if you can focus you can succeed, and if you cant you cant, its a white and black thing. meditation has for long been used as a tool to recharge brain muscles and maintain concentration. today I will share a chapter of my book that vividly states the hows of meditation in a clear and systematic way.
Meditation and Success: The Relationship
During most of our waking hours, our minds are engaged in a continuous internal dialogue in which the meaning and emotional attachments of one thought trigger the next. We find ourselves bombarded by internal images and thoughts. Some are images of the future, what we expect out of our lives, and memories of the past. A snippet of music can trigger the darkest memories of our childhood and bring that sad emotion alive. This thought leads to a shift of our moods throughout the day and at times results in the complete destruction of our daily focus. Although our minds are capable of creating life-affirming stories, they also have what neuroscientists refer to as a negative bias, a tendency to pay more attention to negative experiences than to positive ones.
Again, modern days have become so competitive that multitasking seems to be more of a necessity rather than a unique skill. However, when you are doing several things at a time, you can’t possibly do any of them to the best of your ability. It’s just not possible no matter the nobleness of your intentions. When you multitask, you end up doing more work, i.e. more quality compromised work.
external factors and your personal life can’t let you give your work the best of you. An average person spends at least 46.9% of their working hours thinking about something else other than what they’re doing. But there is a remedy for all these daily distractions that cause low productivity. This remedy is meditation.
To enrich our productivity potentials, we need to pay special to our minds instead of pushing them beyond limits. They need maintenance. Meditation is the practice of turning your mind attention to a single point of reference. In other words, meditation is turning your mind away from distracting thoughts and focusing on the present moment.
You must have heard your friends and family tell you, “Take time for yourself.” What they mean is that you should meditate. However, meditation is easier said than done. Very few people meditate because most of us don’t know its powerful effect on our lives. Meditation enhances focus on creativity, concentration, relaxation, and mental faculties. A daily meditation practice will supercharge your mind by reducing information overload. When your mind is not working overtime to analyze information, you can concentrate on a particular thought or aspect of your life for a specific time.
Meditation increases focus by calming down the mind, i.e. by reducing the number of active thoughts. It helps increase our concentration on the subject at hand. It has a historical value and many consider it a gateway to cosmic energy.
Although meditation has existed for over 3,500 years, the scientific community has only been studying meditation for fifty years. In one mind-defying example, scientists have recorded Buddhist monks use a meditative practice called “gtum-mo” to control their body temperatures. Despite this, no one quite understands the biological mechanism behind meditation just yet. However, studies often demonstrate that meditation has far-reaching benefits including fostering better concentration and memory. Meditation is perhaps the only mental exercise that has the ability to improve cognition and focus.
In a study on how meditation increases focus, researchers recruited a group of sixty students. Half meditated for an average of five hours a day for three months. The remaining half was the control group and placed on a waiting list. This was to rule out that the passage of time was not to blame for any differences between the groups. Later, researchers asked both groups to watch a series of lines flash on a screen. Participants were to click a mouse when they saw a line that was shorter than the others were. This detailed-oriented test forced the participants to focus intently. Results found that those who meditated were significantly more likely to see increasingly small differences in the lines.
While the notion that sitting quietly and alone can improve your productivity may sound bizarre, it’s true. Meditating for even a short time will improve your entire day. Most global brands advise their employees to practice daily mindfulness or meditation to improve their productivity, efficiency, and concentration during their working hours. A mere 30-minutes of meditation every day will keep you focused and in the right mood throughout the day. People who make Meditation their daily habit get more results with the least effort possible.
How and When to Meditate
How and when do you meditate? You can’t just go meditate anywhere with no strategized plan. You ought to be in a quiet environment, maybe in a room by yourself where there are no distracting noises or commotions. Even then, meditating for the first time will prove frustrating. With so many thoughts going through our minds, many people have a problem starting meditation or even sitting for it. To most beginners, it’s indeed frustrating and painful because it’s the first encounter.
I remember when I was starting meditation myself. My thinking was that since meditation means not thinking at all, what I would do is just sit there for ten are twenty minutes and just not think. Then I would go like “now” am not thinking for the next twenty minutes…, but wait a minute, that’s a thought, am thinking again, how do I stop thinking? I don’t know how; that’s more thoughts now “shit!” This continued for a while and I’d end up frustrated after those 20 minutes.
