How To Want To Meditate

Paving the Way to Consistency

Yesterday my sister mused about how dogs are already sorta there with meditation. 

They’re generally pretty chill and happy.

It made me think of how I see the ‘empty mind’ of meditation, not as an end goal, but as a skill to help us enjoy life, ignite that spark within us and love the things around us (and ourselves). 

We’re a little different than dogs in that we have the ability to focus intentionally, use our analytical minds and design the lives that we imagine.

But, it made me think of how happiness and feeling that sense of joy and freedom is important to acknowledge as an objective of meditation, beyond creating an ‘empty mind’.

Meditation trains our power of focus so that we can be more deliberate about how we think, it gives us more conscious control emotionally, allowing us to experience a better feeling on-purpose, and offers a window to our spirit and to a broader perspective where we can see the world through a lens of appreciation.

Sounds pretty great!

At least emotionally, it’s kinda like dogs - everything’s their favourite! (Except baths??)

So I thought I’d post this cutest dog picture as a beacon of inspiration for us.

All The Questions

Let’s talk about meditation.

As you find your groove with it, it can feel difficult.

Uncomfortable even.

You may not know exactly what to do.

Or don’t know if you’re doing it right.

Not sure what the results should be.

Or what it feels like to truly get it.

Is it actually worth it to sit still everyday?

I used to wonder, can’t I relax in other ways?

Is it just about reducing stress?

Not that lowering cortisol is insignificant, but can it be done in other ways?

Like listening to music or going for a run?

I know many who avoid sitting still and closing their eyes because anxiety arises when they try to quiet their mind.

I’ve felt that.

I’d rather be busy and active then sit in a potential bucket of unpredictable emotion, and its concomitant chemical angst in the body. Am I right?

How does emptying your mind translate into real world change?

Does it last?

How does it work? 

How long should you sit?

What are you actually doing?

Why should you do it everyday?

And how do you start to feel like meditating daily?

All the questions!

Why Meditate Consistently?

Short answer:

Consistency leads to momentum, and momentum leads to transformation.

It’s how to get results.

It’s how to live the questions and become the answers.

It’s the difference between reading about meditation, and actually doing it.

Meditation has the power to change your body, mind and life, but it takes creating a habit (practicing!) and learning a technique.

Easier said than done!

I had technique.

I studied at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, became a yoga instructor and was taught specific ways to meditate through various courses and by many teachers.

Download my FEELIN FREE Meditation Guide to learn how to meditate here. (It’s free!)

But still, I found it hard to be consistent.

Even though I knew I should, it’s like I didn’t have a good enough reason.

It was hard to want to do it.

To me that’s one of the most important parts.

I had lived enough pain in a should and have-to life that I wanted so much to live a want-to life on every level.

I wanted to want to meditate. Not force myself to.

I didn’t want to motivate myself or kick myself into doing it.

I wanted to feel so inspired that wild velociraptors (as my niece and nephew might say) couldn’t keep me from it.

Okay, sooo what if I learned more about the benefits…

The Benefits

Studies have shown that meditating for 20 minutes a day for a few weeks is enough to experience measurable, positive outcomes.

Documented benefits include decreased worry, anxiety, stress, loneliness and depression.

It improves self-acceptance, optimism, relaxation, mood and helps to develop positive social connections.

It increases mental strength and focus, and improves creative thinking as well as immune system and energy levels. It reduces blood pressure and lessens heart and brain problems.

Yet even after knowing all of these benefits, I still found it hard to meditate.

So What Changed?

How did I go from sporadic sessions almost 20 years ago, to doing it every day because I wanted to, knowing that this skill translated directly to a better life?

The short and real answer:

I started to know myself as energy and as an extension of a broader source of energy.

I accepted that everything is vibrational at its basis.

I started to wonder if this really was an attractive universe. Is Law of Attraction a thing?

If it is, then when I change my energetic, vibrational, emotional and thought output, I will necessarily change what I receive.

