Meditation has given me so much in my life.
Meditation has given me so much peace and made many things in my life easier, and that is something that I love to share with others! However, there are many misconceptions about mindfulness and meditation. There seem to be these little blocks that are standing in the way of people feeling like meditation is for them.
Meditation is not particularly spiritual.
Just to make it clear meditation isn’t necessarily what we see advertised as meditation. We don’t have to be little yogis and yoginis in training in order to meditate. Meditation is not particularly spiritual.
Many of these teachings do come out of wisdom traditions that have passed down this information for centuries. But you don’t need to be a Buddhist to meditate. Meditation is something that can be beneficial for all people.
To meditate correctly, you have to completely stop your thoughts.
If we were to completely cease thinking, we’d either be completely enlightened or we would be dead. So that’s not, the place that we’re trying to begin from. We’re really just trying to begin from the experience of how we are and finding a way to accept ourselves and to allow the experience of having thought to be just that thought and to not identify with those thoughts.
The Importance of Mindfulness
Mindfulness practice enhances attention, it improves emotional regulation, and it reduces stress. that learning to train the mind, we can give ourselves a healthier life. We can give ourselves a better experience of living and of having a brain and of being a human in a body.
I invite you to listen to my full video where I go more in depth about meditation and mindfulness.
Full Transcript
Hi, welcome back to Awakening with Angela. Today I wanted to talk to you about meditation and mindfulness practice. And the reason that I wanna share about this is because meditation has really given me so much in my life. It’s given me so much peace. It’s made so many things easier for me, and that’s something that I just can’t help but wanna share with other people. And specifically what I wanna discuss today is actually some of the misconceptions about mindfulness and meditation.
Because these seem to be little blocks that are standing in the way of people feeling like meditation is for them. And I just want to say that in my view, meditation is for everyone. But I understand that not all types of meditation are for everyone. And so, just to make it clear that meditation isn’t necessarily what we see, advertised as meditation. We don’t have to be little yogis and yoginis in training in order to meditate. Meditation is not particularly spiritual.
Many of these teachings do come out of wisdom traditions that have passed down this information for centuries. But even the Buddha himself said that you don’t need to be a Buddhist to meditate. So that’s really the first myth, is that meditation is something that can be beneficial for all people. And I wanna share something with you about neuroscience that researchers have found that a number of changes in brain activity and structure in the brain have been related to mindfulness meditation.
So we know that mindfulness practice enhances attention, it improves emotional regulation, and it reduces stress. So that sounds like that would be good for anybody.
So this is something that it’s helpful for us to understand that learning to train the mind, we can give ourselves a healthier life. We can give ourselves a better experience of living and of having a brain [laughter] and of being a human in a body. So another thing that often comes forward when people are talking about meditation, that either they haven’t tried it before, or even if they have tried it, it’s very common for people to say that they can’t meditate, that their mind is just too busy, they don’t know how to sit still.
And that they don’t know how to quiet their mind. And this seems to actually have some sort of connection to some kinds of self judgment. Actually. It’s almost as if people feel that they are unique in having a chatty mind. And I’m just here to tell you that we all think, we all think thoughts, and it’s a very normal thing, and it’s going on all day, every day.
And that meditating, it’s not really about stopping thought. If we were to completely cease thinking, we’d either be completely enlightened or we would be dead. So that’s not, the place that we’re trying to begin from. We’re really just trying to begin from the experience of how we are and finding a way to accept ourselves and to allow the experience of having thought to be just that thought and to not identify with those thoughts.
Now, this takes practice, and that’s why we call it meditation practice. And there’s many different ways that mindfulness and meditation can be practiced. We can do different walking meditations, movement meditations. There’s also different kinds of mindfulness practices that are somewhat like a living meditation practice, if you will. So an example of this is that I find it helpful that when I go to wash my hands, perhaps after going to the restroom, I sometimes imagine that as I’m washing my hands and then running the water over them, that I’m washing away thoughts and stress.
So here I’m being consciously present with my own experience, understanding that yes, there is thought, yes, there is maybe perhaps some kind of sensation in my body, but just for that time, I am just allowing myself to breathe and to be, and to just feel the sensation of the soap and to be grateful for clean water, and to just allow this to be a way that I can allow this feeling to somehow pull this focus that the brain so often wants to pull us to just because there’s thought present.
So in this understanding that we all have thoughts, it’s also important to understand that… We don’t have to believe everything we think, and that we are not actually the thinker of thought. That thought is just naturally arising. It’s actually just what our minds do. So it’s not something that we need to feel badly about, or judge ourselves for. I wanna share an excerpt from a book called The Wise’s Heart. This is from a wonderful teacher, Jack Kornfield, and in it he says, just as the salivary glands, secrete saliva, the mind secretes thoughts, the thoughts think themselves. This thought production is not bad. It’s simply what minds do. Buddhist Psychology directs us to investigate both the content of those thoughts and the process of thinking itself. So these salivary glands in our mouth just secreting Saliva just as they are right now. As I’m talking to you, and just as I’m sure you’ve experienced, when perhaps you smell food cooking and then all of a sudden your mouth waters, and there might even be a thought that arises like, and that it’s just happening.
