3 Things To Give up to EASILY Meditate and Benefit from Meditation

This video will show you 3 things that you must give up in order to easily meditate. I'm going to share with you practical processes that I've used in my own life in order to actually receive benefits from meditation so that you can do the same thing. Welcome back to another video. My name is Aaron and I help people expand their consciousness. Now in this video, I'm going to be sharing with you the 3 things that I had a common misconception about when I first started meditating. You know, when I first learned about it years ago, at first I thought it was a little bit of like a woo-woo type science, but at the same time, this is about 5 or 6 years ago, I had what is formally called ADHD and I took Adderall for it. And the harsh side effects of Adderall were you couldn't eat very much and you couldn't sleep very much. So eventually I was doing research and I found like scientific studies that proved the benefits of meditation. And when I saw that it reduced cortisol, which is the stress hormone, and increased serotonin and dopamine, That's when I became much more serious about it and I decided that I might as well at least learn it. Well, as some of you know my story, what happened is I started meditating and within a day or two I started to receive the benefits from it. And from that point going forward, I never took Adderall again. And since then I've meditated the first 5 or 10 minutes of the day, of my day for the last about 5 or 6 years now. And also the 5 or 10 minutes right before I go to bed. Now this is probably the biggest game changer that I've ever had in my life, the thing that really profoundly impacted my life, but there were 3 common misconceptions around it of expectations I had that when I made these little tweaks, everything began to change. Now the first one had to do with thinking that meditation was about controlling the mind. Now this is a funny paradox because when I was focused on trying to control my mind, and this was mainly within the first couple of days of meditating, I realized that the more I would try to control my mind, the more that I would resist it. It's almost like the more you focus on not thinking negative thoughts, the more you're going to think the negative thoughts because you build up inner resistance inside. Now, the key to this and the solution to this problem is simply observing the thoughts. Now let me ask you a question. If we think of the idea of a rainy day, does the idea of a rainy day have a positive connotation or a negative connotation? Well, the idea is it depends upon your perspective as to the kind of effect that we get out of it. In essence, a rainy day is a neutral idea that we give built-in meaning to depending upon our beliefs. Now, in the same way, what we can learn how to do is understand that our thoughts are fundamentally neutral. When we think that we're having negative thoughts, it's more so that we're attaining and giving it negative meaning, and if we resist it, we will continue to feel that negative effect from it. So in essence, everything that we think is fundamentally neutral, and if we learn how to observe the thoughts rather than control them, that's where you'll start to see the benefits. So this is a common analogy that I use and it's from the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Imagine you're sitting at a park bench and you're just observing people walk by. You're just neutrally observing them walk by. You may see a dog walk by, you might see people walk by, but the idea is that you don't go chase after them. You don't become identified with those people walking by. Now in the same way, you may be having these thoughts in your mind. You may be observing your thoughts and you're not going to identify with those thoughts. You're not going to follow those thoughts and see where they go. You're just going to observe them from a neutral place. Now, this is where the power is. Now, always remember this: we may think our thoughts, but we are not our thoughts. There's a big difference here because when we start to become aware that we generate thoughts depending— that's what our brain does— we see we don't have to be identified with our brain. And when we make this correlation and we take ourselves outside of the reactive mind, we take ourselves outside of that, that's when we're starting to receive the benefits. So in order to do this, all you have to do is realize, first off, it's not about controlling the mind. It's more so about observing the mind. It's more so about allowing the thoughts to be there. Now, this is also a funny paradox because when you allow the thoughts to be there, they will naturally start to go away anyways. So this is the analogy I use for that. Now, I know this video has a lot of analogies in it. But imagine that our ego in a way is like a 2-year-old. Now this is just an analogy, but when you're arguing with a 2-year-old, the idea is the more you argue, the more that that 2-year-old will resist it and the more that you will end up, you know, having that altercation. Now the idea is if you were to let the 2-year-old do what it's doing, almost to let the 2-year-old have a temper tantrum, the idea is eventually that 2-year-old is going to get tired and it's going to go to bed or it's going to go get tired. It's going to forget why it was mad. Now in the same way, that's how we can relate to our ego when it comes to letting it think its thoughts. Let it and observe it, but don't react to it. Don't keep trying to control it. Don't keep trying to think about it. That's just an analogy