this video will show you three things that you must give up in order to easily
meditate I'm going to share with you practical processes that I've used my
life in order to actually receive benefits from meditation so that you can
do the same thing welcome back to another video my name is Aaron and I
help people expand their consciousness now in this video I'm gonna be sharing
with you the three things that I had a common misconception about when I first
started meditating you know when I first learned about it years ago at first I
thought it was a little bit of like a Lulu type science but at the same time
it's about five or six years ago I had what is formally called ADHD and I took
adderall for it and the hard side effects of adderall were you couldn't
eat very much and you couldn't sleep very much so eventually I was doing
research and I found like scientific studies that proved the benefits of
meditation and when I saw that it reduced cortisol which is the stress
hormone and increased serotonin and dopamine that's when I became much more
serious about it and I decided that I might as well at least learn it well as
some of you know my story what happened is as I started meditating and within a
day or two I started to receive the benefits from it and from that point
going forward I never took adderall again and since then I've meditated the
first five or ten minutes a bit of my day for the last about five or six years
now and also the five or ten minutes right before I go to bed now this is
probably the biggest game-changer that I've ever had in my life the thing that
really profoundly impacted my life but there were three common misconceptions
around it of expectations I had that when I made these little tweaks
everything began to change now the first one had to do with thinking that
meditation was about controlling the mind now this is a funny paradox because
when I was focused on trying to control my mind and this was mainly within the
first couple days of meditating I realized that the more I would try to
control my mind the more that I would resist it it's almost like the more you
focus on not thinking negative thoughts the more you're going to think the
negative thoughts because you build up inner resistance inside now the key to
this and the solution to this problem is simply observing the thoughts now let
me ask you a question if we think of the idea of a rainy day does the idea of a
rainy day have a positive connotation or a negative connotation well the idea is
it depends upon your perspective as to the kind of effect that we get out of it
so in essence a rainy day is a neutral idea that we get built-in meaning -
depending upon our beliefs now in the same way what we can learn how to do is
understand that our thoughts are fundamentally neutral when we think that
we're having negative thoughts it's more so that we're attaining and giving it
negative meaning and if we resist it we will continue to feel that negative
effect from it so in essence everything that we think
is fundamentally neutral and if we learn how to observe the thoughts rather than
control them that's where you'll start to see the benefit so this is a common
analogy that I use and it's from the book the power of now by Eckhart Tolle
imagine you're sitting at a park bench and you're just observing people walk by
you're just neutrally observing them walk by you may see a dog walk by you
might see people walk by but the idea is that you don't go chase after them you
don't become identified with those people walking by now in the same way
you may be having these thoughts in your mind you may be observing your thoughts
and you're not gonna identify with those thoughts you're not going to follow
those thoughts and see where they go you're just going to observe them from a
neutral place now this is where the power is now always remember this we may
think our thoughts but we are not our thoughts there's a big difference here
because when we start to become aware that we generate thoughts depending that
that's the what our brain does we see we don't have to be identified with our
brain and when we make this correlation and we take ourselves outside of the
reactive mind we take our sides of ourselves outside
of that that's when we're starting to receive the benefit so in order to do
this all you have to do is realize first off it's not about controlling the mind
it's more so about observing the mind it's more so about allowing the thoughts
to be there now this is also a funny paradox because when you allow the
thoughts to be there they will naturally start to go away anyways so this is the
analogy I use for that now I know this videos a lot has a lot of analogies in
it but imagine that our ego in a way is like a two-year-old now this is just an
analogy but when you're arguing with a two-year-old the idea is the more you
argue the more that that two-year-old will resistant and the more that you
will end up you know having that altercation now the idea is if you were
to let the two-year-old do what it's doing almost to let the two-year-old
have a temper tantrum the idea as eventually that two-year-old is going to
get tired and it's going to go to bed or it's gonna go get tired it's going to
forget why it was mad now in the same way that's how we can relate to our ego
when it comes to letting it think it's thoughts let it and observe it but don't
react to it don't keep trying to control it don't keep trying to think about it
that's just an analogy that makes it easier to understand the correlation and