So then, it’s worth it to spend (a lot of) time honing my vibrational offering.

Meditation seems to be a skill that will help me to do that consciously.

So let’s do the work and see.

That made me sit still to meditate.

Consistently.

It may sound insignificant and woo woo, but it changed everything.

The best part is that you can teach yourself.

Notice how you feel, and notice what comes back to you.

It’s admittedly taken me years to understand the nuances of noticing where I’m focusing and feeling: What it means, what it feels like and how to get there.

Years of working on it deliberately.

I’m still learning every single day. By the hour!

But, becoming sensitive to how you feel, prioritizing feeling good, knowing you’re deserving of feeling good and focusing on what you want is powerful and liberating.

It takes work to focus in the direction of what you want.

Knowing yourself as energy, that we live in a vibrational universe and that there’s a law that is organizing and attracting similar components may help you to know that you are doing much more than ‘sitting still’.

By meditating you are doing immeasurably more than emptying your mind, reducing stress or increasing your ability to concentrate.

Beyond An Empty Mind

Meditation creates a conscious space to become aware of your energy and it trains you to allow yourself to experience positive emotions more easily.

Meditation is a way to free your mind from resistant thought and negative emotion, opening a channel to receive inspiration, on-purpose.

If I could comb my energy, smooth it out, train my emotional and energetic state to feel better, create a more coherent vibe, then maybe the way I acted, thought and what I got would be different too.

Maybe the rendezvous in my life, with people, places, ideas and events would be different.

Maybe my outcomes would be different and more predictable if I consciously refined my energetic (or, in other words, emotional) output consistently.

Maybe as I tuned in, more of my outer experience would be within my control, independent of those external conditions around me.

Once I started to be able to access a quiet mind with ease and consistency, it evolved so that I began to receive flashes of insight, words and ideas, visual images and movie-like daydreams of things I wanted.

It began to open a way to focusing and feeling differently than the life I’d been living.

It began to become feasible to imagine something new and different for myself.

It was like becoming cellularly familiar with the home, relationship, business or lifestyle I wanted, and perhaps most importantly, the specific feeling of it.

Instead of simply saying words, I could begin to feel it into being and truly begin to experience the having of it, before having it.

Meditation carved out a place within me where I could become fascinated, as Abraham Hicks says, with the “intricacies of [my] daydream”.

So let’s break this down…

Energy

A steady diet of Abraham Hicks, yoga, meditation, reading, studying, retreats, processes and experience, gave me a real sense of myself as an energetic being.

Through yoga, I slowly began to consciously feel subtle movement within my body. 

I didn’t truly know before then that I had any real, directable energy of consequence, much less that it could be focused to change my life in a meaningful and lasting way. 

We studied cadavers in university to understand anatomy and I was always struck that we learned so much about the functioning of the body void of breath, movement and the life force and vitality that we all possess.

A systematic yoga sequence of aligned compression and extension, holding stillness, breathing normal and then releasing the posture into stillness helped me to begin to sense subtle movement from within. 

Energy was starting to become discernible.

I was starting to feel that I was more electric than I knew.

Prior to that I knew vibes, and could feel the difference between excitement, depression and frustration, but creating significant effects, within and beyond my body, from an on-purpose focusing of energy, I wasn’t so sure.

I never thought that being aware of a slight buzzing in my physical body might help me to know that I was vibrational at my basis - we did not study this in school!

Or that this personal experience, combined with learning about fascia and the latest in cellular biology, would allow me to open to the possibility that I could change my charge, as it were, and that this charge in my body could be connected to my focus, and by extension, to creating my life more deliberately.

Even though I was open to myself, and everything, being energy - from my fascination of quantum physics to seeing light around my arm like a lightning bolt, from seeing auras to feeling like my walls had consciousness and that plants would ask for water (somehow - don’t ask me how!) to incredible synchronicities - it took years for me to truly accept and know that I was vibration, and that everything was vibration, at its root.

