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hey this is Leo for actualised dot-org and in this video I'm going to tell you how to meditate I want this to be a very foundational video that gets you to actually practically start meditating in your life and we're going to talk about here is why meditation is important how to actually meditate the technique and at the end we're going to cover some of the common pitfalls and traps that people experience with meditation which prevents them from building a consistent meditation habit which is so important to actually get the benefits of meditation you can't get the benefits of meditation by just meditating once or twice you have to make this a habit so I'm going to tell you a lot of important nuances you need to understand to make this habit successfully because when I try to meditate and make it a habit several years ago I stumbled around and I try to make it happen and I was always falling off track I did a couple of 30 day challenge was meditation I was able to stick through those 30-day challenges but in the end it didn't stick and I wasn't seeing the benefits right now though this is getting towards the end of 2014 and I've been meditating consistently for one hour every day since the beginning of 2014 so I started in very early January at the beginning of the new year is kind of my new year's resolution and I meditate for one hour every day and I did that consistently without missing a single day this entire year so right now I'm on day 250 probably something so I'm getting into the 300s in a row and that's what you want is you want that kind of very steady consistency and now it's pretty easy for me even though 1 hours a big chunk of time it's pretty easy for me to do this consistently because I built that habit so let me share with you some of the important stuff that I've learned through doing almost a year really consistent meditation you know the Buddhists they have a way of characterizing our mind and they put it this way they say that you're my is like a crazy monkey constantly running around always ad D always frantic always searching for something new can't sit still worse than that it's not just this crazy monkey but imagine this crazy monkey and that you got it drunk totally shit-faced so your mine is that it's a drunk crazy monkey and worse than that not only is a drunk and is it crazy it's totally out of control but imagine that monkey being stung by a scorpion and now you have the perfect metaphor for your brain the way that your mind runs itself the way that it works without beginning to do meditation without beginning to take a real close look at the kind of thoughts and emotions and things that are going on throughout your mind on a minute-to-minute basis it's hard to even appreciate that this is what it is is your mind is this crazy drunk stung monkey the more you meditate the more you realize oh my god that's the perfect description now what's your life going to be like if you've got a crazy drunk stung monkey running around and trying to manage it is that going to be exceptional extraordinary successful fulfilling happy peaceful type of life or is that going to be a frantic neurotic chaotic overstressed overwhelmed making stupid decisions kind of life it's going to be the second one right you don't want that so the ultimate benefit of doing meditation is to get this drunk crazy monkey in line get it under control so that you take away the scorpion you take away the drunkenness you take away the craziness and now you've just got a plain relaxed monkey and the more you meditate the more of these bad characteristics you take away eventually what you reach is you reach the state of really calm tranquility imagine this monkey on sedatives that's kind of what you reach and it's a good good state to reach but it takes some work to get there let's talk about some of the other benefits of meditation so the benefits of meditation really quickly one very important aspect is mastering your emotions your emotions run your life they determine how much you can accomplish in your life they determine whether you sabotage your own results so this is really big they also determine how you feel if you're always emotional you're always up and down and up and down you're having all these negative thoughts and this is making you stressed and frantic throughout your life so this is destroying the quality of your life so meditation gets that under control meditation is really good for eliminating stress meditation is really good for helping you unhook from stimulation so nowadays it's very easy to get hooked on addictions you can get hooked to television internet pornography drugs food sex I mean you name it it's out there you can get addicted on it what meditation features you it it teaches you to unhook from that stuff and not be frantic the way you would be now but to be calm and peaceful and really be happy just in the moment true happiness can really only be attained by being very present and happy content you might say with the present moment you might have noticed that if you're always seeking stimulation what that does in your life is it produces a roller-coaster ride up and down you have some amazing sex then there's a crash because you can't have sex forever you have some nice drugs and there's a crash because you can't be on drugs forever same thing with food with alcohol with Internet with television so what you want to train your brain to be happy with is just a very consistent level of contentment just in the present moment with whatever's going on and not necessarily even with Pleasant stuff this is something that is really big that you get with meditation the other thing that meditation is great for is building up your willpower your prefrontal cortex literally