with these two analogies and these two ideas you can start to get profound
results from it because you realize and you have the awareness it's not about
the control it's about the awareness it's about observing the thoughts from a
neutral place and when you do that those negative thoughts begin to go away those
negative emotions go away and that stress and cortisol will start to go
away now the second thing that you must give up has to do with giving up
distractions now there's two sides of this coin because normally we think of
meditation as you have to be sitting down you have to be like staring at a
candle flame or something but with meditation it can actually be something
you actively do so it could be something that you do maybe while you're washing
dishes you pay attention to everything that you're doing to your sense
perceptions you bring it the awareness from being inside of the head and into
the body now that's what this part is gonna be about is understanding it's
more about presence it's less about the mind and the intellectual idea is in
thinking and trying to like you know blast off with our thoughts it's more so
about bringing the awareness to the present moment right now and a simple
way of doing this is to simply put the sense perceptions in your hands
now if you do that right now and you focus on your breathing you're gonna
start to take the awareness from being a majority inside the head which is
overthinking and you're going to bring that into a place of presence so that
where a lot of the power is realize it's not just about the thinking it's more so
about the being it's more so about the awareness of how to be present to the
moment now the third thing I want to share has to do with understanding the
ability to focus on one point now this is for people that want to go deeper of
course meditation can also be an active thing but if you want to bring your
meditation deeper this is what I recommend and this is something that
really made a big difference for me now I as I said had quote-unquote ADHD and I
reason I said quote-unquote is because I believe that because I believe dyad of
ADHD because I went to a doctor I believe the only solution to that was
taking adderall I don't believe I have it anymore I have a lot of energy as you
I'm sure you guys can feel but I ground that out by doing meditation so it's
like I've refrained it to not thinking is this disorder you see what I mean but
this is the powerful part of the third one now the third one is all about
taking away distractions with your eyes now I noticed and this is something I
realized actually later when I was in yoga they said something when I was in
Bikram yoga they said when your eyes wander your mind wanders as well so I
realized that because I had ADHD at the time and because I was so focused on you
know always doing the next thing and my mind was moving at a thousand miles a
minute what I did instead was I focused on a candle flame now this was maybe
three or four days into learning meditation I focused on the candle flame
and I would let my eyes focus on that one point and then I would bring the
awareness within my body and I would focus on just being now here's the thing
when your mind is focused on that one point it's almost like it's so much
easier to go deeper with meditation you'll find that when you do that you're
able to really get present to the moment and you'll find that then the
overthinking starts to go away now this is something I've shared with thousands
of people through other videos and it's something that I continuously get
messages from today that seeing people saying that little advice right there
changed the whole results I was getting with meditation and allowed me to really
receive the benefits so that's something that you can do to use a candle flame
what I do is I sit down I have a candle flame that's about eye level I focus on
the flame and as I meditate I keep bringing my eyes back to it if it
keeps wandering eventually I normally will close my eyes maybe five minutes
into the meditation but whatever works for you now realize that these three
things are things that can allow you to go deeper to really have a more holistic
understanding of how meditation can be powerful in your life remember the first
one is to simply let go of trying to control the mind allow the thoughts to
be there and as you allow them to be there the thoughts were naturally start
to go away as well now secondly remember that as you are able to let go of the
expectation of thinking meditation is all about being in the head you can
bring it more until being present into the moment everyday what you can do is
just put the feeling and put the sensation inside of your hands by
putting the awareness there put it inside of your body and realize it's
more about being than anything else and then thirdly all you have to do is
realize that as you are able to focus on one point you will start to go deeper
and that any time your eyes wander you can bring it back to that one point so
with that being said I hope you guys enjoy this video feel free to like this
video if you liked it subscribe if you haven't already also I put a free PDF
inside the description box on the top five books that I recommend they're
books that absolutely transform my life two of those books are less than 50
pages so they could be read in like an hour too so feel free to check out it as
well and other than that I will see you guys on the next dish
nice day