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The 2nd Key to Meditation
Welcome back to my mini course on the 3 keys to a successful meditation practice!
How did you go with the exercise of checking in and noticing your thoughts?
Did you find it hard to stop for a moment and observe what was happening inside you?
When you were observing, how easy was it to be the observer, and not get caught up in your thoughts?
Hit reply on the email you just got from me and let me know how you found the practice.
The Second Key
So, in the last lesson we learnt the first key to meditation – meditation is not about stopping your thoughts.
Meditation is about becoming a peaceful observer of your inner world.
To to do this, you’re going to need to focus your attention – the second key to meditation.
In virtually all meditation practice, you pick something to focus your attention on.
You sit down, relax your body and mind, and shift your focus onto the thing you have chosen to use in your meditation.
Holding your attention on your chosen object is the goal of your meditation.
But what about when your attention gets distracted by random thoughts from your mind?
Don’t worry when it does. It does for us all, even the most experienced meditators!
This is the other reason your attention is so important.
It’s only through your attention that you notice you’ve drifted away from the focus of your meditation.
And when you notice this, you can then refocus your attention on the object of your meditation.
Your attention is the thing you have most control over in your life, even though I know it doesn’t always feel like it!
And using your attention wisely is the thing that’s most important in transforming your life for the better.
Your ‘mind’, your ‘ego’ or whatever name you want to call it – the thing that actually produces your thoughts – has convinced most of us that it ‘IS’ us!
Yes, your mind is a powerful tool you can use to positively shape your life.
But, your mind can also hurt you when it’s allowed to direct your life by default.
When your mind’s in charge, your entire life is driven by unconscious habits and beliefs. These are beliefs you’ve picked up from your childhood, your parents, your friends, beliefs you may not even consciously believe in!
When your attention is consumed by your mind’s constant stream of thoughts, you’re just a witness to your life, with your mind reacting to the world.
This is one of the most powerful benefits of meditation.
By meditating, by training your attention, you find that you have more control over your life, more control over your decisions and their outcomes.
This puts you in the best position possible to start creating that life you’ve always dreamed of.
Meditation Science – Heart Disease
Did you know that meditation can help with the symptoms of heart and cardiovascular disease?
Researchers have found that meditation positively affects hormone levels in the body, helps regulate blood pressure, protects against vascular damage, enhances insulin resistance and promotes other positive changes on a cellular level that are associated with the health of the body’s cardiovascular system.
Helping people that already suffer from problems with their heart and also helping prevent problems happening in people that have healthy cardiovascular systems, these studies give even more reasons how meditation can have a positive effect on our health and well-being.
- Schneider, R., Alexander, C., Staggers, F., Ormejohnson, D., Rainforth, M., Salerno, J., Sheppard, W., Castillorichmond, A., Barnes, V. and Nidich, S.(2005). A randomized controlled trial of stress reduction in African Americans treated for hypertension for over one year. American Journal of Hypertension, 18(1), pp.88-98.
- Loucks, E., Britton, W., Howe, C., Eaton, C. and Buka, S. (2014). Positive Associations of Dispositional Mindfulness with Cardiovascular Health: the New England Family Study. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 22(4), pp.540-550.
- Koike, M. and Cardoso, R. (2014). Meditation can produce beneficial effects to prevent cardiovascular disease. Hormone Molecular Biology and Clinical Investigation, 18(3), pp.137-143.
Stress and Attention
One thing that can make it really difficult to focus your attention during meditation, or really focus on anything, is when you feel agitated and stressed.
It’s much easier to focus your attention and not get caught up in random thoughts when you’re relaxed and calm.
The funny thing is, training your attention through meditation will help you relax your body and mind, making it easier to focus your attention, which then makes it easier to meditate!
It’s what you call a virtuous cycle (as opposed to a vicious cycle).
In today’s exercise that I’ll get to in a minute, we’ll be doing some focused breathing to help train your attention and create a sense of peace and relaxation.
This focused breathing will help you relax, help focus your attention, which then helps with your meditation practice.
Slow, deliberate breathing has been used as a method for calming the mind for centuries.
Many different spiritual and religious practices use this important power that we carry with our breath.
Sayings like “Take a deep breath” and “slow down, take a breath” reference this wisdom we all have, but don’t act on often enough.
Now, modern science has caught up with this traditional wisdom, giving us scientific explanations on exactly why focused breathing helps our body and mind become relaxed.
How the Breath Creates Calm
Slow, focused breathing stimulates the body’s parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
The PNS is responsible for your body’s relaxation, rest and healing systems.
At the same time, slow, focused breathing actually ‘turns down’ your body’s sympathetic nervous system (SNS).
The SNS is associated with your body’s fight or flight response. This is the process that activates when we have to suddenly run or fight for our lives. This increases our heart rate, breathing rate and floods our body with adrenaline.
What we call the feeling of ‘stress’ in our modern world is when our fight or flight response is incorrectly stuck in the ‘on’ position, without a break or release.
Say we come across an angry grizzly bear in the wild and our fight or flight system is activated.
When we either fight or run from the bear (I’d recommend running!), the vigorous activity uses up the stress hormones released during the confrontation.
Then, after the danger has passed, we return to our normal, relaxed state.
But for most of us now, ‘fight or flight’ comes on because of pressure we feel from work, or from our home, or because of thoughts or expectations we put on ourselves.
We never escape our stress, because we carry the main source of our stress around with us, inside our own heads.
Lucky for us, we each have powerful tools we can use, whenever we want, to turn this off and relax our body and mind.
These tools are our attention and our breath – both trained and developed in meditation.
Lesson Summary
- Focusing your attention is one of the most important aspects to successfully meditating.
- Developing a state of relaxation is the best way to get control of your attention.
- Paying attention to your breath is an excellent way to promote relaxation, and is also a profound meditation technique.
Today’s Exercise
Today you’re going to learn a powerful breathing exercise that will bring you into a state of deep relaxation, helping you focus your attention when you sit down to meditate.
And it’s as simple as breathing out longer than you breathe in.
To start, take a moment and close your eyes.
Breathe in through your nose while counting to 6.
Pause briefly.
Then, breathe out through your mouth, this time counting to 8.
Repeat this exercise at least 4 times.
Make sure the pace of your counting is consistent, so breathing out is taking longer than breathing in.
If this is too long, breathe in to a count of 4 and breathe out to a count of 6.
It’s OK to adjust the count if you need to, just keep the out breath 25-35% longer than the in breath.
Notice how you’re feeling before the exercise and notice how you feel after doing your breaths.
Notice anything that’s changed with your thoughts and how you’re feeling.
Do this at least twice a day over the next few days.
Good luck with your practice over the next few days and I’ll be in contact soon with the final lesson!
I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.
– Mahatma Gandhi