there's been scientific studies and evidence done that shows that by practicing meditation even for just 10 or 20 minutes every day within a few weeks in the brain scans that they do they see the prefrontal cortex building new connections growing stronger this will help you with your with your work this will help you in your gym routines this will help you with everything you're trying to do in your life it's really a form of brain training it's the most original old-school millennia-old form of brain training you don't need to play games online to train your brain the best way to train your brain is actually use your brain the way you use it one of the ways is through meditation so that's really good it also helps with brain health more and more studies are showing that stuff like Alzheimer's disease is actually a result of dis use of your brain when you stop using your brain your brain starts to atrophy when you're using your brain actively all the time you're putting it under stress just like a muscle when you're using it then it's growing and it's developing another thing that's really great about meditation is that increases your productivity and your creativity so if you're a very productive person if you're a no-nonsense kind of no whoo no hippie type of person you're very pragmatic and hard-nosed and you just want straightforward results in your life in your relationships you want results in your business you want better finances and better money this stuff comes from productivity and productivity comes from a clear thinking mind that's able to focus so that's what you develop with meditation you can also use meditation to become more creative because creativity is something that comes from your subconscious mind and creativity comes when you're able to calm yourself down and be peaceful and be grounded then creative stuff tends to bubble up when your mind is frantic all the time it's very difficult to be creative so if you're creative artistic type of person meditation will serve you very well meditation is also the single best way to develop and practice mindfulness and mindfulness this is just an awareness and the ability to be an observer of yourself your mood your emotions and also other people in life in general it's the ability to look objectively at these situations without being reactive to it emotionally it's the ability for example when you're angry to look from the outside as it were at the situation that you're in and the emotion that you're feeling and the ability to just get it without having to do anything about it the power of mindfulness which I talk about in other videos and I'm not going to go into too much detail here because it's a very deep topic is that it just literally can be used to melt away and dissolve negative emotions and any kind of like frustrating situations in life just by observing it with a lot of consciousness and awareness without any form of judgement without any kind of action taking just pure observation and awareness can be a really powerful tool and it's hard to appreciate this until you start to meditate and you start to develop these powers you grow that mindfulness muscle and then you start to see the results of that in your life and it's very cool and lastly this is perhaps the most amazing thing about enlightenment I mean about meditation is that it can be used to attain enlightenment and that's again a very advanced topic that I'm not going to go into here but suffice it to say that through proper use of meditation for long enough times what you can do is you can literally melt away your sense of ego your sense of separation from the world and you can reach this very blissful peaceful state which is your natural state which is obstructed by all the crazy monkey chatter that's going on this is just the truth that you are one with the world you are one with everybody else and when you can attain this state then the amazing thing about it is that you feel very peaceful totally content totally fulfilled without needing anything else in your life this is kind of the ultimate state that you can shoot for with your personal development I'm doing a lot of work on that personally I'm really excited about sharing some further techniques about how to use your meditation in order to actually attain enlightenment so I'll have more videos on that to come soon so this is why you want to meditate now let's talk about what meditation is so let's give a definition for meditation it's very simple it's basically just sitting down and quieting your mind and just being aware of exactly what's happening in the present moment that's how I would define meditation it's the ability to just focus your mind on basically nothingness just nothing in particular and not getting caught up in thought stories because what's going on your head that all the time you've got these stories that come up and what can happen is that either you go along for the ride with this story or you don't or you just observe the story kind of carrying itself out and fizzling and bubbling away and that's what thoughts are in your mind thoughts are like clouds that move through the atmosphere imagine your mind like the atmosphere and the thoughts are like clouds and they just come through they're very random they're very capricious one day they're this kind of cloud the next day is a different kind of cloud sometimes it got an interesting formation of clouds sometimes it's pretty boring but sometimes what happens is that we get triggered we get company's thoughts and we get carried away just like carried away and we get taken miles and miles off track by going along on these clouds and what meditation is about is about just being totally still and just watching these clouds kind of move through the atmosphere without moving without