What Meditating for 1163 Days Taught Me About Myself

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?In 2018 I wrote “What Meditating for 650 Days Taught Me About Myself” article here on LinkedIn and many people reached out to me and began meditating and saw benefits as well. If you want to learn the story of how I first stumbled down meditation please check out the article.

Today my meditation practice has very much changed and my perspective of this meta habit has also changed with my 4 years of experience meditating for almost every single day (I’ve skipped a couple of days here and there).

1. Meditation Still Sucks & Doesn’t Always Feel Great

Obviously, meditation doesn’t suck completely or else I wouldn’t do it. Meditation sucks the same way going to the gym sucks. You walk in the gym...you warm up...not filled with maximum energy....realizing the pain you are going to be...but usually by the end of the workout you feel much better.

Every morning when I sit down to meditate my brain still tells me I gotta get up and do x, y, z first because that’s more important than sitting down and focusing on my breath and breathing in a pattern. It’s that very knowing and awareness that is so powerful that makes it worth doing. When you realize that your thoughts are similar to waves crashing at a shoreline and they never stop...throughout the rest of your day you will notice that analogy and not be derailed by your own anxious thoughts.

2. It Makes You Realize There Isn’t Just One Voice In Your Head

When I first started talking about this I was getting messages from people telling me I might have a mental illness where I can hear voices. I do not have schizophrenia or hear audible voices and this is a common thing many meditators speak about regularly.

Perhaps the most valuable benefit of meditation is actually beginning to realize that I had a series of voices and dialogues going on inside my brain at all times. I never realized that and in fact, a friend of mine Jeff Warren states: Meditation makes you realize that we all have a voice in our head that's actually running the show. But even more profound is I became aware that some of the strands and highways of thought weren't even mine. My brain had picked them up, unknowingly as key pieces of information for my survival. Which linked back to the days in school when I endured bullying and racism.

Its almost as if I was an onion, with layers on layers but really deep down I was a squishy bulb that didn't really represent those other layers I had worn on like a coat. As I began to meditate, eat healthy, exercise, which then enables you to start sleeping well for 6 to 8 hours a day....these layers began to shed and fall off.

At first, this was terrifying I felt like I had to hide from everybody in my life as I was going through this extremely spiritual quasi experience. It was especially frightening because I had grown relatively comfortable and accepted these layers as my own. Change is difficult, even when its a really great evolution that's happening in the process. 

3. Meditation Creates Time for Authentic Decision Making

This is some Matrix Neo type stuff right here....

It might be hard to understand as maybe someone reading who’s never experienced the profound benefits of meditation before. But, mindfulness meditation enables you to live life in the present moment, which almost enables you to make decisions in slow motion while life is still happening for everyone else at a normal pace.

Let me explain, the human brain is governed by a series of beliefs and emotions which can trigger thoughts to emerge. We observe the thought, and with our consciousness may be seduced to believe it, create an emotional reaction like getting angry or afraid, and then act a certain behavior in the external world.

If you meditate, you’re able to see a thought from a neutral perspective and at times dismiss the emotion away and experience it from a purely present standpoint. Enabling you to make a decision not based on a split second reaction or fear but from the true self of who you really are as a human being.

4. Meditation Is a Non-Negotiable

I hate to be one of those self-help gurus on the internet that say YOU HAVE TO DO x, y, z to be happy. Reality is you don’t have to do anything with your life. However, if you choose to do one thing...you should meditate.

I hear a lot of well-intentioned individuals say something along the lines of “meditation isn’t for everyone. You can meditate if you go for a walk, take a shower, or listen to music.” While you can get in a state of FLOW with those activities, none compare to the actual act of sitting down, doing nothing, and meditating.

The real benefit of meditation is that you shut off the external environment by closing your eyes. As you breathe and focus on your internal world you start to realize your internal to external connections that govern your life and your behavior. You start to rid and delete those connections by removing yourself from the external environment which is not really possible if you do an activity in the real world.

5. Meditation Is a Key to Social Anxiety

A study from 2017 found that mindfulness meditation is equally efficacious in treating social anxiety disorder as CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy). In fact, researchers at Stanford found that it's not just about relaxing. Meditation helps people with social anxiety and their public image via study done in 2009, head researcher Philippe Goldin states:

“The idea is that if a person has the psychological flexibility to shift freely from one mode of thinking to another mode, then that is a sign of health. It's when we get stuck in certain thinking patterns that our beliefs become maladaptive. Often people will subsequently show up in their 20s or 30s with depression or substance abuse and then if you dig below that you find that what preceded all of that was internal anxiety about performing in social situations.”

My Upcoming Book - Screw Being Shy 

In my book, Screw Being Shy I will guide you with the proper conceptual frameworks and practical application based on the science of what you can do to create your own path out of social anxiety and not being a prisoner of your mind and not wait on other people in life to open the door for you. 

Releases March 14, 2020 to be notified enter your email in on my website: markmetry.com

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