SSP 012: How To Use Meditation To Connect With Your Inner Voice

State shifters podcast episode 12 meditation welcome to the State Shifters Podcast welcome back to the State Shifters Podcast. This is Jordan. So glad you could be with me today. I've got a really, really exciting and important topic to talk about and that's meditation. For me, meditation really transformed my life when I started it. And I guess it wasn't until a little later on as my practice kind of developed and I kind of delved a little deeper into the field of meditation and I really started to notice some profound shifts happening in my life as my meditation practice kind of took a whole new way of incorporating peace and stillness into my life. It really embedded change that I never thought was possible. So in this episode, I really want to kind of get clear on what meditation is. Perhaps if you're listening and you've tried meditation and you've struggled with pinning down a consistent practice, I really want to help you find the motivation and inspiration to stick with meditation and find a consistent practice. I guess for the people who have never tried meditation before, I will also try and break it down and make it as simple as possible so that when you do go try, you're not going to go in there with some false expectation or hope that it's something that's only reserved for people who have achieved a certain level of spiritual growth or personal growth. And that's completely untrue. So I'm excited to get stuck into this. So I'm going to start off with giving you guys a bit of a rundown on how I discovered meditation and kind of my first few experiences with practicing meditation and what I learned along the way. When I began working my first full time job as a tax accountant at Deloitte back in Australia. So I'm actually in Canada and Toronto at the moment. My first job was as an accountant. As a tax accountant. And you know, as I began my first full time career in the corporate world, you know, I just come off the back of four years of studying for my degree in accounting and finance and I guess it wasn't until I started traveling. I had my last semester was an exchange semester where I traveled to Canada and I got to spend a semester in Canada studying abroad and really traveling and exploring North America. It was during this time where I started to question whether my career path was the right one for me. I already had my job lined up for when I returned home from my exchange. So my job was locked in, my start date was locked in and here I was enjoying my traveling and just feeling free and happy and joy and just a love for life. But in the back of my head, I wasn't sure if I was returning home to the right career. And it's a struggle because I think when you invest so much time into your education, into this one path, this one direction, it's hard sometimes to acknowledge and accept that maybe you're not on the right path, climbing a ladder that's against the wrong wall. This was something I had to come to terms with, and it was creating a bit of an existential crisis for me. And it wasn't until a good friend of mine introduced me to Eckhart Tolle's work that good friends, actually. Josh Collins, and he hosts a lot of the podcasts with me. And as I delve deeper into Eckhart's work and, you know, finding space and stillness beyond the mind to really connect with the soul or the spirit, the stillness, the consciousness, whatever you choose to call that place, I started to wonder, how can I increase my connection or deepen my connection with the timeless dimension, with higher consciousness, with the soul? And I guess this is where my meditation practice took a turn. Because before I heard of meditation as this tool that we could use to, you know, boost focus, increase creativity, decrease anxiety, you know, remove stress, it was more all the external benefits of meditation, but I never really understood why and what was happening when we meditated. So I began increasing the length and duration of my meditations. I began to meditate with the intention of connecting with my soul, connecting with my heart, and allowing something to come through me. Because I was on the search for answers, I was really struggling with what my passions were. You know, I wasn't sure of this direction that I'd taken. So meditation for me was I was trying to gain more clarity of hearing my own inner voice. And sometimes it can be really difficult to hear our inner voice because there's so much noise and distraction from other people, from expectations, from society. Expectations. We don't really hear our own voice of what we actually want to do gets drowned out by fear, by the need to feel or look successful. I guess for me, that's what happened when I chose my career path. I wanted to make money. Now, was that my voice or my parents voice? I guess I soon realized that my voice was telling me to go in a different direction than the one I was on. So meditation really is a great way to connect with your inner voice, Remove the noise or turn down the noise in the mind to really allow something greater to emerge through the soul. And I think for me, when I first started meditating, my Heart started to speak to me and started to tell me that I wasn't actually interested in tax and accounting and finance. I was interested in health and wellness and exercise and sport. But I didn't acknowledge these at first because there was no secure