judging them without thinking about them just watching them so that's a definition of meditation there's been a lot of scientific studies that have been done especially in the last 50 years or so on meditation they've done EEG scans and fMRI scans on meditating monks and Buddhists and Yogi's they've also done Studies on just regular ordinary Western meditators people who meditate for just 10 minutes every day what they found is that meditation has enormous health benefits enormous benefits towards improving your life we've already covered a lot of those benefits but don't just think that this is some sort of like new-age type of tradition or some sort of like fad type habit meditations have been up for thousands of years and for good reason because these benefits are very real and in fact science just now is catching up to some of the benefits that have been talked about in Eastern traditions where meditation originated from for literally millennia so there's so much scientific evidence you can read books that will teach you and really convince you of some of this amazing stuff there's a lot of different meditation techniques I'm going to share something very simple with you today there's different ones some of them have you focusing on a mantra or an affirmation that you say to yourself some of them have you do particular breathing exercises some of them have you counting your breasts in a specific way some of them just have you try to clear your mind constantly so there's a lot of different stuff but actually meditation is very very simple and I want to keep things very simple here I'm going to cut a lot of the fact is you don't need to spend a lot of money on classes you don't need to spend a lot of time reading books you don't need any special equipment here's the technique I'm going to give you and you can use this technique and you can literally use this technique to get to the highest levels of meditation that you can all you've got to do is use it consistently so here it is step one is you get a timer I like to take my smartphone I have a timer on there and I set a timer let's say for you the time is going to be 20 minutes when you're starting off a meditation habit a good time to shoot for is 20 minutes so let's have you start with that 20 minutes on the timer step 2 sit in some sort of quiet area preferably alone by yourself sit in a comfortable position you don't need to sit in a full lotus position that's usually difficult you don't need even need to sit in a half Lotus position you can just literally take a chair and sit on it you can do it on a couch you can do it on the side of your bed don't lie down you need to sit up and not just sit up but the more perfectly straight and erect your spine is the better because one of the things you'll encounter with meditation is sleepiness and one of the best ways to correct sleepiness when you're meditating is to keep your back very very straight I used to think that this wasn't important until turn to falling asleep a lot and then I discovered that actually the angle of your spine matters very much the more you tilt it even just a little bit the more sleeping you tend to get so the more straight your spine the better if you want start off meditating with some sort of support for your back so let's say you're sitting on a chair with the back that's fine eventually it's probably best to sit in a way where nothing is supporting your back just your muscles are doing it so that will keep you the most alert so you're going to sit like that and then you're just going to close your eyes as you're sitting like that and you're going to relax you're going to not do anything special with your breath is going to kind of breathe not to deliberately you're just gonna let your breath go automatically nice and calm and steady your eyes are gonna be closed and what you're going to do in your mind is you're just going to try to clear your mind of any particular thoughts and like I said before you're going to try not to get caught up in the thought stories so might look something like this you're sitting there you're comfortable give yourself a minute just to adjust scratch anything that needs scratching so that you're comfortable sitting there and then you're going to try to sit still and not move for those 20 minutes and what immediately is going to happen is that for the first 5 or 10 seconds maybe your mind will be clear but then some thought will come up some sort of story and it'll try to grab you and kind of take you with it as it goes so maybe I'm sitting there and then the the first thing that comes into my mind is oh shoot I got that email I got to answer for a client of mine and see when you get that thought you have a choice you can either continue on that train of thought and start thinking about it like okay so I need to go I need to do a little bit of research I need to I need to compile this report and I got to send that to my client so you can kind of get carried away with a story or you can notice in your mind like oh wait a minute that's just a thought I don't necessarily need to go along for the ride let the thought go on its own way but don't go with it and so you just like that thought go and then as soon as you let that go maybe a new thought comes up the new thought tells you oh man I'm not a groceries I gotta go to the grocery store and oh man my gap my car is out of gas I got to fuel up first again you can start to go into a story mode about that you can say oh I got to get Cass but what about gas prices and that gas station near my house it's closed so I got to go find a new gas station so see you kind of get carried away or you can just let it go and again just wait for a new thought to come and so you continue like this you just let thoughts come and go come and go come