Meditation Techniques Can Change Your Life

Yesterday I met a psychologist friend.  Over a beer we discussed education, because his work involves studying the effect of schools on children’s behaviour.

He asked me a fundamental question.  He said, “If there was one single skill that you think should be taught in school, what would it be?”

Without hesitation I replied, “Meditation.”

Why do I think we should meditate?  There are many reasons, (stay with me, I’ll tell you what they are!), but the most important is unquestionably that watching your own mind for even a few minutes a day makes you understand something fundamental.

You are NOT your thoughts!

Just take a moment to ponder this, will you?  However old you are, just reflect on what has become of the physical infant you once were.  No cell of that baby’s body now exists.  Even the way your own cells divide and reproduce has changed.  Although it’s almost imperceptible, changes happen to your body daily, don’t they?  You look in the mirror and there’s a wrinkle that wasn’t there yesterday.  Did that have anything to do with you?

No.  So “you” are not your body, are you?  “You” have experiences with your body that are as interesting and curious to you as they would be to any other onlooker!

Do you remember what you had for breakfast on the seventy-third Thursday of your life? No? But it’s a fair bet that you had some kind of breakfast.  Memories are highly selective, and whilst there is evidence to suggest that every single experience is remembered, at a conscious level that’s not our experience is it?

“You” are NOT your memories.  You have memories, just as you have dreams – another experience that appears to be nothing to do with you – these are all things that appear to happen to you.

Thoughts, too, float around in our heads seemingly uncontrolled.  There is an awareness, an entity, that becomes conscious of a thought or a stream of them.

You are not your thoughts!

What are you?

You are a still, quiet, entity that does not age, is not physical and is always at peace.  At your centre you are pure awareness.  When you meditate you get glimpses of that true you.

So what?  Well, even a few moments of pure peace will relieve decades of stress and anxiety, even if you go back to the old patterns when you finish your meditation session.  Gradually, however, the old stress patterns get eroded, like the sea washes a mountain away.  (Only quicker!)

Your true creativity comes through when you meditate regularly.  Instead of the old “censor” that cuts in as soon as you have a good idea, saying something like, “What, you?  You couldn’t do that!”  you find ideas just find their way through … plus a much more important “bonus.”

Spontaneously, you discover that you just “know” how to implement ideas.  Meditation removes the barriers and somehow people, opportunities and inventiveness are peppering your life.  It’s like having access to the source of everything.

In fact, my belief is that meditation isn’t like having access to that source.  “You” are the source of everything!  It’s just that, until you began meditation you couldn’t know that because you put a load of “clutter” in your head about what to “do” instead of how to “be.”  (See yesterday’s post on Living from the Inside Out for more on this)

This is all very well, but you do you learn to meditate?  And which meditation technique should you choose?

I was lucky – I learned transcendental meditation in the 1980s.  But now that’s hard to come by, (especially if you’re in the UK), and expensive to learn I believe.

These days, science understands what happens to our brains in deep meditation and can reproduce it.  We can now combine technology with ancient wisdom and get the same results as sages and gurus could get.

One of the best meditation techniques available on the net is simply called “The Meditation Program” (you can get it from here: http://tinyurl.com/deep-meditation ) based as it is on very sound science and a very profound understanding of what meditation is.

The only requirement is that you use it – regularly!  Make time for meditation in your life, (20 minutes a day is enough to begin), and watch your life change!

You’ll find more self empowering tools at http://www.wizardofwisdom.com

~ by wizardofwisdom on July 15, 2008.