career pathway. There was no opportunities to make money. So I thought. So I didn't acknowledge these things. I worked for a year and a half at Deloitte as a tax accountant. And throughout this whole time, I continued to meditate, I continued to learn, I continued to listen to podcasts. And over time, I gained the courage to act on this inner voice. And the inner voice just began to get louder and louder the more I meditated and the more I got clear on what it is that I actually want. So meditation is, for me, a fundamental tool for connecting with yourself to get clear on what it is that you actually want. And nobody else knows what you actually want. Only you know. This problem is not enough. People take the time to listen, to meditate and listen and connect with the space beyond the mind and body. There's an energy there that when you connect with it and it flows through you, your life begins to transform. So meditation is connecting with higher energy. It's connecting with eternal love, peace, joy, that's always there, but it just gets drowned out by the noise and distractions of our external world. So what's actually happening during meditation? That's one thing that I started to look deeper into. Like, what is going on? Like, yeah, we close our eyes, we might listen to some music, we might chant a mantra, we might focus our attention on something specific. But what is what is happening within the body and mind as we enter these deeper states of relaxation, focus, and trance? So to me, to keep it simple, all I explain to people is meditation is simply directing your energy or your attention, because your attention is energy. Where your attention goes, that's where your energy flows. So we're directing our attention or energy into the present moment. That's all meditation is. We direct it into the present moment by bringing it into the body. So when we close our eyes, we are bringing our energy back into the body. So what happens when we do this? We actually boosting a lot of different things within the body because we're actually giving the body energy. And this is amazing because cool things start to happen. Like, we start to boost our immune system. Our overall state of health is actually improved because we're putting attention on our vehicle, our vessel. And when you do this, a natural state of coherence begins to arise. And all coherence is simply union between mind and body. Coherence is where the brain and the body talk to each other in a clear, easy to understand language. So the body responds to what the brain says, the heart responds to the signals the brain sends. This is so important because when you achieve a state of coherence and your mind and body are in sync, you're going to think and feel happy thoughts, you're gonna. You're gonna think and feel the elevated states of emotions. And when you do this, your life just begins to unravel with effortless ease because you're not in control. And I think that's was one of the main attractions to meditation for me, was taking control back from the mind. And I mean, I think we spoke about this on another podcast, was an untrained mind. It's really like an untrained dog. Like, you know, you take your dog out for a walk and if your dog's not trained, you gotta keep it on a, on a leash, otherwise it's gonna run crazy. I mean, that's essentially what you're doing with meditation. You're training your mind to stay close. Every time it tries to run away, you've got control, you remind it that you are the one directing where it goes. So for me, I used to suffer. Not suffer, but I used to. You know, sometimes I would notice, like, anxious tendencies arise, you know, like anxious thinking. I have tendency to overthink sometimes, and there's a few occasions where my mind would get the better of me. And, you know, usually it was happening quite frequently in, like, exams. Sometimes I would just overthink questions and then, you know, I would cause myself to just get in a state of anxiety and panic where my mind wouldn't work, my brain stopped working. And there's a few occasions that, you know, I allowed that to happen and I had to draw the line in the sand. And I said, there's no way I'm going to let my mind take control of me ever again. Because if anyone listening who's had a panic attack or an anxiety attack, it's. It's freaking scary because you lose, you essentially lose control, you freak out. The mind will run crazy if you do not train it. And that's something I learned and it's something that I applied. And meditation is training the mind. So, you know, one of the best things is you're improving your focus and concentration. So when you meditate, you're building a muscle in the brain, literally changing your brain, physically changing it. You're firing new neurons, new areas of the brain, they're creating new connections and new synapses that establish areas in the brain that before were not being used. So you now have more access to your brain. So what this does is your focus and concentration is the first thing to improve. When you start meditating. You start to notice that I can hold my attention on a certain thing or object or area in the body for longer before my mind wanders. My concentration is improved. I can listen to people when they talk to me. And I am fully there. I'm fully present. This is such a powerful thing. You know, when you don't have good concentration and focus levels, your mind's wandering all the time. How