and go without ever moving from where you are not physically I mean in your head just kind of be very still be the atmosphere don't be the clouds let the clouds through you and so that's it and your brain is going to get caught off track you're not going to be able to do this perfectly it's very difficult to do this perfectly so in practice what you're gonna have to do is you're going to get carried away by these thoughts sometimes you'll get carried away a little bit and then you'll stop yourself and your refocus sometimes you get carried away very very far you might find yourself caught up in some sort of thought story and you'll be caught up in it for five minutes and for five minutes we'll be totally unconscious of the fact that you're caught up in this thought story but then five minutes later you're going to go oh wait that's right I'm supposed to be meditating where did I go I got lost in Fantasyland let me bring myself back and center myself become the atmosphere again and so you're going to keep doing this again and again and again and again and that's basically what meditation is you do that for 20 minutes or however long you decide to do it for and you're done at the end of the 20 minutes you get up open your eyes and you're off to do whatever you want to do throughout your day so that's a technique very simple there's no there's no New Age nonsense here there's no ritual there's no theory behind it there's no gods to it there's no religion behind it there's no principles there's no holy books it's just very very simple you just sit and clear your mind even though this is simple it's extremely difficult if you've never meditated before then one of the things are going to discover is just how shocking it is how difficult it is to sit still for 20 minutes without thinking about anything and without getting carried away into Fantasyland with your stories very very difficult and you're going to tend to want to get distracted with meditation a lot of different traditions from the east have different rituals behind the way that they meditate theories and philosophy and theology all of this stuff is distraction I tend to finds distraction people make excuses out why they don't meditate and they'll say stuff like well I don't have the right pillow under my ass I don't have the right mat I need to go take a class how you gonna read this book but the fact is that stuff is just a distraction meditation is meant to be very simple it's meant to fundamentally make you totally accepting of the present moment as you are right now without needing anything it's like the most simple activity that you can do it's the essence of minimalism so don't let somebody confuse you into thinking that you need more information more theory more equipment this kind of stuff you don't need it in fact that stuff will just distract you and notice your mind trying to complicate meditation try to make it too complicated isn't how to be complicated be very simple right what I find is that whenever you're trying to complicate meditation that's you trying to procrastinate from doing it and your mind is very tricky and it will try to procrastinate this especially at the beginning when you haven't built up a habit yet just because it doesn't want to sit still your mind is remember that drunk crazy stung monkey it wants to be running around it doesn't want to be sitting still the scariest thing you can do is force your mind to sit still here's the trick at this point let's actually talk about how to make a successful meditation habit the trick is that this must be done daily this 20 minutes every single day weekday weekend holidays birthdays on Christmas on New Year's on Valentine's Day every single day on vacation days it doesn't matter on your worst days when you have a breakup when your business collapses when you lose a hundred thousand dollars you still got to do it when you're sitting sick in the hospital you still got to do it that's the point if you're not going to do meditation every single day of your life there's not even any point in watching this video and continuing any further don't even try it it's pointless it won't get you anywhere meditation needs to be done daily and not just for a month and not just for a year but you need to make a commitment to do it for the rest of your life that's what I found is necessary because it's just like going to the gym if you're only going to go to the gym for a week why even go if you're only gonna go for a month why even go it makes no sense you're just going to waste a lot of your time and get very frustrated and the thing with meditation is that it takes work to start to get the benefits of it yes you'll get a little bit of the benefits even within just a few weeks but the true benefits come months and years later this is a subtle thing meditation it's not this like big huge supercharging boost to your life at least when you start to start to get that giant supercharging boost that will take you months and years it's not going to happen immediately so you need to prepare your mind with those expectations otherwise I find that you're going to fail here are some of the common doubts and pitfalls that I see people having with meditation one is they tell me Leo I can't focus I'm a DD I mind can't focus no everyone's mind can focus there's nothing wrong with your mind it's just that you haven't trained it meditation will help train that so if you can't focus that means you need to be meditating extra hard it's not an excuse to is that people tell me leo I keep trying to meditate but my mind isn't calm in the middle of the meditation I can't calm down again that's not something fundamental that's wrong with you that's just how the mind works that's exactly why meditation needs to be done that's kind of like telling