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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about how to meditate deeper I really consider this episode here like a part to to my original episode called how to meditate which is really popular a lot of people have gotten a lot of value from from that one there because it's a no-bullshit guide to meditation what we're going to do here though is I want to go a little bit deeper into some of the various techniques that you can do with your meditations and I'm going to give you three phases or stages of meditation that I've personally been working on myself to take you basically from the very beginning newbie phases of meditation the first stage where you're just like clueless about what to do or how meditation works so we're going to have you smoothly transition from that into deeper and deeper and deeper and more advanced stages of meditation until ultimately you can get to some really cool advanced places so I want to kind of guide you through that also I want to cover some of the common problems that people have when they're meditating so what are the greatest pitfalls for meditators and I'm going to give you a little quick schedule that you can use for how to meditate all right so here we go stage number one and I'm kind of assuming that you watch my first video here right so I'm not going to be talking about all the basics of meditation I understand that you understand how the basics work so if you do understand that then here's stage one this is where you would begin meditation if you've never meditated before or even if you have meditated before but you haven't been doing it very strictly and you feel like you're not getting good results with it you can just start here at stage one right it never hurts to relearn the basics and this one is the easy version and it's called simple observation so here's how it works you sit down you can have your eyes either open or closed but you sit down in a meditative like posture and then what you do is you just allow everything to happen and all you do is you just watch it you simply observe it so whatever's going on becomes okay and you're not trying to control any of it so what will happen well when you sit down and let's say you close your eyes and you're sitting there what will happen is thoughts will come up and various feelings and sensations will come up emotions will come up generally a lot of times what we do is we try to control that and we try to either focus our mind on not thinking anything or we try to focus on our mind on some specific objective or goal within meditation and that's one form of meditation which is cool remember there's many many many valid forms of meditation so I'm not telling you that this is the only way or that these three ways are going to be the only ways these meditate no what I recommend is that you try a slew of different meditation techniques which is what I'm hoping you'll do here so what you're doing is you're letting your mind do whatever it wants to do without controlling it and all your job is is just to watch your mind will wander let it wander let it think about tomorrow night and let us think about the email you just got and let us think about what your wife thinks about you or the fight that you just got in with your husband let it think about all that stuff let it wander to scary places dirty places silly places whatever kind of places it wants to go to let it go there but as it goes there your job is to watch it go there and just be mindful of the fact that oh it's going somewhere it was here and now it's there and now it's here and now it's there and now it's here and it's walking around in circles you just watch it as simple as those in struction sound it's still going to be very difficult and you're still going to be likely to get frustrated and want to fight or control your mind and your mind will say stuff to you like oh I shouldn't be thinking about this during meditation and all I shouldn't be feeling that during meditation and I shouldn't be feeling anxious during meditation and what happens there is that your mind starts a fight with itself your only job is to observe not to fight with yourself so don't fight and the way you do this is you just realize that when you're sitting down to meditate for this brief 10 20 30 minutes of your day that you don't want to take your thoughts within that meditation session seriously at all not just thoughts but also feelings emotions might come up you might feel angry or agitated or jealous or whatever frustrated and you can do one of two things you can either buy into those and take them seriously or you can just watch them so your objective here is just simply watch them and what's going to happen is that inevitably you will fail at this you will fail dozens if not hundreds of times just within a 20-minute window of your meditation and what you got to do is you got to not get caught into the trap of beating yourself up for having failed you just watch yourself getting failed you see that instead of berating yourself down yourself oh I screwed up this meditation session you just again you let your mind go there but you watch your mind go there don't try to control anything in this first stage pretty basic about as basic as it gets as simple as this is you're still going to screw this up you're not going to be able to follow these instructions to the letter why is that well because your mind is untrained and meditation is a discipline it's a practice it's something that needs to be done every day by the way just so we get the logistics straight here when I talk about meditation to me what that means is you're sitting down in a quiet place eyes open or closed you have a timer on and you do I would say a minimum of 20 minutes try to shoot