The term "meditation" often comes with a lot of baggage. It's a heavy word, conjuring images of yogis on mountaintops.
While we may yearn for that serenity, we quickly dismiss the idea as impractical amidst our busy lives - what do they know of our pressing deadlines and endless to-do lists?
But, What is Meditation?
Let's first demystify the term. Meditation simply means a technique to help us "think right." When we think right, the number of waste or negative thoughts decreases, leading to decluttering and achieving clarity of mind.
We might notice that the speed of our thoughts is high when we're thinking wastefully or caught in a negative spiral-we feel we have too many thoughts and they're not really in our control.
Fun Fact: We create 60,000 thoughts a day, of which only 5% are productive—the rest are thoughts of stress, anxiety, worry, and the like. These 5% are what manifests into all the achievements and success we see in our lives. Meditating helps to increase productive thoughts, enabling us to put more of those thoughts into action and we end up achieving more.
Where Do I Start?
1.The first step is to not take in wasteful or negative information
2.The second step is substitution with good quality information
3.The final step is conscious meditation
Think of your mind like someone trying to lose weight. To regain health, this person must
1.Stop eating junk food
2.Start substituting it with the right food
3.And exercise
Junk food represents the junk information we end up consuming, often "casually". Whether it's gossip, content that fuels FOMO, or negative news, all of this is junk food for our minds. Every piece of information we feed our mind permanently etches itself in our subconscious and shapes our thoughts.
But the good news is we can consciously change that by changing the information we consume-whether it’s a motivating documentary or an inspiring quotation, even a single line of positive information will start changing your subconscious faster than you think. It's not going to take months or years. You'll start to "feel good" in days, and if you're feeling good, you're on the right track.
Consider how you would clean a glass full of dirty water without pouring all the water out. If you start adding a spoon of clean water every day, the dirty water will overflow, leaving you with clean water.
A Practical Meditation Guide For Busy Lives
Along with a healthy diet, we need to start exercising our minds. If we have never exercised before, our body isn't used to it just yet. If we push ourselves unreasonably, we might damage our tissues and conclude that "exercise is not for me."
Similarly, when starting meditation, we must be gentle and easy with our minds. Our mind is like a naughty child—it's running all over the place and requires patience to discipline. Just as we don't give up on our child, we shouldn't give up on our minds!
Approach meditation as a break or simply a means to take in the right food for the mind.
Start small. Take baby steps:
- Relax for a minute after every meeting or call. Step away from the screen, have a glass of water, or take a short walk across the office. Breathe in and out for a minute.
-Read a positive quotation from your calendar or the office wall hangings and try to stay with it for a minute by thinking about how you could implement it in your workday today
- Try Niksen-The Art of Doing Nothing. Ironically, Doing Nothing for short bursts of time makes you more productive and boosts your creativity.
- Explore 1-minute meditations online called "JAMS" or "Just a Minute." Simply listen, and observe your mind calming down.
Creating a Routine for Meditation
If you're serious about taming your mind, set fixed times daily to meditate, even if just for a few minutes. Keep the frequency rigid but the duration flexible.
For instance, I meditate at four fixed periods of the day: early morning, mid-morning, afternoon (during lunch), and evening (end of workday). Adjust the duration based on how you feel and what works best for you. Start with just 1 minute a session. If you feel good and are not rushing in for a meeting, increase it to 5 minutes. At the end of the day or early morning when you feel you have time, allow the session to go on for 30 minutes. Observe and record how you "feel" after every meditation session.
What Meditation Content Works Best?
As far as content goes, go for those with commentary. The mind is meant to create thoughts, just as our mouth is meant to talk and our eyes are meant to see. If there is silence in the meditation piece we're listening to, our mind will either start shutting off or continue to create its own commentary that we were trying to shut off in the first place. We'd find ourselves either completely distracted or falling asleep—both of which defeat the purpose of meditation.
Meditation pieces with commentaries keep the mind activated and work on changing the quality of our thoughts instead.
Conclusion
Remember, you are the master of your mind. It's time to regain your mastery.
I know you can do it!
Lots of love <3
Avantika Jain,
Your Mindset Strategist
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