me about Leo I'm fast so I shouldn't be going to the gym no if you're fat that means you're fat because you haven't been going to the gym and you need to go to the gym even more than the regular person does same thing here your mind will learn to calm down through the repetitive practice of meditation and just because you can't always focus during a meditation session doesn't mean you're doing it wrong this is where people get caught up the most I think this is the biggest failure point right here people think that well I sat here for 20 minutes and even though I sat through 20 minutes of it I just couldn't get my mom my mind to be calm and peaceful they imagine this this picture and they're in their head of a Zen master sitting there with a perfectly mind for 20 minutes or whole hour and they think that that's meditation and if they're not doing that then I'm not meditating no meditation is the entire process not just the calm part so when you start what's going to happen is you're going to have little windows of calmness maybe five seconds here and then five minutes you'll have another five seconds and then maybe you'll hit ten seconds somewhere in your twenty minute meditation session but don't expect you're going to sit there for 20 whole minutes you might not reach that state for a decade maybe with ten years of meditation practice you'll be able to do 20 minutes perfectly calm but right now you're not going to be anywhere near that so don't set that expectation and don't think that just because you're having five seconds of peace here and five seconds of peace there but the rest of it is all mental chatter that somehow you're failing no that's a full 20 minute session as long as you sit down and you try to focus you're meditating even if your mind is going crazy especially if your mind is going crazy that's where the muscle is being trained right imagine that I I sent you to the gym and I told you to go to the gym you go to the gym for a couple of weeks then you tell me oh man my muscles are so sore I'm straining my muscles every time I'm doing a bicep curl well yeah that's how it's supposed to be and your muscles are sore for good reason because you're working them out there training you're literally breaking down the muscle tissue and those last couple of reps that you're doing that are really tough those are actually building up your muscles the most keep doing that your muscles will get really big same thing with meditation so when your mind is chattering away and it's having difficulty focusing and you bring it back and you focus it that's when you're getting the most benefit so you got to reframe that and say man now I'm doing good that means I'm doing it properly another expectation people have is that meditation somehow going to be exciting and stimulating know if you feel like meditation is boring at first that's totally normal you're gonna have a wide range of feelings when you're meditating sometime you're going to feel agitated frustrated stressed bored sleepy tired anxious all of those are normal emotions especially the one about being frustrated and agitated sometimes people will do a 20 minute meditation session at the end of it they'll actually get agitated not calm and they'll tell themselves but what's the point I thought meditation was supposed to make me calmer I must be doing it wrong no you're doing it just right meditation doesn't always make you calm that's the end state after many many years of meditation initially in fact you're going to be very agitated doing meditation that's okay that's remember you flexing your muscle some people say well I don't see the point of meditation why should I keep doing this and I'll cover that at the very end of the video and some people have this belief that I'm not a good meditator somehow meditation just isn't right for me it might work for other people but for me it doesn't work no that's total nonsense meditation literally works for everybody all human beings can meditate and everyone can become proficient meditator you've just got to practice it consistently which is what you're not doing here's the principle that I want you to carry with you through the rest of your life as you're meditating everything that happens in meditation as long as you're sitting there and you're focusing and you're trying to be mindful as long as you're doing that everything else that happens is perfectly normal and natural and it's good sleepiness tiredness feeling boring feeling anxious all that stuff good you're doing it properly this is a really huge principle to accept once you accept this principle you can use it to reground yourself because you are going to have days when you're meditating and it's going to be just like ah like it's not working like I must be doing something wrong you're going to start downing yourself especially when something turbulent happens in your life one of the most difficult times to meditate is when you have a big breakup with your girlfriend or boyfriend man it's meditating on that day or the next morning that's like hell because your mind is all over the place it's it's thinking all these negative thoughts but just sit down you try to focus you do the best you can and there's no way you can have a perfect meditation session on that day you're going to have a very rocky very turbulent very agitating meditation session but when you finish that you tell yourself you know what i sat here i did it i followed through on my commitment and that's exactly what matters everything else is okay don't judge yourself while you're meditating in fact try to like turn off your logical mind don't be thinking too much about the foster thinking don't be doing any meta-analysis just sit and be peaceful it's kind of like you try to find an off switch to your mind and