can you do anything? You can't even listen to someone when they're telling you something. So this is the first thing that happens when you start meditating. Focus and concentration are going to improve. And this in turn is how we start to combat anxiety and panic, is because if our concentration and focus are improved, we are better at focusing on the present moment. And all anxiety is is focusing on the future. It's worrying about a future moment. You're not in the now. You're not focused on the now. So with meditation, you can improve your concentration on focus on being in the present moment. And this is such a powerful theme, because life is only now. Life is never tomorrow, is never yesterday. It's just now. The more you can ground yourself in the present moment, the more connected to life you're gonna be, the more amazing your experience is gonna be. So I can list off some of the other benefits that I guess I felt or I experienced through meditation, and I guess in a broad sense, the benefit that I guess I mentioned earlier as I was explaining this, but, you know, it's really an embracing of a greater awareness of yourself and who you are in this world. You essentially get to zoom out a little bit on your life, and you get to have better awareness of certain behaviors or actions or conditioned thinking habits that actually no longer serve you in becoming the person that you want to be. So through expanded awareness, you can actually then, you know, notice the things that you want to improve, or you can actually redirect your attention away from the behaviors or actions that don't serve you in becoming the person you want to be. So I guess you could say meditation really is the ultimate tool for becoming the best version of yourself. So to get clear, I'm going to list off some of the benefits that I noticed through having a consistent meditation practice. And over time, some of these benefits are more immediate. Some are more long term, medium term. So as I mentioned before, you get more clarity on what you want in life. That was probably one of the main benefits that I experienced, and it's probably the reason why I have, you know, chosen to share and be an advocate for meditation is because during those times when I struggled so much with what direction to take in life, meditation was the tool that really gave me that clarity. And I now actually spend, you know, my job is actually helping people meditate and it's actually educating people on the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and, and that's how much it's impacted me. So clarity in your life is to me, the number one benefit. And then secondly, you're going to attract new experiences into your life that now match this new vibration of output that you're putting out. So as I said earlier, you're actually connecting with an energy, a universal energy that is now flowing through your being, you know, and this new energy is really gonna reverberate out. And then, you know, I guess if you believe in law of attraction and that you're gonna attract back experiences, people, places and things that align with this energy, so you're gonna see new experiences arise in your life. And it's important to go with it. When you notice that changes need to happen, it's important that you acknowledge them. As long as you're coming from this higher, higher elevated, energetic state, you're only going to attract amazing things. So another benefit was more creativity. Because you kind of remove the noise of the mind, you're able to connect with that stillness, that space where that's where creativity comes from. So creativity is essentially another word for stillness, presence, consciousness. It's the same space where it's the infinite potential. It's something that you cannot describe through language. Language is only a pointer to this space. So if you ever been in a creative situation, you know, the mind is not thinking, how can I be creative? It's just flow. Creativity is an expression. It's an outward expression of a passion and a connection with a higher source. So you need to get more creativity with meditation, where you want to channel that creativity. That's it's going to depend on your passion. So another benefit was enhanced sleep. Now a lot of people struggle with getting good quality deep sleep. And, and it's mainly because their mind's just too active at night. They can't switch their mind off because of that. They go to sleep when the mind's still racing and they wake up and the mind just continues to race. When you meditate you're gonna slow the thinking down. You're gonna give your body a chance to really get the deep sleep without it being interrupted by thoughts, which are energy, which is essentially gonna really cause unnecessary momentum in your life and wasted energy. So with that, you're going to get more energy through you conserving energy and not wasting your energy on thoughts. So I'll repeat that by not thinking as much, you're not wasting energy on past and future, or what you're going to have for breakfast tomorrow, or who you're going to call today, what you're going to do at work, which is all you know. You know you're not aligned with the present moment, so you're going to get more energy because you're living in the present moment. Your energy is now invested in this moment. This is powerful because, like, I actually noticed sometimes I didn't even need coffee in the mornings if I meditated. And