Meditation?

Who has time to meditate when there is so much to DO?

Yes, life falls apart sometimes, in little things and giant ways. Relationships, ideas, currencies. It can all suck, or not, depending upon your level of attachment to this idea. The currency of Tasmania tanks? You may not care if you are in Norway. You may care deeply if your elderly mother lives there. You see what I mean? The more attached you are, the harder it is to let go and move on.

“But how do I let go of attachments and meditate? What is meditation going to do for me?”,  is the question that most everyone asks me. You see, every time you ruminate on what you DON’T want, you are sure to get more of it. Remember the axiom, “What we resist, persists”. So, you ask, and rightly so, “Ok, well, what the heck does this even mean and why does it happen that way?” Well, the simple answer is, that we are made up of two minds, our Conscious and SubConscious Minds.

Let me break it down. You have a shiny and bright Conscious mind. It is quick, it is fast and it spends a great deal of time being useful to you in myriad ways. You also have your SubConscious mind, as you know, but this seems more like the sleeping part of you, the part of daydreams and wistfulness. The Conscious mind makes rapid fire decisions and helps you stay on your game, or so you surmise. The thing is, although it prances and preens in the spotlight like a teenage heart throb, the Conscious Mind only constitutes about 10% – 15% of your daily self. The sweet, slow, darker sister of the SubConscious Mind, actually pulls the strings on the other 85%. So while you are busy thinking that YOU are making lighting fast decisions? Yeah, that’s the SubConscious whispering to you. “We don’t like that, remember? We already tried that and didn’t like the outcome. In fact, we would much rather do it this way….”

Your beautiful Subconscious mind is doing all it can to protect you in fact, from making the same stupid mistakes over and over again, by causing you to stay trapped in the same thinking that actually allowed the stupid mistakes to occur in the first place.

Which is why we learn to meditate so that we can go in with our Conscious mind, and re-wire these programs.

Your Subconscious mind is still running old programs like the garage sale Mac running OS 8. It grinds along on old concepts that were installed while you gestated in utero, that were created by humiliation in 3rd grade, and updated with your first heartbreak, and subsequently re-booted by your most recent one.

By now, you may know that meditation is what most folks would say is the answer. Heck, your doctor may have even mentioned it, which means you really should pay attention. You may have tried to meditate in the past and found the whole thing too challenging. The sitting still was painful, the focus on a candle feels silly, and chanting makes you squirm…I get it. Look, there are as many ways to meditate as there are breaths in the day. The thing is, you are already meditating, but you just don’t know it yet. You see, meditation is the access key, a moment of ATTENTION that allows us to self examine and self reflect. I am not referring to Therapy, nor dissing this process, I am simply saying that meditation is a far simpler and more personal narrative. For example:

Every time you look in the mirror and hate on your thighs.

Every time you say, “You are such an Idiot!”, or even better, “That person…..fill in the blank…is such an idiot!”

You are rewriting over the same SubConscious patterns of code, called thinkings and more importantly, feelings, that drive you in your daily life. This makes the groove of the thought even more ingrained with each retelling, leaving very little room for new thoughts to be installed. By meditating, or coming to consciousness about these thoughts, we get to short-circuit old ones and create a teeny tiny new pathway that will begin to pick up steam for new ones the more often we travel its path. Let me give you an example….

You brush your teeth everyday, probably twice or so, correct? Are you aware of what your mind is doing at this moment? Hmmm, it probably never occurred to you to pay attention. I ask you to do so now. You see, while you are brushing your teeth, you have a rich and fertile opportunity to rewire your thoughts. So, instead of thinking about that phone call you don’t want to make, instead take those two minutes and reflect upon how grateful you are to even have teeth to brush, and the clean water with which to do so. In this simple act, you are creating a new feeling, Gratitude, to infuse in your day (say, 2 minutes times 2 or 3 times per day). Rather than reinstalling the feelings of shame or lack or anxiety over the perceived stress of a phone call, you have created a window of something else that wasn’t there before, thereby short-circuiting the old programs, ever so slightly, and causing a ripple in The Force around you. Now magnify this by 10 or more times per day, and you can start to understand how infusing a moment of consciousness into the unconscious act can manifest in subtle but noticeable ways.

I offer you 5 EASY mechanisms of consciousness change in the short video I added to YouTube. Click the photo above to see it.

You can learn to rewire your own thinking and cause it to be more harmonious with the things you actually DO want to have happen, thereby ushering in a new sense of stability, clarity and yes, even peace.

I hope you enjoy the video, and I look forward to hearing YOUR thoughts about this topic- the conscious thoughts please! 🙂 Feel free to email me, engage me, or more importantly SHARE this post and video with those whom you believe would appreciate a bit more conscious connection in a simple and sweet way. Its all about creating more ease, less stress and greater self awareness.

Thanks for reading and for sharing, and more importantly, for playing with me!

Sat nam- Kristen Eykel