you're never ever going to find that off switch because there is no off switch thoughts just come one thing you're going to learn through meditation that you don't really have as much control over your thoughts as you think you do and that's fine because what you're going to learn is just mindfulness you're going to observe the thoughts and what that's going to do is not going to shut them off it's just going to get you distance and separation from them it's going to dis identify you with them and you don't even realize how powerful that is right now until you've actually experienced it I want to set the expectation that the first two years of meditation even if you do it consistently every single day are going to be hell because your mind is not good at bringing your focus back and back and back from these wandering thoughts it's going to be difficult and you have to tell yourself that that's normal it's not going to be smooth sailing which brings us to the final reason which is why should you meditate at all when there's all these difficulties and frustration and agitation feeling bored and tired and sleepy all this stuff - so why are we meditating well we already talked about some of the benefits but the reason that you failed if you've tried in the past of setting up a successful meditation practice it's because you lacked the vision of what meditation can do for your life the reason that now I'm very consistent with my meditation is because after lots of research lots of trial and error I finally been able to create a vision that I really bought into like heart and soul convinced myself that meditation is something I should do for the rest of my life here's what I picture for myself I picture that through years of meditation I'm going to develop really strong emotional control I also picture to myself that I'm going to be able to be happy no matter what the circumstances how cool is that if something goes wrong in my life I'm still gonna be happy if something goes great in my life I'm still gonna be happy I'm gonna be in control of my life I'm going to control my emotions it's going to help me in my relationships it's going to help me with overcoming any negative addictions or habits that I have it's going to build like strong mental willpower and I'll be able to apply in my business I'm very business oriented I'm also going to be able to apply this to be more productive I'm very productivity oriented I'm also big on creativity I love being creative in my work it's going to help me with that I also realize that without meditation I'm never going to actually attain fulfillment in life it's not going to be possible because I'm just going to be chasing and running around like that drunk monkey looking for sources of stimulation well I want to unhook myself from all that and I see myself five or ten years from now being much more unhooked from stimulation than I am right now and I can see that having huge repercussions positive repercussions throughout my whole life and ultimately the thing that has me really excited is the potential of using meditation to attain enlightenment this sense of oneness with the whole world the loss of ego the loss of all the pettiness that we as human beings strive for every day they need to protect yourself all the insecurities you have all the negative emotions all that ultimately stems from ego and I'll shoot more videos talking about that but for me that's a really exciting prospect is to attain that kind of state so that's how I was able to convince myself you have to build a case in your own mind you know pick and choose from this laundry list of benefits whatever is most important to you latch onto it and try to make this vision then go and start with a 30 day meditation habit start with just 30 days do a 30 day challenge and see if you can last for 30 days straight every single day like clockwork 20 minutes every single day and just see how far you get and if you're still not convinced that's fine try it more because the first time I did my 30-day challenge I wasn't convinced and I fell off track you get back on back on and back on until eventually you see that this is something that you really as a human being must do if you want to attain fulfillment and happiness and full potential in your own life this isn't just apply for hippies but for every single human being and if you aren't meditating and you're saying that well it's too difficult or whatever excuse are coming up with in the end is just because you're lazy and you're undisciplined and you you don't want to become disciplined and it takes a lot of practice to discipline your mind because your mind is the most unruly part of you it's that drunken munkey so bust through the laziness bust through the lack of discipline start the habit and we'll talk when you become a good consistent meditator and I'll shoot a lot of cool videos that will help you to take that meditation and channel it into even more advanced things with enlightenment which is going to be really exciting all right this is Leo I'm signing off go ahead post me your comments down below if you like this video click the like button for me please also spread it around share with a friend on Facebook so that this message spreads and finally come and sign up to my newsletter at actualized org right here it's a free newsletter I release new videos on personal development and self actualization topics every single week I had a lot of cool exclusive content planned for my subscribers in the months and years ahead I'm very consistent and prolific with the amount of work and videos that I put out so I want to be putting out more and more cool stuff and a lot of it is free so sign up and you'll be getting all this information about how 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