How Your Brain Transforms When You Meditate | Emily Fletcher

Meditation, as I would define it, is basically when we're accessing a verifiable fourth state of consciousness. So different than waking, different than sleeping, and different than dreaming, when you start to cultivate a meditation practice, you actually move into a fourth state of consciousness, okay? And in this state of consciousness, the right and left hemispheres of the brain start to function in unison. And this is important because your left brain is in charge of the past and the future, and your right brain is in charge of the right now. Left brain, critical thought. Right brain, creative thought. Left brain, I suck, I suck, I suck. I'm in a dialogue with cats eating my face. Right brain, write that book, call that guy, start that company. Okay? So we actually want to have both of these guys functioning at the same time, right brain and left brain. So I. When we start meditating, we're accessing this fourth state of consciousness. And when I say that it's like a verifiable state of consciousness, what I mean is that if you were to hook your brain up to an EEG machine, which is electroencephalography hardware, there are eight classic points on the right brain and eight classic points on the left. And in waking, sleeping, and dreaming states of consciousness, the right and left hemispheres of the brain are functioning separately. But in this fourth state of consciousness, all 16 leads of EEG rise and fall in unison. Now, when you start meditating, instead of a small part of the brain lighting up like it does in mindfulness, the whole brain lights up, and that starts to increase, something called neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change itself. It also increases something called neurogenesis, which is the brain's ability to generate new brain cells. Okay? And that's happening because you have this whole brain cohesion happening when you're doing this. Practice. When the whole brain lights up, the right and left brains are talking to each other, and that strengthens and thickens something called the corpus callosum. Now, the corpus callosum is the white strip that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And we've known for a long time that meditators have thicker corpus callosums than non meditators. But we weren't able to prove if it was causal or correlated. But now we know that the longer you meditate, the thicker this thing becomes comes, which suggests that it is, in fact, causal. It suggests that it is the meditation that is thickening the corpus callosum. So, great. Why would I want a fat corpus callosum because it is the very thing that allows you to come up with a creative problem solving idea even in the middle of a high demand situation. Okay, so your boss is yelling at you, you get kind of stressed and like, it's like, ah, I don't know, I'm sorry, goodbye. Or you get into a fight with your partner and it gets pretty heated, and then it gets really heated. And then eventually you just like shut down and retreat to the bedroom. And about two hours later, you start coming up with all these hilarious witty comebacks. And you're like, why? Why couldn't I have thought of that in the moment? Well, my hypothesis is, is that the thicker your corpus callosum is, the easier it is for you to come up with all those witty comebacks when it counts, right? Because none of you guys care how hilarious or amazing or enlightening I was last night in my hotel room when I was making my notes for this. It doesn't matter. It matters how well I perform right now. And we really need the combination of left brain and right brain happening simultaneously. Also, I don't think that nature makes mistakes. And if you look at a human brain, it's actually 50 50, right? Why would nature have given us 5050 if it wanted us to use 90 10? And yet that's what most of us are doing. We're thinking, we're taking action, we're achieving, we're making money so we can be happy in the future. We think, we take action, we achieve, we make money so we can be happy in the future. And meanwhile, our poor little right brain is like, I have a creative idea, I have a suggestion. Like, shut up, right brain. I gotta think and take action to achieve and make money so I can be happy in the future. Mantra is actually a Sanskrit word. Man means mind and trap means vehicle. So a mantra is actually a mind vehicle. And these mind vehicles are custom designed to de excite the nervous system. They're custom designed to take you into more subtle states of consciousness so that you can start to access your bliss and fulfillment and in the only place that they reside, which is inside of you. And every spiritual text has been saying this since the beginning of time. What you seek is in you. The kingdom of heaven is within. And that is a beautiful intellectual concept to get in your brain. But it's a lot more powerful to be able to experience that every day, twice a day, physically, viscerally in your bones, in your cells, in your body. And that, in no uncertain terms, is what meditation does for you. It's giving you access to your fulfillment inside of you. How kind are you? How compassionate are you? How present are you? How's your sleep? How's your sex? How's your parking karma? How creative are you? Okay, because when you give your body the rest that it needs, when you're giving your body that deep healing rest, rest that's two to five times deeper than six, then the body knows how to heal itself. And one of the things that it heals itself from is stress. And so that stuff has to go somewhere. And in my experience, when you practice meditation, when you give your body this deep healing rest, you're handling not only the stress from the right now, but actually purging and creating a catharsis from all your stress from the past. And that's actually the thing that up levels your performance capabilities. Ra.