How I Learnt to Meditate
to restore peace in mind and body
Living in this fast-paced world bombarded with information overflow, especially in Hong Kong where every body appreciates real-time response so much, it is difficult to have your mind calm down. Close your eyes, first few seconds seem to be okay, you feel like your mind is blank and you are at peace. Shortly after that, your mind starts to wander and is filled with all sorts of random thoughts streaming from daily life: “Where should I go for dinner later?”, “Is the laundry I did yesterday dry yet?”, “I have to reply this email and that text message.”, “Okay, so for tomorrow, I gonna do this, this and this…”and so on, until you are aware of your consciousness, feel rather agitated and open your eyes to focus back on your task at hand.

How I came to practice yoga
Social worker is an emotion and empathy demanding profession, we often seen people burning out as they do not pay enough attention to self care and work-life balance. I do appreciate work-life balance a lot, and this is a boundary I hold on to so much to safeguard my personal life, as well as quality of my work. If you can’t love yourself, you can’t do much good for others. Therefore, when I first started working as a social worker almost 8 years ago after graduating from university, I decided to take on yoga to establish a good exercise habit to stretch my muscles and relieve my mind from all the stress at work.
First time experience is very crucial to me. If it doesn’t go well, it hinders me to further pursuit it, no matter I know how good it is to me. Even if succeeding experience is good, the poor first time experience still looms from time to time. Knowing well how my mind affects my behavior, I decided to go to a workmate who is an active yogi to do some research first, in which I asked about her yoga experience at the yoga studio, as well as the quality of yoga teachers and environment there.

I am so grateful that she brought me to this awesome yoga studio at Pure Yoga Langham Place, where I was able to enjoy my first yoga lesson (a hot yoga class) with a very positive experience. I still feel lucky that the first few yoga teachers I met are a great inspiration to me, which drives me to keep practicing yoga till now.
How human brain works
I often consider my mind peaceful, as I seldom overthink. If there is something lingering in my mind, I would just do it or write it down to remind myself to do it later. And I rarely suffer from insomnia, not even jet lag. Once my head touches a pillow, or even a cushion, I could fall asleep soundly in minutes. I do get emotional sometimes, just like any other ordinary person. But once I share it with one or two people, I am all good and it won’t bother me anymore. It is not until I started practicing meditation that I learnt how noisy my mind could be.
One reason why meditation is challenging for beginners is that, our brain burns more energy when it is idle.
Accounting for only 2 percent of the body’s weight, it consumes 20% of the body’s energy. Yet the rate at which the brain gobbles glucose (the fuel our brain cells run on) barely budges when we cease performing a physical or mental activity. Even at rest, the brain seems to be engaged in a blizzard of electrical activity, which neuroscientists have historically viewed as useless “noise”.
(Goldman, 2015)

A team led by Stanford neuroscientist Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD, published a study in Neuron back in 2015, which sheds light on why the brain paradoxically appears to exhaust so much energy in what at first glance seems akin to the idling of a car’s engine. Although you wouldn’t know it from just staring at it, the human brain is a complicated orchestra of electrical circuits constantly humming along with one another over the comparatively long distances that separate one part of the organ from another.
In this study, Parvizi and his colleagues were able to dig deeper than brain-imaging studies can usually go, because they could directly record electrical activity in selected areas in living human subjects’ brains. The areas in question are distinct parts of a well-studied brain network called the default mode network, which is perhaps the most energetic of the dozens that have so far been discovered. It is because the default mode network is most active when a person is at rest — lying still with eyes closed or just staring off into space (sounds very much like meditation right?) — or is retrieving an autobiographical memory (“What did I eat for breakfast?”).
Even more, Parvizi and his associates showed that the same pattern of coordinated electrical activity observed in the default mode network regions when experimental subjects were performing an autobiographical-memory task persisted even when those individuals were sound asleep! It adds up to this:
The vast amount of energy consumption by our brain is due to its spontaneous activity at all times when we are not consciously involved in a specific task.
(Parvizi, 2015)
So, how does meditation kick in?
If you think that meditation is having your mind completely blank or idle, you might have to rethink it.
Meditation can be defined as a practice where an individual uses a technique, such as focusing their mind on a particular object, thought or activity, to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm state.
(Feuerstein, Georg. “Yoga and Meditation (Dhyana)”, 2006)
It is easier said than done. But my favourite yoga teacher Cinderella Yau taught me two simple yet useful methods in redirecting focus of my mind:
- Count your breath. Your breath never disappoints nor deceives you. You can count it like “In…Out…In…Out” or “In 1, 2, 3, 4 (until you exhale)…Out 1, 2, 3, 4 (until you inhale again)”
- If counting breath is not your cup of tea, you can pick a favourite sentence, and use it as a mantra to chant it.

Perks of meditation

We might be benefited from practicing meditation in a different way due to individual difference. But here are 8 benefits of meditation that are commonly observed:
- Reduced stress
Meditation is a mind without agitation, and it allows people to take charge of their own nervous system and emotions. - Improved concentration
Meditation has been linked to a number of things that lead to increased ability to focus and improved memory. This greater concentration is related to the increased energy meditation provides, as meditation connects you with your real source of inner energy. - Encourages a healthy lifestyle
- Increased self-awareness
Meditation often teaches people to recognize their own emotion and become more detached from it, which clears your mind and calms you down, as well as allows you to be more comfortable in your own skin. Many meditation practitioners share that when you take more time to dive inside yourself, you grow more comfortable showing who you are. - Increased happiness
Meditation puts you on the fast track to being happy. Studies have shown that brain signaling increases in the left side of the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for positive emotions; while activity decreases in the right side, which is responsible for negative emotions. - Increased acceptance
Meditation helps you accept yourself more through exploring your inner self. - Slows aging
Studies performed by Harvard University show that mediation changes brain physiology to slow aging. Cognition seems to be preserved in meditation practitioners, as they have more gray matter — literally, more brain cells; and longer telomeres, which are the caps on chromosomes indicative of biological age (rather than chronological). - Improved cardiovascular and immune health
Meditation induces relaxation, which increases the compound nitric oxide that causes blood vessels to open up and subsequently, blood pressure to drop.
Rome isn’t built in one day
If you consider yourself a rather rational and down to earth person like me, “mindfulness” might appears to be an alien concept to you at first, and you might even feel clueless about how to practice meditation to gain inner peace.

Stop giving yourself excuses like “I suffer from (self-claimed) attention deficit” or “I am just not good at focusing on my own feelings” to restrict yourself from doing what is good for your mind and body. All you need is a bit of determination to love yourself more, and a bit of practice. Here is a simple guide of how to start meditation in daily life:
- Sit or lie comfortable.
- Close your eyes.
3. Make no effort to control the breath; simply breathe naturally.
4. Focus your attention on the breath and on how the body moves with each inhalation and exhalation. Notice the movement of your body as you breathe. Observe your chest, shoulders, rib cage, and belly. Simply focus your attention on your breath without controlling its pace or intensity. If your mind wanders, return your focus back to your breath.
Maintain this meditation practice for 2 to 3 minutes to start, and then try it for longer periods.

Start your meditation practice today and enjoy a revitalized life with greater capacity to contain life and love for yourself and others.
Happy Meditating!

