I never in a 100 years thought that I would ever try meditation

It’s not that I’m a closed off person, actually far from it, but meditation just seemed hokey and kind of far fetched. The only people I knew that meditated were long haired hippies and equally long haired (but probably in a man bun) yoga instructors and I didn’t exactly identify with either of them. Besides, I always felt like I was a pretty intelligent and self aware person and I had a pretty good handle on my mind and body so what could meditation offer me?

This past year a friend introduced me to a podcast called The Tim Ferriss Show that really changed my life. I won’t rant on about how awesome it is (and it is pretty awesome) but I will say it’s definitely worth checking out. Tim does these amazing transparent interviews with hugely successful people and tries to extract simple commonalities about how they achieved their success. I began to notice one very apparent and quite surprising common practice between everyone from world renowned body builders to high level investors, almost every single one used some kind of mindfulness or meditation practice.

This perplexed me as I had never expected those types of people to go in for something so ‘new-age’ or ‘granola.’ I wondered what they knew that I didn’t? Why would they bother spending their extremely valuable time on something like meditation? That was the first time I considered that ‘maybe there was more to this idea than I first thought.’

When I originally chose to ‘learn meditation’ as one of my 1 month challenges it was really because of nothing more than curiosity from the question above. I thought I was doing all these different personal development experiments so why not see what all the fuss was about. 3 months later I was feeling maxed out, stressed out, and spread thin and when I decided to reevaluate my schedule and make this month my meditation month I was all of a sudden more than just little curious. I was really hoping meditation would be the key to solving these real problems that were negatively impacting my life. The only problem was, I had no idea how meditation was supposed to do that.

I never really understood what meditation was all about, but from the outside it seemed cryptic and complicated. I assumed, like most people that to properly meditate you needed to join yoga classes, light incense or candles, put on instrumental music and bend your body into really weird positions on the floor. I thought meditation was about trying really hard to think of absolutely nothing; that the goal was to focus so hard on nothing that you somehow entered an enlightened state where you could eliminate all the stress and clutter from you life.

The whole idea obviously seemed kind of ‘woo woo’ to me but I figured ‘if it could fix my issues than it was worth a shot.’ I started by downloading the meditation app Headspace which had a free 10 day beginners guided meditation program and I began starting my day with 10 minutes of uninterrupted meditation.

After going through the course for a couple of days I found that shamefully my preconceived notions of meditation were no where close to reality. Meditation was actually much less complicated and far more simple of a concept and practice than I thought. To meditate all you needed was a quiet-ish space, a comfy seat and 10 minutes. The point of meditation wasn’t to think really hard about nothing, in fact the harder I tried to think about nothing the more my head would fill with thoughts about everything. The purpose of meditation was to attempt to quiet the mind by relaxing and focusing your attention internally, not to suppress thoughts, but to gain control of the chaos of your internal mind to give yourself a better perspective on your life and to become more present and aware in the moment.

I still think I’m making this sound more complicated than it actually is so I would suggest watching this video from Smile Mind explaining meditation, mindfulness and how our brains work (only 3 minutes).

Simple but not easy

The idea of taking time to step outside of our daily internal chaos and gain some perspective on our emotions may sound simple but the execution is not. Unfortunately my efforts to quiet my mind and create a sense of calm were constantly hammered by distractions. Just like in daily life all kinds of ideas, stresses, noises, etc pop into your head and cause your brain to un-focus and to wonder off, so the trick was to try and build a sense of control. Both in daily life and in meditation if you can gain that control over your emotions and distractions then you can focus on the present, feel less stressed about the future or past and be more aware of your emotions.

So how does it work?

I don’t think I can sum this up any better than Headspace does in this funny animated video.

So does it work?

To be honest, I don’t know yet. I’ve only been doing it for 8 days so far but I can tell you I am enjoying the process. I’ve noticed that while meditating I’ve progressively been getting better at going for longer spurts with a clear mind and daily I’ve noticed I’ve been becoming more aware of my thoughts and actions. Just taking the 10 minutes a day first thing before my day gets rolling has also helped me start with a clearer more focused outlook to each day. I’m still exploring the complete value of meditation and it’s possible effect (or solution) to my problems but I’m very eager to see what my perception will be by the end of this month.

Still a skeptic? – Debunking the myths

Committing to trying meditation has caused me to personally open my eyes to some of its benefits, but since you are probably reading this never having tried it you might still be unconvinced. You may still have the same negative predisposition as I did before I tried it. “Seems hockey and I wouldn’t want to/don’t need to try it.”

Well before you dismiss meditation completely as not for you have a look at these video’s below and they may help in overcoming some of your bias towards it. What I would suggest is if you really want to know and understand meditation, give it a try! Like a real try… it won’t hurt you and you never know, for 10 minutes a day (which is really nothing) it could be the thing that changes your life for the better.