What you've just done is that you've activated your parasympathetic
nervous system. A couple weeks ago,
I made a video about mental health tips for the second wave
of the pandemic. Tip number five was all about having a daily
meditation practice.
So I wanted to expand on the idea of actually adopting a
meditation practice today.
I personally learned how to meditate ages ago, starting at
age 17 when I was kidnapped and taken to a Buddhist Monastery
in the middle of nowhere and spent the whole day with monks.
That's a story for another time
maybe. Then I learned how to meditate again in therapy,
but I didn't start meditating regularly until earlier
this year.
Honestly, for a long time
there was a chasm and I think that this chasm exists for so
many of us. So many people understand what the high-level
benefits of meditation are, but yet so few of us actually
practice meditation everyday. I know, for me, that one of the
blockages that stopped me from meditating every day despite
having a vague desire to is not being able to wrap
my head around the tangible baby steps of
meditation. In my mind,
it was almost as if... either you are a zen master with the
ability to sit in total stillness and silence for extended
periods of time or you are a regular person with a far too
busy and demanding life.
And for the longest time,
I would have loved to just comfortably sit in the latter
category. (Until things didn't get so comfortable
of course.)
So in today's video, I want to go back to basics and I want
to share with you some techniques to use
if you are new to meditation. Tip number one: go outside and
open your ears.
One of my best meditation hacks for people who find it difficult
to focus is to engage your sense of hearing. This is because
the sounds of our environment are usually not paid too much
attention to. And so if you start to pay attention to what you
hear, you can open your sense of presence almost immediately.
Think about it. In your day-to-day life, you either notice
what's in the foreground or what's in the background. When
it comes to background noise,
it's background noise for a reason.
But in meditation, you can bring what's in the background
to the foreground and suddenly noticing the depth of your
environment starts to become interesting.
If you watch my daily routine video, you'll know that one
of my favorite places to meditate is outside at the dog park.
I've got a routine with my dog Chadley. Within that routine
is an opportunity for me to seat myself
in my favorite spot and meditate. I'll close my eyes
and one of the first things that I like to notice is
all the sounds going on around me. The sound of wind, birds,
people, dogs.
I don't know how to describe it any other way. I
just noticed that, for me, one of the truly enjoyable experiences
of meditation is listening to the symphony of sounds
that otherwise go unacknowledged in my day-to-day life. Tip
number two:
do a grounding exercise. A grounding exercise is a catch-all
term for any therapeutic technique that gets you centered
back to the here and now. It's an exercise that therapists
like to teach their clients in a state of emergency.
Let me give you an example of a grounding exercise and then
I'm going to explain why it works.
The next time you notice yourself in a state of panic
or worry; stop, pause, and breathe. Drop an imaginary anchor
to the ground and look at your feet.
You might even want to to stop them a few times.
What do you feel?
What is this sensation that you feel? The bare ground? Your
wet socks? The rubber soles of your shoes?
What do you feel?
What do you feel in your hands as well?
Now look around you.
What do you notice in your environment?
What are some things that you see? Some things that you hear
and some things that you might even smell? Take your time.
We're in no rush because the only objective of this practice
is to notice and once you've centered yourself to the
"here" and "now," you can just check in with yourself.
If you're practicing this in a state of emergency, I would
imagine that the sense of emotional distress that had been
weighing on you has now been alleviated. What you've just
done is that you've activated your parasympathetic nervous
system. You see, our nervous system mainly consists of two
parts: our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic
nervous system.
The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for our body's
unconscious actions. When you're sleeping in the middle of
the night and you hear a strange noise and you get jolted
out of bed, the act of being jolted out of bed or getting
yourself out of bed is not a conscious action.
It's not something you had to think about. That is your sympathetic
nervous system being activated.
It's responsible for your fight-or-flight bodily responses.
Your parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is
responsible for your rest and digest bodily functions.
You can think of them as mirrors of each other. When one gets
activated, the other gets deactivated and vice versa.
So when you're ruminating over events that haven't happened
yet, that is your sympathetic nervous system being engaged.
Those are your fight or flight response is being activated.
You might notice a rapid heart rate, a tightening of your
chest, and a tunneling of your focus on a perceived psychological
threat. This is why you want to do a grounding exercise... to
reactivate your parasympathetic nervous system and get
you back into a state
of rest. Of course,
the state of rest is where most of our sound decisions are
made. Tip number 3: cover your breaths with awareness.
Breathing is something we do automatically. You don't have
to think about it.
You don't have to force it.
It just happens.
And if you're starting out in meditation, one of the simplest
things you can do is to simply pay attention to your breathing.
Cover each inhalation and exhalation with your awareness.
You might even want to count your breaths and to see how
long you can stay focused on your breath before losing track.
And of course, when you lose track of your breaths
or of the number of your accounts, simply start over
again without judgment and remember, being aware that you've
lost focus is the practice itself. Because an awareness that
you are no longer present is in itself, presence.
I feel like that last point was pretty important.
I might just reiterate myself.
That was an "aha moment" for me.
Being told (as I was learning) that when you catch
yourself slipping up, when you catch yourself being distracted,
or being lost in thought -simply come back and reorient yourself
back into the present moment.
You don't have to judge yourself.
You don't have to be disappointed in yourself for having
lost track because the act of catching yourself and bringing
yourself back in the now -THAT is the practice itself.
Like I said, being aware that you're no longer present
is in itself presence.
And if you do that enough, over time, you're going to
become better at being able to
stay focused.
That's it
for our video today.
If you found these tips to be interesting or helpful, please
consider giving this video a "like" and leaving a comment down
below. Subscribe if you haven't subscribed already because
I make videos like this at least once a week. Actually, specifically,
I would want to know... if you're new, which of these tips were
the most helpful to you?
And if you're not... How's it
going? I don't know.
I'm kind of running out of creative juices today.
So I will see you in my future videos.