Meditation as a tool to improve the quality of your mind

Lessons learned from an 8 month meditation practice

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions - as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all"

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Last year, I had blogged about my experience of working out five days a week for a full year. When I posted the blog , my good friend Lynne Ly had commented on my blog about starting a meditation practice and writing about it. So I decided to meditate every day using an app.?

I evaluated several meditation apps and here are a couple of them worth mentioning.

• calm. - Lots of content, including books and short stories being read by celebrities. However, for some reason, I was charged three times for a one year subscription.?

• waking up - Sam Harris's app on mindfulness and non dual meditation.?

Sam Harris's teaching on non dual meditation caught the best of my curiosity. And I decided to use that every day for 10 to 15 minutes at the beginning of the day, here are a few lessons I learned from it.?

Recommit.?

During meditation, as you start noticing and becoming aware of your breath, the sensations in your body, your form, temperature variations within the body, you also become aware that you cannot help but get lost in thought. In guided meditation apps such as waking up, the guide will prompt you to get back to noticing your breath. There is no judgment that you found yourself lost in thought. You soon realize that the objective is in fact, to notice what is arising on its own. It is by no means a failure to meditate the right way.?

In meditation, the goal is not attaining an improved state of meditation. Catching yourself lost in thought 3 times less than the previous meditation doesn’t mean you have improved the quality of meditation. It is not about lowering the number of times you are lost in thought, it is actually just witnessing that these thoughts do arise. Invariably by you noticing it, it gets better. What I found fascinating is that it is much like life where you are starting a practice or a habit? and you perhaps fall off.? You actually acknowledge that and become aware without any judgment. You can actually recommit not seeing it as some failure, without any judgment on yourself. Recommit.? After all, it is a practice.?

Discursive thought

In meditation, I found that there is a key lesson to be learned about your identity. We often tend to choose our identity based on what we think about. We tend to think our thoughts on a particular topic is much deeper than the others. We have this egotistical idea that we are better thinkers than most other people around us, because of our depth and breadth of research on a topic and the thoughts in our head. Meditation will prove to you in a few months that this is not the case. As you meditate, you will quickly realize that the thoughts you witness appear spontaneously and are rather random. In consciousness, you will realize that we do not appear to be truly authoring or choosing thoughts. Meditation guides call this discursive thinking. There is a thought production that is happening in our mind. It is as if we are “thinking machines”. When thoughts arise during meditation we really do not have any idea on why we chose to think about a certain incident, an idea, a person or an object over any other?

Freedom from thought identification?

This might be controversial depending on your views about freewill, agency etc. However, when you witness and become more aware of discursive thought (Refer previous section), you will realize that you can choose not to identify with it. Identification with a thought is a choice. You are not necessarily your thoughts, no need to deeply identify with them as if that is your life's purpose and mission. Some thoughts that appear to evoke a strong sensation or an emotion will pass, just as the clouds do in the sky.?

Psychosomatic integration?

In meditation, one can observe the psyche(mind) and soma(body) integration. You are invited to witness and be aware of the cloud of sensation that your body exhibits, how certain emotions manifest in your body and what that feels like. For example, you may feel anger as more of a tightening of the shoulders or anxiousness as more of a pressure on your arms. The emotional response in your body is unique to each. It is worthwhile to find out how negative emotions manifest in your body. This will help you label the emotion when it arises. Meditation is not meant as an exercise to get rid of those, but to be aware of it. This is truly an awakening to the acute sense of how your body feels when experiencing an emotion.?

Although I have not yet experienced the non dual awareness that Sam is talking about in the waking up app, my experience of meditation has been overall positive. And I plan to continue to incorporate 10 to 15 minutes of meditation each day. Although I cannot prove this I do intuitively believe that meditation is a tool that can support my intellectual acuity. Intellectual acuity is one of the core tenets for self mastery and self actualization.?

If you liked reading this article, consider subscribing to the newsletter . So you can stay in the loop as I create more videos, articles, and short posts on self mastery and innovation. If you would like to join a network of innovators , consider filling out this form so we can send you more information on the network and its purpose.