2 Ways Meditation has Changed My Life
How meditation has improved my mental wellbeing and unlocked the benefits of my daily practices and routines.
Ever found yourself completing a daily habit or routine just so you feel like less of a miserable couch potato instead of doing it because you get value from it? I certainly have. Unfortunately, I think many of us approach daily habits and practices in this way.
But what if one daily practice could make you feel both less miserable and enable you to get real value from your daily habits and routines? As you have probably guessed from the title, I think that practice is meditation.
1: How meditation has improved my mental wellbeing
I am sure you have heard about the research discussing the benefits of meditation on mental health, so I will not shovel even more of it down your throat. Instead, I want to focus on the practical ways in which it has alleviated suffering in my life.
There are doubtless many things that are constantly going on in your life that cause you stress and unhappiness; yet you choose to do them or let them into your life regardless. I am not talking about overt events like giving a speech to a large audience, I am speaking about the small things that easily go unnoticed by a distracted mind wrapped in thought 24/7.
I had friendships that rested entirely on being able to moan about similar things together or I would start my day by scrolling through Instagram. These things did not cause any sudden anxiety or sadness. Yet these and many other small actions and activities constituted a slow drip of sadness, bitterness and anxiety into my life. The cumulative effect is that I was left feeling rather miserable and unmotivated most of the time.
Developing mindfulness allowed me to notice the moment a situation or action started to make me that little bit more sad or anxious, and in noticing it I was better able to either make peace with it or eliminate it from my life. I began to stop scrolling through Instagram the moment I felt the first pang of envy, I started hanging out with different sorts of people who gave me energy rather than sapping it away.
Once I started eliminating unnecessary suffering from my life I started to feel a little more motivated and inspired: I wanted to start enriching my life through more practices and habits that seemed to add value to other’s lives. Here, mindfulness was useful in an entirely new and unexpected way.
2: How meditation helped me unlock the benefits of my daily routines and practices
I think many of us spend our lives taking the ways in which we react to the world around us for granted. Perhaps you have never felt any emotional reaction to hearing music, or tend to wonder what all the fuss is about when looking at a sunset. These reactions to the world around us seem fixed and unlikely to change.
This was certainly the case for me, so I turned to external structures like routines or habits when I felt unsatisfied in life. Unfortunately, despite the mass of content online providing these external solutions I didn’t seem to be able to get what is promised from these routines and habits.
What I was missing in all this was incredibly simple: How my mind was interfacing with the various practices I was trying to incorporate into my life. What I was missing was that if I wasn’t able to pay careful attention to the contents of my conscious experience; I was never gonna get the same value out of my daily practices as those I admire did.
The difference between me and the cultured people I look up to was not the amount of poetry they have read, it was that at some point in their life their mind was drawn to that type activity in a powerful way.
Before I started meditating, my mind was closed off to this kind of experience because it was too distracted and anxious. But by making me more mindful, meditation enabled me to actually appreciate the effect these experiences were having on me.
A prime example of this for me is reading. Before I had a daily meditation practice I would force myself to read. I would set some arbitrary goal of ten pages a day for example. I would suffer through, not really taking in anything from the book, let alone even thinking about what I could conceivably hope to get from it.
But once I started to become more present, I found myself actually finding the books interesting: I realised that being engaged in a book was rather an enjoyable experience. The result is that I no longer have to set a daily target of pages to read because I actually want to read. I want to read because I actually paid attention to what I was reading for more than ten seconds and then started to find it incredibly interesting and fulfilling.
This is just one small example of how meditation has enabled me to unlock the benefits and enjoyment I was missing from my routines and habits for so long.
So if this all sounds good to you, here's how to get started…
How to Get Started Meditating
For most beginners, the best way to get started meditating is usually to have someone guide you through the practice. The most convenient way to access this guidance is most likely going to be through a guided meditation app, which usually offer ten minute guided sessions. Just ten minutes of meditation a day is enough to start getting benefits from your practice.
Headspace is one of the more popular options, and offers great discounts on the price of a combined subscription with Spotify. If you are a student, you even get a Headspace subscription for free with your discounted Spotify subscription. I used Headspace for years and loved how it slowly guided me, through a series of courses, from a fully guided meditation practice through to a fully unguided practice.
The only other app I have tried is the Waking Up app, which provides a deeper and more philosophical approach to your practice. I have been using the app over the past couple of weeks and have enjoyed the greater depth and detail the app brings to the practice. However, I would still recommend the Headspace app first and foremost for anyone looking to jump into meditation for the first time.
Take Away
There are plenty of ways to get started with this meditation, but the best and easiest option is usually going to be a guided meditation app, which provides an affordable way to help improve your practice over time.
Remember, this simple practice takes as little as ten minutes a day, but can do two incredibly powerful things. Firstly, it can eliminate the suffering that keeps you unmotivated and closed off from the world. Second, it creates a mind that is better able to employ and appreciate the practices and habits you choose to fill the space left by your now alleviated stress and anxiety.
