Hello. Good evening. It’s a bit of a bad hairdo. Tonight I want to talk about meditation. Now, I came in fairly late into the world of meditation, because I just thought only really woo-woo people sat down and went, “Um, um, um!” I apologize to everybody I ever kind of had those conversations with, because since I have started meditating, I’ve done it on and off over the years, but since I have become more regulated with it truly has made a difference to my life. So I’m going to give you meditation from the point of view of someone who’s analytical with a woo-woo rising, which is how I describe myself. So I found this great quote, I’ll just read it to you, “Your calm mind is the ultimate weapon against your challenges, so relax.” It’s by someone could Bryant Miguel.
So how do I meditate? I’m yet to get to the point where I can just sit and chill and empty my brain. I really hope I get to that point, because I know for the people that do do that, the benefits of meditation are tenfold what they are for me. So currently the way I do meditation is I do guided meditations. So in the morning I do a guided meditation like 10 to 20 minutes. I tend to find one that I am liking at the time or is based on something I’m interested in learning a bit more about, or a challenge I’m working on with myself, so it might be money, it might be procrastination, it might be all sorts of things, or it might just simply be a relaxation thing.
I love, there’s an app called Omvana that Mindvalley have, there’s a great six phase meditation in there by Vishen Lakhiani, and I really do like that one, it’s about 20 minutes long, and he goes through six different mini guided meditations, so you can build up to it and do one a day till you get to the whole six. There’s gratitude, there’s forgiveness, there’s future visioning, there’s all sorts of things. I do really like that one.\
And then sometimes at night I will do a hypnosis-y kind of meditation. Evening, [Johnny 00:02:23]. And I’m not sure, you know, does it do amazing things to me? I don’t know. I do know I sleep really well. I’m one of those lucky people that when I go to sleep I’m… And I wake up in the morning. I’m not getting up and I very rarely wake up and can’t get back to sleep. When I do, generally something big is going on. So I find if I’m doing those late night ones, sometimes they’re like 45, 50 minutes long. I reckon I’m lucky to get to minute number five before I’m sound asleep, and it does relax me, it totally clears my mind in that going to sleep process.
And when I do the one in the morning, I do it in bed, I’d actually like to get myself a meditation cushion because I think it would be better to get up and do it. But I do it as my kind of way of waking up and processing the world before I get up.
The other time I do meditation, again using guided meditations, is quite often in the middle of the day, I might take a walk and go sit in a park near my house, I might take a walk into the national park and go sit by the water, because water totally calms me, feeds my soul, does all those things. So doing a meditation those times is also beneficial and I really enjoy doing. Occasionally I will just sit and not be listening to something, but I haven’t yet mastered that.
So enough about what I get out of meditation and how I do it. But there so many apps out there, have a fiddle. If you’re doing guided meditations, a lot of it is about the voice that you’re listening to, because some of them, let’s face it, we don’t all like everybody’s voices. You know, there are going to be people listening to this that are, “Ah, I don’t like how she talks.” Doesn’t bother me. But find someone who’s doing the meditation whose voice you do like listening to, if you’re going to go down the guided meditation road.
So what are some of the things that meditation can do for you? Well, it can lower your blood pressure. It can increase your circulation. It increases neuroplasticity in your brain. It helps you process information better. It calms you down. It’s really good for tapping into, and I don’t mean that kind of tapping, it’s really good at tapping into your creativity or your intuition. It can actually increase blood flow to parts of your brain, which blows my mind, that stillness and thinking like that can have actual physical, physical benefits to you. But it’s totally scientifically proven that these things work. You know, meditation does do things. Meditation does reduce cortisol production.
Meditation does increase neuroplasticity. It reduces stress. It boosts your immune system. It helps relax your muscles.