Top 10 Reasons To Start Meditating Right Now

[Vladimir]

“Meditation is the closest we can get to speeding up evolution, and making the most of our brain’s potential.” ~The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal.

1.     Foundation

2.     Awareness

3.     Change

4.     Evolution

5.     Willpower

6.     Healing

7.     Perception

8.     Cultivation

9.     Authenticity

10.  Presence

Foundation

Before building a house, we all know we must first lay solid foundation which will sustain and support our house for many years to come. Meditation is a very strong and powerful foundation for lasting inner growth and personal change, everything else that you want to master, change and manifest in your life will be built upon this practice. If you rush into this work by trying to learn a bunch of advice here and there, reading a bunch of books, you can quickly find yourself lost in the ocean of information, overwhelmed and frustrated and you may actually end up doing more harm than good. That is why building our foundation is the most important first step when embarking on such an ambitious journey as personal development. You’ll be able to stay grounded, organized and focused. Meditation is the number one habit to develop in this work, as you come across obstacles in the future, you can always fall back on this practice and figure out what's keeping you stuck.

Awareness

“95% of people's bahaviors are subconscious” ~Joe Dispenza

One of the first video games I played back in childhood was called Prince of Persia. In this game, you had to be very careful and mindful how you navigated the dungeon, one wrong step and the prince would end up on top of the sharp spikes. Life is like the most sophisticated and treacherous dungeon, it's like the dungeon from Prince of Persia multiplied by a complexity of 1,000 or more. What if I tried beating the game with only 5% of screen visibility which would only allow me to see the prince’s head. It would be impossible to beat the game, yet we’re trying to navigate this unbelievably complex dungeon with only 5% awareness. Meditation is the best technique for regaining that awareness.

Change

If our mind is like the operating system of the computer, then we can image that our sub-conscious thoughts are like programs that are running in the background of that operating system.

Meditation allows us to go deep into the operating system of our mind, and with time, become aware of thousands of programs that have been running in the background of that system for many years. We can then start understanding where our behavior comes from, see how certain thoughts are triggering specific feelings in our bodies and start uninstalling these viruses from our system. We can then figure out the conditions which will allow us to break out of the loops that we have been stuck for many years (eg: addictions, insecurity, social anxiety, depression etc.). We can also start installing new thought patterns which will be beneficial to our biological systems and create new, healthy behaviors leading to happier lives.

Evolution

“Meditation is the closest we can get to speeding up evolution, and making the most of our brain’s potential.” ~The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal.

We have become a culture obsessed with physical appearance, spending enormous amount of time trying to make ourselves look good by taking care of our bodies. Yet we completely neglect training our minds, thinking it will just take care of itself. The reality is that you can look 100% healthy on the outside, yet at the same time be horribly sick on the inside, just because you look good, doesn’t mean you’re a complete, healthy human being. Actually, most of the personal development work involved, including healing your mind and body is done by taking care and training your mind.

By practicing meditation, you are working out your mind by sending more blood flow to your brain and increasing gray matter which unlocks all kinds of super powers that you didn’t even know existed. You are evolving into a higher version of yourself, literally upgrading the most advanced super computer known to humanity which is your mind.

Willpower

People name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals. There is no better way to increase your willpower than by meditating. Willpower is one of the most precious resources we as human beings have, it’s self control, the more of it we have, the more difficult challenges we’ll be able to overcome. I like to represent willpower as a glass orb filled with blue magic substance, which I have taken from a video game Diablo 3. As we go around slaying monsters, casting spells, this blue energy orb representing our “magic energy” is drained, similarly as we expend our willpower, facing emotionally difficult situations in life, our orb of willpower will be drained. Though at the same time the glass orb will be expanding, growing more capacity for willpower because willpower works like a muscle, the more we train it the more we grow our muscles after allowing ourselves to rest. Once the orb regenerates to full capacity, we will have more willpower and be able to face more emotionally difficult situations along our hero’s journey

Healing

In programming profession, just like in many areas in life, there are different levels of skill ranging from junior to senior level programmers. When we become aware of our thoughts that are triggering negative emotions and causing all kinds of harmful behavior towards ourselves, we can then start “re-programming” ourselves by uninstalling these thoughts from our minds. This process can lead to healing for a lot of people, but if the root cause of the problem is at the structural level, we’ll need to become “senior programmers” in order to access the structural code area of our system. This area in humans is called epigenetics (from Greek “epi” - upon the genes), Joe Tafur from his book The Fellowship of the River describes epigenetics as “the seat of the seat of the soul” – meaning this is where the core software of our human system design is located. Just like senior programmer would design the interface of the system from which the rest of the code is written, we too can have access to this place by elevating our consciosness to a higher level when we meditate long enough. So, you’ll be able to restructure and reprogram the maladaptive code which you may have acquired during childhood and release that emotional trauma on a deep level.

