Musings on Meditation
Do you ever sit in silence?
I don’t think many of us do.
In this modern world, we’re constantly on the go. Our mind’s are filled with activity and stimulus all the time. With mobile phones, computers, and all kinds of different devices, channels and messages coming at you, it’s very distracting. It seems never ending sometimes…
So sitting in silence can seem very strange.
On top of all the distractions and messages that fill our minds and our screens, we’ve got a mind full of thoughts. We’re constantly interpreting, analysing, judging, and telling ourselves stories. It really is never ending.
Just think about it for a minute.
Just stopping and being silent seems strange to most people because we’re always on the go, mentally and physically.
And I’m sure many people do this…
Using your phone as your alarm clock. You’ve got it by your bed. You wake up in the morning and before you’ve even pulled the covers back, you’re looking at your phone. You’re thinking about what you’ve got to do today. Notifications are pinging at you and distracting you. And this is before you’re even fully awake!
This is really bad for our brains.
It’s bad for our health.
It’s bad for actually getting anything done.
And it’s terrible if you want to feel good and positive as you start your day.
This used to be me too. And it really didn’t help me overcome the stress, overwhelm and anxiety I was already suffering from…. And then I discovered meditation.
I’ve really started to understand how powerful it is.
The power of going into a silent space, of taking a journey from activity, into silence.
People have this impression that meditation is about sitting on a cushion in the lotus position chanting “om”. Now of course you can do that. It’s a certain technique. But really, it’s about taking our mind into quieter and quieter levels of awareness.
It’s really about reconnecting with yourself.
I know that sounds strange.
But in all the busyness of life, with the constant distractions, technology, and trying to get 3 million things done in an unrealistic window of time, we lose ourselves a little bit.
With meditation, I’ve discovered you find yourself again through this very simple practice.
And practice is the key word.
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I’ve had people who say I can’t meditate. I can’t do it, can’t sit still, can’t quiet my thoughts. But you see if you develop a daily practice and you’re consistent with it, you start to feel the benefits when you’re out of meditation, as you go about your daily life.
You can’t meditate once and expect your life to change overnight.
It’s just not how it works.
You know, when you were a kid and you couldn’t swim, you weren’t thrown into a swimming pool once and suddenly you were flying up and down the pool like Duncan Goodhew.
So it has to be a daily practice, to truly reap the benefits.
It’s how I start the day.
It’s the first thing I do when I get up in the morning.
I don’t look at my phone.
I don’t switch music on.
And I certainly do not put the news on, because that’s just a disaster.
I meditate for 30 minutes.
I quieten my mind and get ready for the day, get more in tune with myself, with how I’m feeling, and how I’m thinking.
The benefits happen outside of meditation.
It starts to shift your experience of life.
You become more responsive than reactive.
Remember the experiment of Pavlov’s dogs where the same stimulus would get the same reaction? Well, I think a lot of people are stuck in this mode of being, including myself in years past.
Something happens.
You freak out.
You react.
You say something that later you think… “Oh, I probably shouldn’t have said that. I Probably should have thought beforehand.”
But if you develop a meditation practice and you’re consistent with it and you keep tuning yourself back in, you become a little bit more conscious. And increasingly so over time. More conscious of how you think, feel and respond to things.
Just think if everybody was doing this, how different the world would be. Maybe there’d be less wars for a start. Personally I think that this should be taught in schools. I think it should be taught in prisons. I think it should be taught to anybody who is prepared to put the work in and have a daily practice.
Because it makes a difference to how we are.
There was a study that showed when they brought meditation to schools, bullying went down. Surely that’s a good enough reason for this to be something that everybody understands how to do.
Meditation cultivates real self awareness.
If you understand yourself at a much deeper level, then you can reprogram yourself. You can change things for the better. You can stop reacting and behaving in the way that you always have. That is possible.
And the other thing people say… I can’t clear my mind of thoughts.
It’s not about that!
You can’t not have thoughts because no thoughts mean you’re flatlining.
You’re dead.
There’s no brain activity. So that’s just ridiculous. People misunderstand this.
It’s about taking your awareness away from your thoughts into stillness and silence.
You know that old saying silence is golden.
Well, it really is.
It moves you from doing… to just being.
I know for me, meditation really has changed my life.
And in some respects it’s changing my personality too.
It’s changing how I see the world, how I see myself, the way I deal with things that come up that on first thought might be deemed to be really stressful, difficult things.
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Every thought as a start and an end, which means there’s this tiny little gap between them.
And that gap is precious.
With practice, you can slip into that gap a little bit more often. And I’ve experienced this with my own meditation practice. It’s basically where you lose yourself a little bit. You’re not quite sure what happened. You just realise that some time passed and you weren’t thinking lots of things, you weren’t aware.
And it gives you a real rest.
Restful alertness.
Your body is in a complete state of rest, but your mind is still alert.
And this has lots and lots of benefits.
There’s no goal to meditation.
It’s just practicing it on a regular basis.
There’s a great analogy that somebody told me, and I think this sums it up really. Meditation is like diving into a cool, calm pool of water. It doesn’t matter how deep you go, you still get wet. When you come out of the pool, you carry some of that wetness into your daily life.
And over time, you stay wet a little bit longer.
It connects the mind and the body because when you’re in silence and stillness, you can listen to your body. You can feel where there are certain sensations and you can truly start to relax.
It helps overcome the stress response that many of us live our lives in. You know, we come from a time where there’s so much going on, everything seems stressful.
So with meditation, over time and with practice, you can help to reduce that stress response, and not be living on a constant feed of adrenaline and cortisol, which depletes us in so many ways and is so bad for our health.
It lowers blood pressure, reduces our heart rate, reduces inflammation in the body plus a zillion other physical and psychological benefits, ALL backed by science.
My own practice has been quite profound.
I feel the most relaxed and inspired and creative than I ever have and yet it doesn’t mean my to do list has got any smaller. It just means that I don’t put myself through it every day. I take the time twice a day to sit in silence and go inwards.