Perhaps there really was some kind of significant, ordered and organizing force at play.

Ultimately, and truthfully, it was two hallucinogenic experiences that allowed me to truly know that everything was indeed changeable and vibrational at its basis.

That changed everything.

Those experiences confirmed a sense I’d had for decades and completely changed my perspective.

A paradigm shift.

The world was changeable.

I was changeable.

I began to see, and feel, that thoughts were energy. 

Frequencies.

I began to feel the application of how brain waves are detectable, measurable and carry information.

That the world around us was movement and consciousness at the most infinitesimal level.

All interacting. All made of the same stuff.

Maybe, through meditation I was effecting real change in the signals I was broadcasting and receiving, and in the interplay between myself and the world.

It began to make sense to consider meditation, and the conscious tending to my energy, in terms of the ideas, experiences and opportunities I was attracting.

Maybe there was a way to hone my signal.

That made me sit still.

This knowing allowed me to see, and feel, that I was actually doing something of consequence by emptying my mind.

I started to realize that with intent I could gently smooth my vibe. 

And that this mattered as to how my life played out. 

A lot.

Opening The Channel

I started to learn that emptying my mind of all thought, allowed me to release the negative (doubts, frustration, worry and anxiety) and open a path to letting in positive source energy.

As Abraham Hicks would say, it’s like allowing a cork, which is naturally buoyant, to float to the surface.

Releasing the resistant, negative pressure allowed it to float.

That’s what emptying the mind does - it releases all thought (especially the momentum of negative thought) and trains us into allowing an elevated emotional state, so the cork floats.

A body mind space where we can more easily access emotions like appreciation, love and a feeling of happiness.

The value of meditation is that it bypasses the analytical mind, shifts our brain waves, gives us a rest from our stress response and gently trains us into that better-feeling.

Shifts that begin to translate chemically in our bodies.

Shifts that make us more receptive to the positive thoughts that align with our desires.

Meditation essentially offers us easier access to a happier life over time, with practice.

A state where life feels good, we feel good, ideas flow and we attract those right time, right place, right people, right vibe moments.

We all have different reasons for meditating - to lower anxiety, to improve concentration and focus, to be calm, to be healthy, to experience transcendental moments and more.

I wanted all of that, as well as a conscious coalescing of synchronous moments on-purpose.

This was a practice that would help me open the channel and allow more of this broader source energy.

And along with that, came inspiration.

It offered a gateway to feeling more energized.

Like tapping into a source of unlimited, always available energy.

Also, if there was a source of infinite intelligence that I was now allowing, could it explain the ideas to call someone at the exact right time or go somewhere that would lead to a synchronous rendezvous?

What I really liked from consistent practice was that I could feel like I was having more control over allowing or disallowing the stream.

The better I felt, the more I was allowing the flow. 

The worse I felt, the more I was focused in opposition to my source. Resisting.

The negative feeling was my indicator, letting me know that I was focused on the things I didn’t want.

Emotions became my compass.

Meditation allowed me to chart out my emotional course with more predictability and discernment.

Sometimes when you meditate it feels like you’re disconnecting from reality but you’re actually connecting to the reality you want.

Bringing It Home

I now understand meditation as a fundamental skill related to mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health. 

A skill to help you to create the overall life experience you want. 

A skill to tap into ideas and visions of what you desire.

It’s funny because that’s what I’d heard, read and learned, but to really experience it and know it, it took considerable application (consistency!) and an acceptance of myself (and the world) as energetic. 

Knowing that I was vibration at my basis, and that I was actually doing something to that vibration, made me want to take the time everyday to refine it. 

Understanding that everything is vibration allowed me to know myself as fundamentally changeable and connected to a powerful stream of energy that I could access and shift constantly. 

This open connection resulted in elevated emotions and the ability to direct my focus more easily in the direction of what I wanted as my meditation turned into visualization, which manifested into changes in my life. 

