Why even bother to meditate when you get restless or bored, when you fidget or keep watching the clock? Or when your thoughts are jumping around inside your head at 60 miles an hour? What’s the point?
As you develop a meditation practice, you may very well find yourself distracted especially in the beginning. I refer to distractions as anything that takes your attention away from that which you are focusing on whether generated by someone or something else or yourself.
“I cannot sit still that long”, “It’s too noisy”, “I can’t stop my thoughts”, “ Meditation is hard to do”, “I’ll be late”, “I need to go workout so I don’t have time”, “Will it interrupt with my purple happy pill”, “I’ve got too much going on right now”, and so on and so on. I’ve just highlighted some of the comments my “before learning” meditation students have said to me.
These diversions are the excuses you tell yourself that you are not able to meditate, the 101 reasons not to meditate. Well, maybe not 101 but many none-the-less.
When you include these reasons as part of your self-talk bites, you convince yourself you are unable to meditate, which justifies your beliefs that meditation doesn’t work or that you tried it but it’s not for you, or that it’s a total waste of time. In fact, it has been suggested that the practice of meditation helps tune-out distractions. This, in turn, crosses over into your daily life allowing for better concentration and focusing ability. Dr. Deepak Chopra states, “Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there - buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.”
An MIT article posted April 2011 reported: A study in the journal Brain Research Bulletin, the researchers found that people trained to meditate over an eight-week period were better able to control a specific type of brain was called alpha rhythms. “These activity patterns are thought to minimize distractions, to diminish the likelihood stimuli will grab your attention,” says Christopher Moore, an MIT neuroscientist and senior author of the paper. “Our data indicate that meditation training makes you better at focusing, in part by allowing you to better regulate how things that arise will impact you.”
After learning meditation, my students have expressed how much a regular daily meditation practice has changed their lives. They feel more centered, less stressed, and able to sleep better and handle challenging situations less reactively. In today’s times, I know meditation is a necessity of life. Give yourself a gift and learn to meditate.
I’ve said this before… If you don’t want to spend time with you why should anyone else want to spend time with you? Meditation is the way to get in touch with your true authentic self.
The best way to learn to meditate is with an instructor. In the meanwhile, you can start meditating today.
- Find a comfortable quiet place to sit with your eyes closed. Give the body permission to relax. Place your hands in your lap with the palms facing upward in a receiving position.
- Now simply observe the breath in and out. Remember, you are observing the breath and not controlling it. Be easy as you let the body breath itself with its own natural rhythm.
- Observe any sensations in the body, as you remain aware of the present moment.
- As thoughts come in, do not try to stop them. Whenever you notice your mind has drifted just gently return to observing the breath.
- Have no expectations, no perceived notions of what your experience is to be.
Do this for 15 minutes a day everyday to start and begin to notice the difference in your daily life. Let me know how it goes. Share your comments.
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