because anger makes us prideful and protective.
The simple key for forgiving yourself when you get pulled into the drama is to not feel bad for feeling bad.
When you realize that you no longer have to feel bad for feeling bad, you let yourself off the hook for all the times you tried to choke down toxic positivity.
When you observe your own negativity- the parts of you that you would rather tuck away or fix- you cease to spiritually bypass what makes you human.
On your best days, you will meditate and step out of your experience to savor it.
On your worst days, you will meditate as a way to step out of the drama of self-rejection.
The point of meditation is to not opt-out of the human experience, but to create a space between stimulus and response, and observe it.
Every time you redirect your self-criticism into a learning opportunity, you improve the dynamics of your life.
The focus, balance, gratitude, and resilience you can cultivate from meditation will improve your life personally and professionally. When you find stillness, your intuition can speak up.
Like anything though, it takes consistency to build strength in your meditation — that’s why it’s called a practice. It’s about building an ongoing relationship with the deepest and most fundamental parts of yourself.
All you need to do is trade as little as a few minutes of your day to show up for your meditation practice, the same way you show up for your other ventures and goals.