Sensing energy and practicing consistently turned a conceptual idea into a tangible, repeatable experience. 

I’ve now come to understand meditation as akin to how a highly trained musician learns foundational scales, or how a basketball player practices dribbling, shooting and layups.  

I see now, how in life, the more skilled I am at quieting my mind, it translates into ideas and new behaviours that are inspired rather than motivated.

It’s tapping into a mode of receptivity to the best of yourself. 

By tuning everyday to your inner being, creating a new set point emotionally, you’re creating a reference for what it’s like to be in the world in that smoothed out energy state. 

You’re creating a space for inspiration. 

You’re opening a channel for insight.

You’re positioning yourself for creative flow.

It’s created a sense of home within myself - a place I always have, that feels good, that opens a receptivity to ideas, solutions and offers a feeling of stability.

It’s like creating a secure place within yourself that you can take with you wherever you go, and access whenever you want. 

With this fundamental skill in place, once you can access that elevated, buoyant state easily, it’s a space where daydreams float in. 

Where you can receive the vision or feeling of what you want to create. 

It’s an allowing state rather than a forced state. 

It’s, as David Hawkins might say, power versus force. 

That’s where meditation moves me to today.

From the pleasure of an empty mind, feeling floating or detached, to ideas that flow, visions that play out, and the embodiment of a sense of confidence, clarity, stability, creativity and purpose. 

A sense of self-love, independent of conditions beyond myself. 

A sense of real freedom because I know I can come back to this stream and be re-sourced, and open to a current of energy and ideas.  

Through practice you start to tell the difference between thoughts of stress and worry, that feel forced or pushed, and the received ideas that drift in, that feel easy, good, unique to you and aligned. 

Through practice you begin to translate the essence of a desire (perhaps the emotion of ease, comfort and security) into pictures, words or even an impulse to act (to write, go to a website, call somebody, workout, clean your desk etc).

It took consistent effort, and accepting that I was electric, to know that I was building roots from which I could grow the life I envisioned. 

It’s so true that words don’t teach. Experience is the true teacher.

You can read a book (or these words!) about meditation, and it will guide you, but it won’t develop the practical skill to direct your mind and know your power of focus, and the effect that has on your world. 

Meditation is a powerful and important skill to harness the power of your mind so you can create fulfilling results in your life.

It’s Within You

You can go through life and be absolutely fine without meditating.

But life is so much more juicy with it.

Being more conscious and deliberate about how you’re focusing is exhilarating as you discover the power you have to create what you envision.

A mentor used to say, having doesn’t mean anything unless you know how to use it.

We have powerful minds and sensitive emotions to guide us into ideas that take us to where we want to be.

A practice like meditation will help you to make your mind, body and emotions your friends and learn to use them as powerful tools.

With consistency, you’ll move beyond an empty mind into infinite creative possibility, ignite your spark and more easily access the joy and freedom that is your truth.

With steady practice you’ll feel it, then begin to see it.

Even 20 minutes a day.

Sometimes it takes 17 minutes to get into a state where you experience a quiet mind for a few minutes.

That is enough.

Celebrate that, appreciate the work you did by carving time out and attempting it.

Is the attempt an achievement? I think so!!

Then do it again tomorrow to find the treasure that lies within.

I hope this inspires you to design your life and organize your time in a way that you carve out space every day for yourself.

Over time, with an intention to enjoy a quiet mind, to trust that feeling good is good, to enjoy the space for yourself with no agenda other than simply time to chill out, relax and allow your emotion to rise and stabilize, you will begin to notice changes in yourself - your thoughts, emotions, body and life.

~~~

One quick caveat - I’m not a doctor or a scientist:) I have a degree in Physical and Health Education, as well as a Bachelor of Arts with a Minor in Psychology, and this is a documenting of my experience as a yoga teacher, passionate meditator, tools and processes investigator, life traveler and avid explorer of how to deliberately create a life I love, one that can move with the ebbs and flows, and one that feels pretty great.