3 keys to having a Breakthrough with Meditation and ACTUALLY receive benefit from it

Welcome back to another video. My name is Aaron Doughty and I help people expand their consciousness. Now in this video, I'm going to be sharing with you guys 3 powerful ways to having a breakthrough with meditation and really, uh, you know, experience the benefits that everyone always talks about. Now for me, for example, I began meditating about 5 years ago and I would say that it's probably the one thing that I began to do consistently that's really profoundly changed my life. And since then, since, uh, a lot of people ask me because they saw how I was before, if you would have interviewed someone that knew me like 5, 6, or 6, 7 years ago, they would have told you that I was very loud, that I was very sporadic, that I was random, that my energy wasn't grounded. And after I learned meditation, I still loud, but I am also grounded in who I am. There's a completely different level of presence underneath what I do, and from that it's changed just about everything about me. Now before, just to give a little bit of context to this, before I began meditation, I had what is called ADHD, or at least that's what, you know, doctors said that I had, and I got Adderall, which is the prescription drug that they give out for it. And I took that for in my teens up until about 7 years ago. And there were harsh side effects of that. The side effects are you don't eat very much and you don't sleep very much. And eventually I was like, you know what, there's gotta be a better way. So I went online and typed it in and came across the research on meditation and it was like so obvious, like there was so much benefits of it. I was like, I just have to try this. I tried it and within 2 or 3 days of doing it, it was like everything began to change. I started to feel different after about a week of doing it. I completely got rid of Adderall and since then I've never taken a prescription drug since then simply because I've been able to ground myself naturally. I can focus just by being present, by learning how to tailor the first 10 or 15 minutes of my day and the last 10, 15 minutes of my day every single day, and it's made a profound change in my life. With that being said, these 3 things are things that if we tweak it just a little bit, have a profound change in the results that we get. So the first one I want to share with you was the most powerful one and the one that a lot of people make the biggest mistake with, and that is trying to control the mind. So there's this strong desire for us to think that with meditation it's all about controlling the mind. If you make it that you don't have thoughts and you focus on not having thoughts and you focus on controlling what comes into your mind and out of your mind, then you'll get results. That's not the case. Realize that the moment that we begin to let it be okay that the thoughts are there, the thoughts start to go away naturally. It was like for the first day or so, it was like I was fighting myself with the thoughts that would come into my mind and it was also a time in my life when I was learning my more about the law of attraction. So I'm thinking to myself, these negative thoughts come in, I'm like, oh no, I'm going to somehow bring more negativity in my life. And I found that just by focusing on not having it there, that resistance actually created more of it. So the breakthrough for me was on like the second or third day, I learned how to observe the thoughts that came into my mind. Now the easiest way that I described this is realize we have two versions of ourselves. We have the small self and the big self. The small self is what we call our ego. Our ego is reactive, is always trying to put dialogue into what's happening, is always trying to help us survive. That's in a way the job of the ego. What I realized though, that was by sitting there and thinking to myself, what am I going to do after this? What am I going to eat today? I'm getting hungry. How much longer am I going to do this? As I learned how to observe those thoughts and let them be okay that they were there, it was like after a period of time they just started to go away naturally. The way I describe this to people is imagine that you're sitting at a park bench and you're just walking, watching the people walk by. You're not labeling them, you're not judging them, you're not telling them where to go, you're not trying to direct anything. You're just watching them walk by. In the same way, watch the thoughts come into your mind and watch them leave. Now I also think of this example of imagine the ego in a way think of it in this example. If you had a toddler, the more that you fought with the toddler, the more that that resistance would come through. It's like the more that you argue, the more that the arguing would be there. But if you simply ignored the toddler and you observed and you let the toddler be, it's like eventually if the toddler's having a temper tantrum, it's going to get tired and go to bed. Now in the same way, if we observe the ego, what the ego is thinking, we let it be okay of what it's thinking. We're then not charging it one way or the other, and then it's like it naturally begins to subside. That's where the power is. That's when the real benefits begin to start for me, and that's the one thing that when people change, I see they get so much better results. Now the second way is learning how to listen to the silence. So, so many times when we're thinking to ourselves, I need to calm my mind, I need to let it go, or I need to do this, I need to do that. What we end up doing is putting the focus on whatever we're thinking about. So if it's I need to stop my mind from thinking, we're putting the focus on the mind thinking and therefore creating more of it. Now when we put ourselves into a state of listening, what we then begin to do is we begin to come into an alert presence. The act of listening, doing that immediately begins to put us into a state of presence. So right now, Focus on hearing the silence and you will then bring more of that because whatever you focus on grows. So hear the silence. As you begin to do that, you then begin to naturally silence the mind because that is what the focus is. That state is something that you can recreate over and over again by sitting in meditation and just bringing the awareness into your body. Focus on the silence, focus on the feeling. And as you begin to do that, it's like you can't do that and think at the same time. So you do that and then you start to feel present. And that's what meditation is really about. Being present, being observant, letting it be okay what you think. Sometimes there's this connotation that when you learn to meditate, you become this person that's not supposed to feel emotion. Emotion is part of the human experience. Let it be okay that it's there. If you let it be okay that it's there, a lot of times it starts to go away naturally. Only in the resistance of not wanting it to be there does it actually begin to stay because we're charging it. Now the third part is also very powerful. It's understanding the power of repetition, of doing it over and over again. You see, there's been so much conditioning that we've had till this point in our life, and the way that we become conditioned is through repetition. Now if we start to meditate, what we can simply do is decide. Decide that we're going to do it every single day. Personally, I meditate the first 5, 10, 15 minutes of my day every single day and the last 5, 10, 15 minutes of my day every single day, sometimes up to 20 minutes because it feels good. So I like the feeling of it, but I haven't missed a day in years and it's something I just have to do. The more you do it, the more you will enjoy doing it, and then you'll start to feel the difference after maybe even a week of doing it. You'll start to feel profound differences in your energy state, and it's almost like you begin to prime yourself to observing rather than reacting. So when you get up in the morning, that's the best time that I feel to do it, and I've explained this in other videos, but right when we wake up in the morning, our brainwave state is going from a theta state, a delta state, to a theta, to an alpha, to a beta state. That's the most power we have over our subconscious mind is the first 20, 30 minutes that we wake up and the last 20, 30 minutes before we go to bed at night. So if we meditate in that time, we are priming ourselves not to become reactive to our thoughts and we begin to then have an ability to affect our subconscious mind in a much more powerful way. Sometimes this is when people will do things like visualization, feeling the emotions that you want to feel. You can begin to prime yourself in that way, but realize that the more repetitive that you do this, the more benefits you get. Do it for at least a week and I promise you, you'll start to feel a difference in your energy state. You'll start to feel yourself becoming a new person because you're letting go of the conditioned mind. You're letting go of the repetitive thoughts. You're learning to observe them rather than react. That's where the benefit is. So with that being said, I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Feel free to like this video if you liked it, share it if you found it of value, and as always, I will see you guys in the next vid. Peace, much love, namaste. All right, bye.