It’s your Nervous System just responding to some kind of Stimulus. And so the thoughts are arising in the same way. And learning to train the mind to be less lost in the stories and the comments that the mind is always making. This is something that we practice in these different Mindfulness and meditation spaces because the more that we can bring ourselves back to a place of holding attention on just one thing and releasing this habit of thinking, then the more often we’re able to return to that place.
And we can, in a way, actually help the brain to feel that it’s come to a place of Homeostasis with body. So that just because there are different Stimulus that is coming into the experience, different events, different people, different things, there’s all kinds of stuff going on in the world. We all know that, that we think about, and there’s all kinds of relationships and we have all sorts of feelings and emotions. And so there’s all these things that the mind can comment on. And being able to learn to sit with these feelings, sit with these experiences, and just breathe.
And just allow, this is actually how we begin to let go of this thinking mind. Now that doesn’t mean if you start meditating, you go and sit down now and you begin meditating and you do what I just told you that you’re, gonna be stellar at it. It’s gonna take practice, like I said, and it’s very common for people for a long time as they’re getting started into meditation to just forget that they’re focusing on their breathing, or that they’re on a mindful walk. I go and wash my hands all the time and I forget to do that practice, but when I do, it’s so much more impactful and it gives me the ability to self-regulate in that moment and to consciously bring my self to a place of gratitude and a grace of rest just for that time. And these little bits they add up, I kind of like to think of it the way that it’s healthy for us to get into a workout routine.
Most people go to working out, especially after they haven’t done it for a long time, or if they’re new to it, they go into it with this real Enthusiasm that often will say, I’m gonna work out five days a week. I’m gonna go run every morning. And usually for most people, after two, three days, your body is screaming, no. And it’s very hard to keep up with. And so then we then realize that, Oh, I probably am overdoing it. And a lot of times people will quit at that point. But if you stick with it and maybe you just start walking for 30 minutes in the morning and do that for, perhaps a month, then maybe you can walk for an hour.
And, so on. And so this is the same sort of idea, but we can make it even more simplistic with Mindfulness because it’s a lot to ask any person to just be still for 20 minutes and to quiet your mind. That’s, actually a big ask. That’s, like, let’s go run a marathon. You just got here, you just showed up. You don’t even have the right equipment. But let’s just go do that.
So with mindfulness, you can begin with something as simple as the practice that I shared, that I do myself with washing hands. But you can also do it with simple mindful breathing Techniques where you can just pause at different times during the day and just allow yourself three cleansing Breaths where you fully witness the breath, come into the body and filling up your Lungs, and then breathing out fully. Let’s try it together. Breathing in, breathing out. Sometimes it’s helpful to count one, two, three, four as you Breathe in and hold from two and then out four, three, two, one. And breathing in and breathing out.
And even there, I know I feel calmer, I hope you feel calmer. It’s relaxing to the body, our bodies live on oxygen, our brains eat oxygen, so any opportunity that we have to breathe, we’re nourishing our body. And any opportunity that we have to just focus our attention like that on one thing and to let go of everything else in life, that’s like us going to the gym and doing three reps.
And that can be a building block that you can utilize in your life that I guarantee you, if you do that, you start doing that on a regular basis, you will find more present awareness, you will find more calm. And then if you want to take it a step further and just take a full minute every morning to breathe and just witness and just to laugh and see what happens, and then perhaps you can advance to five minutes or who knows what, but either way, this is just to demystify the misconception that I don’t have any time to meditate, because if you are breathing, you can meditate. So there’s all kinds of fun things that I would love to teach you about mindfulness and meditation, and that is a lot of what I offer in my practice here at Awakening with Angela.
I actually have an area in the home that is devoted to meditation practice, and it’s devoted to all forms of meditation practice, so it’s not just seated silent meditation, it also has movement meditation, it also has different kinds of dance incorporated, and I also teach meditation in my coaching sessions. So if any of this sounds interesting to you, and you’d like to check it out, I would love for you to visit the website and to read over all the services that I have, and understand that some form of meditation and mindfulness is actually incorporated into all of my work, and that it actually supports my ability to offer this work to you, and that in many of the hands-on healing sessions, my clients will often tell me that it feels as though they are being meditated while I am working with them…
And this is what we would call a transmission of presence, and this is basically that I have practiced honing the skill of staying in that space of that single pointed focus of just breathing and being, that I’m actually able to share that space of calm by touching other people, and being with them, and helping their body to regulate off of the regulation that I have been able to hone and cultivate within my own being, and so I would love to share more of this with you, and if you would like to talk more and see how maybe I could be helpful to your experience, or if you just have curiosity, please feel free to find the service that offers a 20-minute free consultation, which is under the category selector for coaching, and I look forward to seeing you soon, and wish you many happy, healthy, deep breaths, and moments of peace.