The problem, as I’ve learned, is that you can’t stop thinking because thinking is involuntary.
What I didn’t realize then is that meditation is not about trying to control your thoughts. When you are meditating, the point is to concentrate on one thing and allow your other thoughts to pass by. By defining meditation as not thinking, it does not necessarily mean that you don’t think at all. No! it only means not attempting to control your thinking. An easy way to get started is to listen to your breath: focus on your breathing, and let your thoughts be: let go off the need to control them.
Our breath is intimately connected to our state of mind—we have observed in our lives that when we get angry, the breath has a certain quality and speed to it, when we are sad, the breath changes its pattern and length, and when we are happy, the breath moves in a different rhythm. The breath has an intimate connection with our emotions and state of mind. When we use the breath skillfully for a few minutes, with ancient yogic techniques that have stood the test of thousands of years of human use, we can effortlessly calm the mind and nervous system. Daily practice of these techniques brings our mind more and more into the present moment and trains it to stay there.
The Do Nothing Meditation Technique
I’m going to show you an easy meditation technique so that you don’t have to struggle to start as I did. It’s called the do nothing meditation technique. It’s the technique that I feel on when all other techniques failed to work and I got massive results out of it. It’s the technique I would recommend to beginners and to those struggling to make meditation habitual. The do nothing meditation technique is a technique anyone can rely on when others fail to work.
Like any other meditation technique, it starts by:
1)Look for a quiet place with no distraction, noises, or commotion.
2)The most important thing is that you should have a timer. Set the duration for your meditation session—maybe 30 or 40 minutes. For beginners, twenty minutes is okay; however, you can start with any session you feel comfortable with—even 5 minutes is OK. Of critical importance is making sure you practice this at least every day or twice a day if possible.
3)You can sit with your legs crossed if you are comfortable with that; if not, you can just sit in a chair or on the bed. Either way, make sure you keep your back as straight as possible without tensing it.
4)You can choose to sit with your eyes open to avoid falling asleep or if you are a beginner, close your eyes to avoid your visual stimuli.
5)Center yourself by recognizing and making yourself aware that you sat down to do meditation. This takes you from the normal mode to a relaxation mode where you are only concerned with the present. Take a couple of relaxing breaths and became aware that thoughts are arising in your mind. However, do not let them carry you away.
6)Then the actual technique begins. Center yourself and say, “now am doing nothing.” Defocus your gaze so that your eyes are looking at somewhere in space, and not at any particular object. Let go off trying control your attention and your mental process. Let your mind do whatever it wants to. That’s the essence of the do nothing process. You let your mind do what it wants to do at its own accord; you let it be free and you accept it without trying to control or resist it.
7)Obviously, scents, thoughts, feelings, itches, pains, memories, will come up. Accept them and do not attempt to stop any of them; do not try to control any of them. Exercise complete acceptance of the present moment whatever it is: whether it is good, bad, neutral, or boring. Even though many negative feelings will come, don’t try to control or label them as bad. Totally release your control and let your mind wander wherever it wants; let it do the monkey dance if it wants to. The mind will try to take you to a million directions, don’t resist any of them
8)What will happen then is you will feel guilty of letting all those thoughts be without control because you are trying to be a good mediator. The trick here is to let go the urge to control your thoughts, that’s the whole technique. Let go off all that you can and if you can’t let go off thoughts, just let them be. You can’t be a hundred percent perfect. Make your mind as loose as you can. When you strain to let go off all thoughts, you’re not loosening your mind. Inasmuch as you release control over your thoughts, you will try to exert control over your body, like opening and closing your eyes, scratching your itches. Don’t do any of those either.
The technique may look easy and stupid to be true but really what makes it effective. The good thing with it is that it’s really hard to get wrong. The only way you can do it wrong is if you try to do it perfectly. Like trying to get somewhere and achieve a goal.
The mind will spend the greatest percentage of your time during this process wandering into thoughts and things that have nothing to do with meditation, the “monkey mind.” However, in that little time that your mind will not be doing the monkey shadow, the five to one percent, it’ll remain focused on the present.