I had a good, deep practice. My eye was just filled with natural life energy that you don't need to turn to stimulants to wake yourself up. It's pretty freaking cool and definitely a cool benefit. So improved overall health, that was another thing. My body actually functioned a lot better. I was able to exercise better. I performed better in my sports. I played soccer. And my performance was improved because I just had this clarity and this space now of executing decisions better. I was able to feel when moments were right. I had more intuition on what direction to take in my performance in my games. It's a powerful skill to have. And then obviously, less stress. You know, when you meditate, you're gonna really take back control of the fight or flight response and not allow anxious and stressful thinking to just take control of your life, really, especially at work. You know, working in any environment can sometimes be stressful. When we get given tasks that require us to invest a lot of time, we tend to think too far ahead. And again, coming back to the present moment, when you're grounded in the present moment and your focus is here and now, you cannot be stressed in this moment. The last podcast, Josh and I spoke a lot about that. And if you'd like to know more about dealing with stress, definitely go and give that one a listen. So now that you kind of understand what the benefits of meditation are, I want to try and help you guys establish a practice for yourself. If you don't already have a consistent practice, then I want to try and give you some pointers or tips that can really help you build that consistency of effort that is going to help you really gain all these benefits that I just mentioned. Also, if you don't have a practice already, I can give you some tips as well that are going to make the first time a little easier, because the first time you meditate, it's always difficult. It's always difficult the first time we do anything because we're going to be shit at it. So I guess that's my first tip, is don't expect to get it the first time. Don't expect to be good at meditation. Don't expect to be good at anything the first time. So when you go in there with no expectations, you kind of become a lot easier on yourself. You allow the learning process to unravel naturally. And that's the best part about learning, is you get to see when you get better, you notice the improvements. So no expectations. And that way we can really start to build the practice and grow with the practice. Now, secondly, my tip would be to pick the right time to meditate. I mean, if you're going to meditate in the middle of the day, It's a lot more difficult because the mind's already active. You want to try and choose a time, and the mind's naturally going to be drifting into more of a peaceful state. So that would be, I guess, first thing in the morning when you first wake up, because the mind's still cycling through certain brainwave patterns. You're going to really optimize times when you're in a theta brainwave state. And theta brainwave state is basically when the mind's in that lucid state. It's in between sleep and awake. And this is what we want to achieve when we meditate. Because in theta, that's when we start to tap into the subconscious mind. That's when we start to get past the conscious mind, and we get to really start to connect with this higher energy that I spoke of earlier. So the two times you're gonna really optimize for being in theta state Is in the evening just before you go to bed, and first thing in the morning when you wake up. So theta is essentially when the body is asleep, but the mind's still awake. And you may notice that you fall into this state, you know, when you. When you kind of. You know when you're dreaming, but you're sort of awake. And just when you're about to fall asleep, you notice that you're having, like, these lucid dream states. That's because your mind is in theta. So if you meditate during those times, we can really tap into this state of being, the state of mind that we want to achieve. So I guess now this kind of loops back into developing consistency. And now that we've established the right times to meditate, I think it's important to then optimize these times so you can then find that consistency. So maybe if you struggle with finding a consistent practice, use these times of the day to establish habits. So for me, it's like first thing in the morning, you know, my habit is as soon as I wake up, you know, I might go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, but the first thing I do before I check my phone is, is I sit down and enter my meditation practice, enter my routine, and that's now a habit. And for me, it's. You have to prioritize it. You know, meditation. I mean, if you, if you've listened this far, you've heard about all the amazing benefits and the amazing changes that happened in my life, and surely that's enough for you now to commit to making this a priority. Make meditation a priority. If you don't have time in the mornings, then go to sleep earlier, wake up earlier, make this a priority. Like, I don't understand when people say, you know, like, like, oh, I don't know, I don't have the time to meditate because you don't have the time not to meditate. Meditation is going to give you everything that you're chasing through whatever form of work or other activities that you're doing. You're. You're just chasing an emotional