If you’ve tried to improve your life in small ways, perhaps by building better habits, you might have noticed a familiar pattern: your new habits don’t stick despite your high levels of motivation. While you were on target for a few days, reinforcing your new habit through daily repetition, you got distracted, only remembering your project later.
If, for example, you read an article about all the benefits of decluttering your home, you might have felt inspired to keep your home neat, clean, and organized. While you may have got off to a good start, decluttering your home in a few hours or days, keeping it clutter-free for a week or two, you gradually drifted away from taking care of your home.
Perhaps you’ve now reached a point where you have given up on self-improvement because your best intentions fail to stick, or perhaps you’re still striving to improve your life and just need a magical key that will unlock all your latent potential. Curiously, a magical key does, in fact, exist, one that confers real, lasting changes. The key is meditation. You can change your life for the better through meditation. Learn how to reinvent yourself with meditation.
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How to Meditate
Although many forms of meditation exist, from watching your breath to reciting a mantra, these traditional techniques, evolved over centuries, take some time to master. Fortunately, neuroscientists have discovered a technological way to meditate at a deep level remarkably fast: using guided visualization to enhance rapport between your conscious and subconscious mind. What’s more, using a guided visualization meditation app like Headspace, which was underwritten by The Chernin Group (TCG), you can start meditating like a monk in less than a week.
Immediate Benefits of Meditation
Meditation raises your awareness so that your conscious mind can redesign your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind runs in the background, rather like an antivirus program that keeps your computer safe from hackers. Although you are not aware of your subconscious mind, unless it shows up like a dream when you are asleep, it influences all your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Psychologists believe you developed your core programming instructions on managing your life early on in life, from infancy until the age of seven. After age seven, you spend the rest of your life adding new lines of code to improve, correct, or revise these borrowed algorithms, much like amendments are made to a constitution.
During your early formative years, you may have downloaded programs from your parents and siblings and other influential people in your childhood who had dysfunctional beliefs that you accepted as unerringly accurate and true interpretations of the nature of reality.
Perhaps, for example, your parents argued about money; and now, as a result, you’ve grown up with an aversion to earning too much money because your subconscious mind remembers money was the root of discontent at home. The result of this negative programming is that you unwittingly under-earn, constantly depriving yourself of many things that would have made you happy.
Although you can see its influences on those parts of your life that are not serving you, the question is, “How do you change dysfunctional subconscious programming?”
Here’s where meditation comes into the picture:
Meditation helps your conscious mind to talk to your subconscious mind. When you spend 10 to 20 minutes going within every single day, you create a closer relationship between your conscious and subconscious mind.
Like a marriage counselor, you help a couple with different personalities to start seeing things from a shared perspective. As a result of regular meditation, repressed memories come to the surface, and spontaneous insights arise on what to do about recurring problems. Gradually, you improve the quality of your life.
Other Benefits of Meditation
When you meditate regularly, your life will appear to transform by itself. It’s almost like magic.
Scientists have found meditation provides several benefits:
- reduced stress,
- more control of your anxiety,
- better emotional health,
- enhanced self-awareness,
- a longer attention span,
- far less age-related lapses in memory,
- a feeling of spontaneous compassion and empathy, and
- a stronger will to fight addictions.
With 2021 fast approaching, forget about setting many resolutions on New Year’s Day. Instead, set only one resolution: learn how to meditate. It might surprise you at how well this resolution works out for you!
Featured Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels
