Imagine running up flights of stairs for 24 hours. Full speed. Non-stop.
Your muscles screaming out in pain. The trapped feeling of drowning in your own exhaustion.
Every breath harder than the last.
Who would do such a thing? It’s crazy to exert yourself in such a way without any rest.
It’s just as crazy to run around your mind 24 hours a day.
Meditation gives your busy mind a break. Helps you to be aware of your thoughts.
Once you are aware of your thoughts, your thoughts stop controlling you. You then control your thoughts.
Here are some other ways that meditation unlocks enormous potential within you and helps you achieve your goals.
Hear critical thoughts
We talk to ourselves a lot in our head. Even if you hear no voice, you might experience negative feelings about yourself, such a disgust or inferiority.
Meditation brings you self-awareness. This self-awareness helps you scrutinize these thoughts and feelings.
By scrutinizing these negative feelings, we find many of them to be false.
For example:
Sometimes we have thoughts like ‘Ugh, I suck at this. I’m really bad at doing things.’Without meditation and self-awareness we might just accept this as a fact, after all, we experienced yet another failure so it must be true that we suck in general right?
With meditation we can realize this thought like all others will pass. This feeling that ‘I suck at things’ will fade away just like every other feeling.
Yet reality remains unchanged.
By observing this thought in our mind’s eye, we can see that it’s not even true. With consistent practice, we can be above average at most things.
Thus in reality, it’s not that we suck, it’s that we didn’t have the chance to practice it enough.
Meditation helps you bring out compassion. Compassion for yourself. If after observing that thought and realizing you can’t change being bad at something, why beat yourself up over it?
Why suffer over something you can’t change?
Understand reality
My theory is that reality is wrapped by how our mind perceives it.
We can interpret a neutral event in different ways.
For example:
In a social setting, you walk in and suddenly everyone looks at you weird.Do you just think that they are looking at you weirdly, or is it happening in reality?
Is it reaaally possible that 100% of the people in the room dislikes you from the get go?
How many of them even noticed you in the first place?
If your mind jumps to conclusions you might be wrong sometimes.
Reality is like a house in a snow globe. When there is chaos, you can’t perceive it clearly anymore.
Meditation helps you still your mind to see reality more clearly.
Manage stress
Business can be stressful.
If you want to design the perfect way to induce stress, then you need these ingredients.
- An activity where you can never be good enough
- An activity where problems come up regardless of whether you solved the one you are working on
- Some problems are impossible to solve at this time period but you don’t know which one
These are typical challenges business owners face.
That is why the stereotype for the typical businessman is a beer belly.
This guy has been drinking and possibly even smoking a lot. It could be for social reasons, it mostly helps with the stress.
Most people don’t know how to deal with stress well. They use unhealthy and even toxic ways of dealing with it.
Not just drinking and smoking, drugs and sex as well.
Meditation helps you manage stress in 3 ways:
Seeing the problem clearly.
You see things closer to reality when you are in control of your thoughts.
Induce calm
By slowing your breathing and letting go of thoughts and emotions, you’ll arrive at the state of calm
Remember what’s important
As big as your troubles are, meditation helps you to reframe what is really important. You are breathing. You are alive. One day you will be dead and you will be dead forever. The limited time you have being alive is more precious than anything.
Increase focus
It’s common to get distracted easily when we do work. We might think of errands to run or other problems that we are facing.
All distraction starts with thought. Uncontrolled thought.
Our mind is not where we want it to be.
Being in control of our thoughts helps us to be in control of distractions.
We can simply acknowledge that distracting thoughts have arrived, and we just let it pass like a cloud in the sky and continue with our work.
We don’t need to stress over the distracting thought.
We don’t need to be mad at ourselves because we got distracted for a moment.
We simply let it come and go.
This way we can continue to carry out our intention and work to the best of our ability with the fullest concentration in our minds.
Summary
I can safely say that meditation is responsible for 50% of any success I had so far.
From understanding myself, to understanding reality, to understanding others.
Meditation has helped in every way.
If you’re interested to start try out the app ‘Headspace’ or read the book ‘The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle’.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
— Chinese Proverb
The best time to start meditation is today.