Perception

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ~Anais Nain

One of the biggest traps is that we assume that our models of reality which we hold in our minds accurately represent actual reality. You may be living in a state of social anxiety, depression, anger, addiction, and reactive behavior, yet at the same time telling yourself that you are perceiving reality very accurately. I personally had all those things I just mentioned for 20 years and I thought my representation of reality was the most accurate of all people. “Heaven and Hell are within us” ~Joseph Campbell, a lot of people are living in the state of mind of Hell and don’t even reazlie it. The truth is, even if you fall within the parameters of what our society would call “healthy” individual, the room for improving your quality of perception is still gigantic. Your life can still be better by a factor of 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 or even 50,000. Meditation raises the quality of our consciousness which should be a prime directive in anybody’s life. We’re able to perceive reality more accurately and get back to the place of love and being, where we all came from before we learned all the thinking and doing.

Authenticity

When you carry plastic bags in your hands from your car, after grocery shopping, and eventually let go of them, they leave imprints on your hands, after you release the bags from your hands - the first few seconds can be painful as your hands return to their natural state. Just because it’s habitual doesn’t mean it’s natural.

Underneath layers of social conditioning and cultural zombification, there is a place of our true self. To get to this place of authenticity, we don’t have to learn anything new, that’s why I think books like “How to Talk to Anyone” may actually do more harm than good, as they teach communication techniques which aren’t coming from an authentic place, and by learning them we are moving further away from our true selfs.

Authenticity is more about uncovering layers and dissolving barriers that we have built and unlearning thoughts and behaviors we have practiced living under social constraints. These barriers and blockages are called “allostatic load” in scientific terms which is the accumulation of stressful responses that manifest in all sorts of malignant ways in the body which can include tension, anxiety, depression, migraines and anger. Our true self is already there underneath layers of cultural conditioning, buried by social rules and limits we have learned and imposed on ourselves. Meditation allows us to tune into that place, by elevating our state of consciousness, we’re able to dissolve barriers and blockages we have built and access our higher, authentic selfs.

We’re able to access “A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.” ~The Matrix

Cultivation

Humanity’s greatest treasures are cultivated from within and the nature constantly reminds us of this truth. The sun is shining from within, the seed grows by germinating from the inside, the baby develops inside of a mother’s womb and is then delivered to the external world, not the other way around. The baby doesn’t start growing in the external world and then crawl into a mother’s vagina and goes on to develop into an adult human being and have a life inside of a mother. Yet we are still fooling ourselves by believing that external circumstrances, relationships and material posessions will make us happy and bring love into our lives. We can cultivate all the greatest treasures by intentional meditation including joy, happiness, love, forgiveness, compassion, greatfulness, and peace - all these treasures are available to us no matter what life circumstance or how rich or poor we are.

Presence

"The past is only a memory, the future a fantasy, the present moment is all we have." ~John Kabat Zinn

I first discovered the true power of meditation while at a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat out in the desert here in the Southern California, about a year ago. It happened around day five of the retreat, as I was walking through the desert. All of a sudden, I realized that my mind was completely still, there was no chatter, no thoughts running through the mind, no memories about the past or fantasies about the future. I realized for the first time ever, that I was missing out on life, because I wasn’t living in the present moment. I felt happy just being, my body blending in with the surroundings, the warmth of the sun, wind, earth. I felt like I was transported back to childhood in Russia, when I was about 8 years old, resting in the sun at the beach on a 3-month school break, back then I felt overjoyed knowing I have so much time to enjoy without school, I felt happy.

This is what meditation can do for you, it can bring you back to that state of present moment, the state of being, before you have learned how to be an adult, it can bring back the magic of life as it unfolds moment by moment.

[Afonso]

Cool pics!