How To Meditate Like A Pro - By Reddit Users
"I’ve been meditating for about 1 year seriously (seriously meaning every day).
I experimented with doing 1 hour concentration based meditation sessions just staring at one spot.
I’ve done mindfulness meditations feeling the body, breathing into the body, bringing certain feelings up.
I’ve tried different apps like Headspace or Calm
And everything in between.
Meditation is a great way to quiet your mind and get present to the moment.
To cool your brain waves off from High Beta Waves (overanalyzing / obsessing over a problem or person / stressed out / survival mode) and into Alpha Waves (relaxed / calm / empowered / creative mode).
Daily meditation has allowed me to quit drinking, smoking cigarettes, vaping, using a JUUL, smoking weed and eating meat.
It’s also allowed me to have greater levels of focus allowing me to read books at a faster rate, build a business and become less reactive to social pressure, negativity or external stimulus / conditions.
It also saved my life—I wanted to kill myself at the start of 2019.
I lost my job, had my car repossessed and slipped into a deep depression where I mainly slept all day, every day because I had so little energy, I couldn’t even get out of bed or shower.
Basic activities and hobbies were completely exhausting and I felt powerless to change my life.
So, below is a list of current meditation mindsets, strategies and tips I use daily to harness the most transformative power from this practice and art form.
Create your own safe space.
It’s important to have a space where you can sit upright to meditate that’s preferably quiet but if it’s loud you can also use that to get present as well.
Our brain associates with everything.
If I say kitchen, you think “Food/dishes.”
If I say bathroom, you think “toilet/shower/brush teeth.”
You want a space that you can begin associating “Meditation” with.
Also, if you meditate in your bed—you’re more likely to fall asleep.
- Meditate right when you wake up. 3. Don’t check your phone for 30 minutes.
As soon as you open your eyes, your consciousness pours back into your body and your brain begins intaking all the stimulus from your environment, you remember all your problems, you remember your life story / identity and your current personality (how you think, act and feel).
That’s years of conditioning coming into play.
You’re immediately placed into a reactive state.
Your consciousness is reacting to everything 3D and physical.
Most people immediately pick up their phone and amplify this state of reactivity, identification with the mind and unconsciousness.
They scroll for a few minutes or longer, look at memes, check their email (a nicely organized place filled with other people’s agendas / wanting stuff from you).
Training themselves not to be in CREATIVE MODE.
And if you’re not creating life, you’re reacting to life or worse—surviving it.
We want to establish a firm connection with the present and quiet place within us.
We want to change our state of being and supercharge it so we’re empowered.
We want to decide how we’re going to feel and what we want to get done today.
- Sitting down is a victory.
Sitting down every day, right when you wake up and not checking your phone is an enormous victory.
You’re going against years of negative conditioning to unmemorize negative emotions, create a new personality (how you think, act and feel) and focus on feeling empowered.
You’re also resisting millions of dollars of research and testing that goes into you being addicted to checking your phone and using social media.
This will be unfamiliar at first so simply sitting down every day to do this practice is a win in and of itself.
You’re saying “No, my body is not in charge and these thoughts / emotions are unloving to me. I don’t like feeling like sh%t every day. I don’t like being stuck in my head. I don’t like judging everyone and everything in my life. I don’t like feeling worthless or powerless. I don’t like feeling anxious and stressed out and like I have to RUSH everywhere all the time.”
Your mind and body is going to start giving you these little sub vocalizations when you start to go against the normal routine.
It’s going to give you thoughts like “Ughh, I don’t want to do this. I don’t feel like it.”
And this is your body’s conditioning at work.
It’s saying “Hey, you’ve thought and felt this way for years—so much so that your brain’s synaptic pathways have literally wired together tightly. And because of that, every day you think the same thoughts which cause your brain to produce the same chemicals to make you feel the same emotions associated with the same negative thoughts. You’re literally chemically AKA emotionally addicted to staying the same.”
Every time you sit down, it’s a victory.
- Every time you bring your attention back to the present moment—it’s a victory.
The art of staying present to the moment means that you’re not thinking anything.
You’re fully immersed in being aware of how your body feels and feeling the beingness / aliveness of everything in your environment.
Listening to the sounds, feeling the temperature, feeling your body, breathing deeply in and out, calming and relaxing your mind.
So when you have an itch, or want to check something, or want to go eat, or drink water, or drink coffee, or think a thought and you bring your attention back to how you’re feeling and being aware of the space around you—that’s a huge win.
These daily victories quickly accumulate over time and pretty soon you’ll stop being RUN by that depression and find yourself laughing at the little voice inside of your head and it’s attempts to get YOU to identify with IT.
- View your mind like a horse.
If you train a horse, feed it, love it and take care of it—it’s going to behave and work for you.
If you don’t, it’s not going to listen to you and it’s going to gallop whenever it wants in random directions yanking you right along with it—possibly greatly injuring you.
Our mind works the same way.
It can be used to invent technologies that advance the entire civilization, resolve world problems, help Humanity and help you solve the challenges in your daily life.
It can also be used to create weapons of mass destruction, wage war against our fellow Human beings and make you suffer mentally and emotionally every single day of your life.
Quieting the mind, getting present and remaining present every moment of our day is how we train the mind to be under control of our consciousness.
When the mind is trained, it becomes an amazing tool.
You can focus indefinitely.
You’re more resilient to social pressure.
You can handle more tension and stress.
Your negative thoughts and emotions begin to melt away and have less impact on you.
You find yourself in greater and greater states of creativity, bliss, flow, peace, gratitude and joy.
We are not our mind.
We are consciousness, awareness, energy.
We have this mind and body to help us learn how to love ourselves and each other.
When we identify with our mind, we feel separate and enter a survival state of lack, scarcity, competition and aggression.
- Observe your habitual thought processes and emotional set point.
Start becoming aware of the thoughts you’re thinking and the emotions you’re feeling on a daily basis.
As we begin paying attention to how we think and how we feel, we generate awareness and start the process of dis-identifying with our personality.
When we become aware of the program, we cease being the program.
Awareness is the first step to creating change.
The mind loves for you to identify with it and think your thoughts are it.
That’s how it stays alive.
Through your constant thinking, constant projecting into the future or the past.
It needs time to survive.
When you get present, it starts to die.
- Become the greatest expression of yourself.
After you finish meditating, I want you to ask yourself:
“What’s the greatest expression of myself?”
And really think about what that means.
What does it mean to be great?
What would that look like to you?
How would you walk?
How would you breathe?
How would you speak?
Start embodying the greatest expression of yourself.
Start wiring in new thoughts, new emotions and new behaviors that match this state.
As you begin modeling new thoughts and behaviors, you begin creating a new personality.
Every time you begin slipping back into the “old self” I want you to snap back to the greatest expression of yourself.
You’re going through conditioning withdrawals.
You’ve been conditioned to be something you’re not.
To think, feel and behave in a way that’s not in alignment with your true state of being.
That being is infinite, limitless and eternal.
It’s joy, peace and bliss.
It’s creative and expansive.
Not judgmental, competitive and righteous.
Not scarce and lacking something.
Not continually finding something WRONG with this moment.
We must create a new self that we can embody.
In doing so, we slowly “prune” away the old synaptic pathways and create new ones.
We unmemorize the old negative emotions and condition our body with new empowering ones.
- Read books that elevate you.
There’s 3 spiritual books that completely changed my understanding of being Human and how my mind works.
The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle Breaking The Habit Of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza. The Law Of One"