The good thing is that even the monkey mind is healthy too. It does not seem like meditation but it’s cool.
The great thing about this technique is that it’s the easiest. You can do it when you are tired, sleepy when you forget all other techniques, or when all other techniques don’t seem to work. It doesn’t need skills or effort: It’s a default meditation process you can fall back on. Because it’s so easy, you may be tempted to doubt it. Before you do that, let me explain what it does to your mind.
What this technique does to your mind is that it simply loosens the mind. Imagine you had a monkey that’s been caged in a five by five foot cage for a whole year or maybe five. It’s been there and it’s angry; it has got all this energy and it’s bouncing around all the walls of the cage. Now imagine walking up to the cage, unlocking the lock, opening the door, and the monkey bolting out. With all this energy and anger, it’s ready to tear you apart and then as the monkey is bolting out of the cage, you hand it a bag of hand grenades and set it loose on the city. That’s basically what you are doing to your mind.
You’re setting your mind loose. Like that caged monkey, sometimes all your mind will want to do is scream crazy things inside your voice. It wants to imagine crazy things like you flying or jumping down big cliffs or just something nasty such as detonating a nuclear bomb. Whatever your mind wants to come up with, the crazy schemes and ideas—maybe attending an orgy or something most if not all the time—we don’t let that happen because it’s breaking the law, rules, and ethics of human society. So the mind is always clustered and fool of trash and ideas, some crazy, others worthwhile but we don’t let them be. We don’t let the mind explore these ideas even though it has great enthusiasms and energy in the inside, we never give it an opportunity to releases the great pressure it ought’s to release. What happens to your mind is that it is filled with those memories, images and nasty ideas that doesn’t give some breathing space for the mind to at least absorbed some new information or be still enough to focus and all your mind needs now is a bulge, to release and keep off those memories, images, and all the trash. And it feels weird to just say, “Hey! Stop controlling your mind for 20 minutes.” It’s one of the things that you haven’t done in your life before.
One common thing that the ego does is that it’s the control feed. We let it control everything. When you try to take that away from the ego, it doesn’t like it and it resists. Therefore, at first, you may experience a kind of backlash where your mind says, “Okay you are letting me loose. Okay if you are really letting me loose, let me test you.’’ Then your mind wants to see what the limits are. Then it realizes that there are really no limits, it can do whatever it wants.
After the technique, your mind has released all these pressure, the stress, and anxiety and it’s released and ready for the next move. It’s like when you wake up in the morning after a long tiresome day, you feel your mind all fresh, relaxed, and energized to start the day. Then you can attend to even the most overwhelming task with ease.
This is what you ought to know about meditation, this is how it works. Meditation is like a purging. It is purging your conscious and subconscious mind. You have a lot of trash in your mind; some of this trash is decades old and your mind is dealing and struggling with all those memories and images you know.
When you force your mind to focus still and fully in the present moment, it will keep moving around. To stabilize your mind, what it has to do is it has to purge that crap that is making it anxious. When you push your mind to stop thinking, it creates even more resistance because of that inside pressure. To reduce this to pressure purging has to happen. Purging is what happens when you practice the do nothing meditation technique: you let the monkey mind release all it’s pent-up energy, trash, and craziness.
What you have to do is don’t expect results after just one input. Don’t be frustrated if it doesn’t seem to work on the first day. Consider meditation a gym for your mind. You can’t go to the gym today and wake up the following day with a perfect body. Achieving results takes time and consistency.
I would recommend you practice this technique for at least two weeks or a month before judging it. If you do it consistently, before you get to the end of a week or month, you will realize, “aah! It finally purged.” From there on, you’ll start experiencing a new level of calmness. Don’t stop there though. Make meditating a ritual because that pressure and trash will always build and need a release.
Meditation is like servicing a car: It does not have to break down before you decide to service it. Service your mind as often as you can—through meditation—and it’ll run like a well-serviced supercomputer.
#credits to myself author of the science of willingness.
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Willingness-Achieve-Goals-Destined/dp/1976724481
https://thesiliconvalleymind.quora.com/