This text is part of my ongoing reflection on self-awareness, emotional patterns, and conscious growth.
I don’t know about you, but I used to be the kind of person that felt huge resistance against meditation. It felt spiritually vague to me even though I had no idea of the actual concept. Something in me resisted it so hard that I even laughed about it. I condemned meditation and all people meditating for what appeared to be no reason at all.
Resistance is actually a dimmed version of what I felt at the time. I felt actual hate towards meditation, it seemed a revolting activity to me.
Now, later in life I think it was my programming that was objecting this practice.
I was programmed by media and the people around me to hate spirituality, to distrust it and to avoid it with gusto.
After my point of no return I decided to open myself to all possibilities, even the ones that I had found nauseating. I started reading self-help books and learnt about ‘the great now’. One thing became very clear to me, in the now I was nowhere to be found. I was living inside my head and listening to my thoughts all day every day. The now was covered with a mist of voices in my head and I was unable to really enjoy my now.
In order to change such a situation I needed rigorous action. So yes, I downloaded the app called ‘Headspace’ and started my first meditation trial. I started with five minutes on a daily basis and to be honest, I felt like an idiot. I was mostly yawning for five minutes and couldn’t even count to ten two times before distracting myself again with many useless bantering of the mind.
But I persisted, I really wanted to give it a chance. I was so far out of reality that I knew I needed a new habit to change things over for me.
Surprisingly it took only a couple of weeks before I started noticing changes.
My awareness started to take more space. All of a sudden I had moments of clarity and without even really noticing it, I slowly began to be able to experience the now in actual silence.
No voices in my mind, no one to listen to. Suddenly I could experience my life or at least some parts of it. Where I had always consistently observed my thoughts, I could now really experience moments in my days. And it turned out that I felt grateful for these moments. And gratefulness was something I had never been able to extract out of my thoughts.
It made me think, “who was this person talking to me?”. All my life I had assumed that my thoughts were my own, but after my encounters with meditation I noticed that I was the person listening. Up unto this moment I still have no idea who is projecting thoughts into my mind, but it is definitely not me. I’m a cheerful person and I wish people well. Random thoughts such as “what an ugly outfit” or “of course, because he’s stupid” simply cannot derive from my own reasoning.
By means of meditation the voices in my head started to dim. A pleasant occurrence of course but I still felt I was not there yet. I noticed that I was still listening to the voices in my head like they were true. But they are not (or at least most of the time)! It became clear to me that I needed to take on the role of a judge. I needed to actively judge the thoughts entering my mind before owning them without a cause.
And so we can break meditation down into two solutions for one problem:
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Silencing thoughts;
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Creating a pause between thought and emotion in which you can decide your next step.
Taking on the role of a judge does not mean controlling or suppressing thoughts. It means recognizing that not every thought deserves belief or action. Meditation taught me that I can witness my inner dialogue without immediately identifying with it — and in that pause, choice appears.
The thing is, whenever you think a bad thing and make it real, you only have yourself to bother, simply because this whole ordeal is happening inside your mind. You are creating emotions that you link to certain thoughts and you keep them active in your memory only to pop up whenever you are unaware.
So what is meditation? We have all heard about it and we definitely have strong feelings towards it (good and/or bad) but do you really know what it means to meditate? I can assure you that there is nothing vague about meditation. Meditation is simply the art of being. Letting go of all doing and thinking and practicing awareness. Awareness is nothing more than being in the now. Meditation challenges you to train and expand your awareness. And how to do it? Well, you simply breathe. In and out. And you try to keep track of it.
Really, there is not much more to it. Breathing, and being aware of it. That is it. Still think meditation is vague or trippy? I see meditation more or less as exercise for the brain. We all want to look good on the outside, which is why we exercise. But nobody wants to lose their shit either right?
In comes meditation, exercise for the brain!
So if you are tired of listening to the bullshit running through your hard drive it might be time to sit down a couple of minutes a day. What are you going to loose from trying? How will they know? They won’t. You can even do it secretly, do it on the bathroom for all I care. Just try it out and see where it takes you. For me it started with an application on my phone, which I downloaded and it helped me to understand the concept of training your awareness. If you don’t want to download an application but you are willing to try, you can find various meditation videos online on channels such as YouTube. However you do it, it is up to you, but I can guarantee that you will feel stronger and more in control of your life once you pick up this practice.
Where I mocked meditation for the first thirty years of my life, it turned out to be the simplest tool to meet myself in the now — and to actually enjoy life through the power of awareness.
This text is an open reflection.
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99% of the things we worry about never happen.
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