Meditation 101

‘Sup nerds. 

Introducing the mystical, very confusing, and often-taught-wrong practice of meditation.

Can I get an “oooaaammmYeAAhh?”

First things first: meditation is an ACTIVE practice. NOT a PASSIVE one.

The goal is not to sit crosslegged, eyes closed, fingers pressed in hippie-crystal-girl style, chanting “oam” and thinking about nothing,

Meditation is merely the active pracitice of becoming AWARE of what you are thinking in your mind, what you are feeling in your body, and of any emotions that come up. It honestly has nothing to do with how you position yourself as you can meditate laying down, sitting, standing, walking, fucking, eating, or when shaving your balls. (it’s most easily practiced and learned while still and with closed eyes, but I digress)

Major learning point: YOU are NOT your THOUGHTS.

Meaning: the thoughts you think everyday are not YOURS. They are a combination of your experience mingling with a stream of consciousness.

When engaged in meditation, the goal is to create separation from the thoughts currently in your head and this “thing” that is “you” that “observes” these thoughts. Heady I know, but stay with me. Here’s how this may manifest:

*The scene is you sitting still with eyes closed. It’s your first time trying meditation.*

After you initially close your eyes, you immediately think, “Well this is dumb. I feel foolish right now.”

Meditation is becoming AWARE that you just had the thought, “Well this is dumb. I feel foolish right now.” There’s this separation between that exact thought, and this place of “observation” where you NOTICE that you just had that thought. 

The point of meditation is to withhold judgement of that thought, whether it’s positive or negative. This means that you neither agree nor disagree that the thought of “Well this is dumb. I feel foolish right now” is true and describes your current state. You simply…notice the thought – nothing more. 

The next part of meditation is learning to let go of that thought and give it the space to move on and dissipate from your mind. 

A thought can only be let go when you don’t hold on to it (“well duh”, but wait, hear me out) To release the hold of a thought you have to withhold the judgment of it. If you just allow the thought to exist on its own and don’t judge it as true to you or not true to you, with a little patience and time, that thought will slip away to the stream of consciousness from where it came. 

Then comes the good part, the stillness of the space between thoughts. The “promise land” of mediation. 

When you purely notice a thought and allow it to pass, there is a space before the next thought floats into frame. As you get better and better at mediation, the time that stillness lingers will increase, but the stillness is the “promise land” regardless of how long it remains uninterrupted by another thought. 

It is in this stillness that you reach total immersion into the present moment. Unburdened by past traumas, and free of the weight of the future, the present moment is calm and poised to create. 

It is in this still state of presence that you allow your awareness to expand. I often am led into epiphanies, reason, and ideas when in this stillness. 

I liken meditation to cleaning dirty glasses. Sometimes in your working life, you are seeing through dirty glasses but you don’t know it. You try to answer your own burning questions, figure out how to act, and decipher the world around you, but it’s just not clear. Taking time to find stillness through meditation is like cleaning your dirty glasses. It takes a little bit of work, but once you put on those freshly cleaned glasses, you see things that you either couldn’t see before, or, just looked right past because the little details were all muddied. 

Plenty more on this to come. But that’s a 101 for you earthlings.

Contact me to learn more.