that makes it easier to understand the correlation. And with these two analogies and these two ideas, you can start to get profound results from it because you realize and you have the awareness. It's not about the control, it's about the awareness. It's about observing the thoughts from a neutral place, and when you do that, those negative thoughts begin to go away, those negative emotions go away, and that stress and cortisol will start to go away. Now, the second thing that you must give up has to do with giving up distractions. Now, there's two sides of this coin because normally we think of meditation as you have to be sitting down, you have to be like staring at a candle flame or something, but with meditation it can actually be something you actively do. So it could be something that you do maybe while you're washing dishes, you pay attention to everything that you're doing, to your sense perceptions. You bring it, the awareness, from being inside of the head and into the body. Now that's what this part's going to be about, is understanding it's more about presence. It's less about the mind and the intellectual ideas and thinking and trying to like, you know, blast off with our thoughts. It's more so about bringing the awareness to the present moment right now. And a simple way of doing this is to simply put the sense perceptions in your hands. Now, if you do that right now and you focus on your breathing, you're going to start to take the awareness from being majority inside the head, which is overthinking, and you're going to bring that into a place of presence. So that's where a lot of the power is. Realize it's not just about the thinking, it's more so about the being. It's more so about the awareness of how to be present to the moment. Now, the third thing I want to share has to do with understanding the ability to focus on one point. Now this is for people that want to go deeper. Of course, meditation can also be an active thing, but if you want to bring your meditation deeper, this is what I recommend and this is something that really made a big difference for me. Now I, as I said, had quote unquote ADHD and I reason I say quote unquote is because I believe that because I believed I had ADHD, because I went to a doctor, I believe the only solution to that was taking Adderall. I don't believe I have it anymore. I have a lot of energy, as I'm sure you guys can feel, but I ground that out by doing meditation. So it's like I reframed it to not thinking it's this disorder. You see what I mean? But this is the powerful part of the third one. Now the third one is all about taking away distractions with your eyes. Now I noticed, and this is something I realized actually later when I was in yoga, they said something when I was in Bikram yoga. They said when your eyes wander, your mind wanders as well. So I realized that because I had ADHD at the time. And because I was so focused on, you know, always doing the next thing and my mind was moving at 1,000 miles a minute, what I did instead was I focused on a candle flame. Now this is maybe 3 or 4 days into learning meditation. I focused on the candle flame and I would let my eyes focus on that one point and then I would bring the awareness within my body and I would focus on just being. Now here's the thing, when your mind is focused on that one point, It's almost like it's so much easier to go deeper with meditation. You'll find that when you do that, you're able to really get present to the moment and you'll find that then the overthinking starts to go away. Now this is something I've shared with thousands of people through other videos and it's something that I continuously get messages from today that's seen people saying that little advice right there changed the whole results I was getting with meditation and allowed me to really receive the benefits. So that's something that you can do to use a candle flame. What I do is I sit down, I have a candle flame that's about eye level. I focus on the flame and as I meditate, I just keep bringing my eyes back to it. If it keeps wandering, eventually I normally will close my eyes maybe 5 minutes into the meditation, but whatever works for you. Now realize that these 3 things are things that can allow you to go deeper, to really have a more holistic understanding of how meditation can be powerful in your life. Remember the first one. Is to simply let go of trying to control the mind. Allow the thoughts to be there, and as you allow them to be there, the thoughts will naturally start to go away as well. Now secondly, remember that as you are able to let go of the expectation of thinking meditation is all about being in the head, you can bring it more into being present into the moment every day. What you can do is just put the feeling and put the sensation inside of your hands by putting the awareness there. Put it inside of your body and realize it's more about being than anything else. And then thirdly, all you have to do is realize that as you are able to focus on one point, you will start to go deeper and that anytime your eyes wander, you can bring it back to that one point. So with that being said, I hope you guys enjoy this video. Feel free to like this video if you liked it. Subscribe if you haven't already. Also, I put a free PDF inside the description box on the top 5 books that I recommend. They're books that absolutely transformed my life. Two of those books are less than 50 pages, so they can be read in like an hour or two. So feel free to check that out as well. And other than that, I will see you guys on the next video. Peace, much love, namaste.