state of more connectedness with being, which is going to give you more love, peace, joy and gratitude. That's all. That's all we're chasing. So if meditation is going to give you more access to these states, then why would you not want to make it a priority in your day? So if you struggle with the consistency, I just hope that picking the right times in the day, in the morning, at night, and weave your practice into your routine and make it a habit. And by doing that, you're going to build from that and all of a sudden you're actually going to enjoy your meditation, you're going to look forward to it. And as you get better, you notice that it's probably going to be the funnest part of your day. I mean, for me now my meditation has advanced to a place where I'm committing to doing two hours a day. And you know, like, to a lot of people, that's quite alarming. Two hours a day. Like, I mean, what the hell? How do you find that time? That's what I hear a lot from people. But again, when you get to a place in your practice where you are entering a state of being, a place beyond the body and mind, beyond this physical world, a place where you're connected with everyone and everything and you feel a sense of love, joy, appreciation for life, why would you not want to do this more? And for me, I just want to experiment with how far can I take this? You know, you could call it like urban monk. You know, I'm essentially practicing what monks do in, in a normal living scenario. Like I still go to work, I still live a normal life, but I'm just starting to amp up the duration of my meditations. So I'm at two hours a day now clearly, obviously monks do it for a lot, a lot longer than that. But you know, I'm gonna experiment with two hours a day and see, see what happens. And so far, like, you know, crazy stuff starts to happen, like synchronistic things that you really, really starts to reaffirm the idea that you are a co creator, that you are connected to everything and your thoughts are energy and your vibration that you put out directly affects the universe. So by you raising your vibration through meditation, you are affecting everyone and everything and you're going to attract people, places and things that reflect this new level of vibration. So that's not to say meditation is going to answer all your, all your problems. Meditation is not going to, you know, enlighten you, but it's certainly a foundational and powerful tool for raising your vibrational state, for making you a more happier, fulfilled, grateful person. So I'll keep you updated on how these two hours a day meditations go. And you know, if more cool stuff starts to happen, I'll be sure to report that back to you. But I mean, for now, you know, I've kind of given you guys a pretty good understanding of where I'm at with meditation and how it's impacted my life and hopefully maybe inspired you to start meditating or maybe commit to more of a consistent practice. So, you know, I've been doing some research recently and I've been asking people a lot of questions. More people in my community, my social networks, and people who I come in contact with at work, because obviously I work in a mindfulness clinic where we use meditation. I've been asking what are the biggest challenges or struggles that people face and I've noticed a consistent response. And the response is always, I have difficulty silencing my mind during meditation. So I decided to include a bonus for people who listen to this podcast. And I've kind of collated a list of my go to tools or techniques or tips to really help silence the mind in meditation. And obviously there's no way of fully silencing the mind. I guess that's the idea of meditation, is to just notice when you have thoughts and acknowledge them when they arise and let them go. But certainly for some people, they struggle with the idea of really getting past that initial barrier of the mind, just not stopping. And there's certainly some techniques that have helped me a lot in getting through that and some even tools or resources that you can use along with your practice to really accelerate this, accelerate this destination to stillness that we're trying to. We're trying to get to. So feel free to grab a hold of that bonus content. And I'm also in the process of creating my own meditations and creating a meditation course as well that will assist people in gaining clarity in their own practice and establishing their own meditation routine that kind of works for them so they can get access to these benefits as well. So stay tuned. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to meditation, talking about meditation because I'm so passionate about this. But thanks for tuning in and, and I'll try and keep you updated on further progress and lots more things to come. So thanks again. Bye for now. Guys, it's me again. Everyone keeps telling me have a call to action at the end of your podcast. I keep reading it everywhere. So here's my call to action. If you haven't already, go and follow my State Shifters Instagram page. Ate Shifters post lots of cool content relating back to like mindfulness, spirituality, inner growth, all that kind of stuff. So if you're into all that, make sure you follow that page. And also if you haven't got your tips for silencing in mind, content upgrade that I'm providing with this episode. Be sure to grab that on the podcast episode page. That's all. Thanks guys. Bye for now.