4 Years of Meditation Taught Me This
In the last couple of years, many people have told me how they attempted mindfulness meditation and couldn’t keep it going. They struggled to form a habit and threw in the towel after only a week or two. An effective way I have dealt with improving my habits is to consume as much information on the specific topic as possible, to arm myself with multiple reasons to keep the practice going. I want to describe how I have experienced the life-changing perks of meditation for those of you like me.
There is a long list of excellent benefits associated with consistent mindfulness practice; managing stress, reduce anxiety, self-awareness, compassion and calmness to list a few. However, aside from the fact results aren’t quick to come by (more on the neuroscience behind why), how does sitting still and focusing on my breath help provide these improvements?
For those unfamiliar with mindfulness, the main focus is to concentrate on your breath and “catch” your thoughts as they come along. As each thought is caught, you acknowledge it and return the attention back to the breath. After 100+ hours of this exercise, you start to acquire a detailed picture of how your brain thinks, and your body feels. Typically you want to meditate in a location without distractions, thereby minimising the chance of being aroused. Arousal refers to the psychological experience of energy, mobilisation, activity, tension, alertness, or quietness.
This practice helps us identify what I call our “baseline” level.
Our baseline is the state where there is no or minimal externally generated arousal. As seen in figure 1, the power of this newfound awareness lies within arousal moving positively or negatively. When you’re happy or excited, your arousal is positive. When you are angry or sad, it is negative. I know this can seem pretty basic; you already know when you’re happy and sad. But it gets a whole lot better than that.
Once you understand your baseline, you begin to improve your ability to recognise your arousal levels as they move along the spectrum. Early on, it may still be large triggers like noticing how disappointed you are in being turned down for a promotion. Alternatively, you may pick up on the excitement levels as your team at work finally deliver a challenging project.
It’s important to note, before learning your baseline “you don’t know what you don’t know”. If you’re not catching these changes, you have no hope to do anything about it. To illustrate this point, let’s look at the role vocabulary can play in thinking.
Scientists have found that children who develop large vocabularies become more profound thinkers. At face value, this makes logical sense. Suppose person A has twice the vocabulary of person B. The internal (and external) dialogue available to person A is vastly more extensive, allowing them to think of and reflect on topics that person B doesn’t even know about. Comparably, Person B is limited by their lack of vocabulary.
Similarly, you’ll be limited in your ability to understand feelings, emotions and arousal if you’ve not learnt how to pay attention to them.
As you spend more time meditating, the cues you pick up become far more subtle. You’ll be amazed to realise how much excitement you exude when talking about a particular topic or the infinite amount of energy you draw from certain activities. And you’ll wonder how you never recognised it before.
One thing I did not see coming was the power of noticing internally stimulated cues. Remember the part of mindfulness about catching your thoughts as they arise? You begin doing this throughout the day. Sitting on the bus to work, you may judge someone negatively, and catch the thought only to realise there are underlying elements of jealousy. Perhaps you identify that job promotion you got declined for wouldn’t have actually made you happier after all…
Upon reaching this territory, your experiences and desires are all laid out on the table to see (should you choose to look). According to Jordan Peterson, this is something we should inspect in detail.
“…we must become conscious of our desires, and articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies. That makes them sophisticated. That makes them work with each other, and with the desires of the other people, and with the world.”
Whatever you pick up on, you learn more about yourself, and what makes you, you. After all, don’t you want to know what makes you happy so you can do more of it? Likewise, understand what stresses you out so you can do less of that?