for 20 minutes if you want to do more you can do more and you have to do this on a daily basis every single day you have to do this all right so that's stage one after you've practiced sage one for a while and you've gotten pretty good at it or maybe you're still crappy at it after a while then what you do is you move on to stage 2 stage 2 is like the intermediate stage and this one I call active detachment so here what you do is again you sit down in your typical meditation pose and you now actively try to release every thought that comes into your mind so it's just like the first stage except now you're actually doing a little bit of manipulation something comes up like oh shoot I got that project that's due tomorrow at school like let's say you get that that thought and what you do is you say oh that's a thought let me just let it go and you let it go and once you get after you let it go successfully for a few seconds is you get a little window of peace and then what happens is that usually another thought comes up sometimes immediately I'll thought will come up like oh did I lose my car keys where did I put my car keys I can't remember I put my car keys what if I lost them again so that thought might come up and again you realize oh that's just a thought let me let it go and you detach and release it and then immediately that thought can come up again so again you might say but my car keys I really need my car keys I can't just let this one go again you have to realize that oh it's just another thought let me let it go and this is the Active Release approach so a couple of points about this as simple as these instructions are you're going screw this one up a lot because what's going to happen is you're going to try left thoughts go but thoughts can be sticky and they can creep back up on you so the instruction here is very important you try to drop the thought release it and if you can't for whatever reason don't worry about it try it again a few seconds later and if you still can't release it don't worry about it try again a few seconds later the key is that you don't lose your composure and start to panic and that you're able to stay calm throughout this process because notice as soon as you're frustrated or you're panicked that tells you what that tells you that you're taking these thoughts too seriously even the thought I have to be meditating properly you're taking that too seriously - so this whole idea of not taking your thoughts too seriously this is the entire theme and point of meditation is to make you aware of this now if you become this anal person who tries to meditate perfectly all the time well counter intuitively what that does that that backfires on you because you're not taking yourself less seriously like you should with meditation you're too serious about meditating so it's a little paradoxical there so you're going to try to release the thought often what I find happens is that you release the thought and the thought comes back up five seconds later and what you do then is you get a little bit off your Center and you're like oh damn but I release this thought if I released it why is it coming back I must have screwed up and then you got to recognize all what am i doing I'm just creating more thoughts let me release these thoughts - and you release those but then they come back two minutes later they come back you're like oh I should have released these but I didn't and so you're playing these mind games with yourself you always have to go Metta see what's happening and then release alright and if it fails don't worry about it try it again you'll fail many many times also a trick is don't resist thoughts arising because thoughts will arise sometimes what I tend to do is I sit down to meditate and I tell myself something like okay got a nothing got a nothing no thoughts no thoughts stop thinking no thoughts and you just like you're trying to you know suppress them from coming up it's kinda like you have a burp that's about to come up and then you hold it back or you got a sneeze and you hold that one in that's kinda what you're trying to do with your thoughts but that doesn't work so well usually what that does is that makes you kind of more panicked and again there's this whole problem trying to manipulate your way all the time so even though in this stage to technique you are actively detaching and that can be viewed as a form of subtle manipulation it's not nearly as manipulative as you sitting there trying to prevent thoughts from arising in the first place that's gonna leave you very frustrated and it's going to be counterproductive all right so you got that okay so that's basically stage number two again I recommend you do it for 20 minutes every single day with the timer as was discussed with the other technique now let's move on to stage number three this one I would call them advanced technique and this one I call awareness focus so what you do here is you sit in your typical meditative posture and you put your awareness on awareness itself put your awareness on awareness itself this is a little tricky because unless you've meditated for years then actually you don't know what awareness is when I use that word awareness you kind of know what I'm talking about but not really you don't have a phenomenological experiential understanding of awareness and awareness is a very weird phenomenon unless you've observed it for years it's very hard to put your finger on it what the [ __ ] is awareness hard to be sure so here what you're doing is you're kind of working on this problem of understanding what awareness is and the way that you do that is that you notice that everything that comes up at any time in your life but especially when you're sitting down meditating is just content that feels this you might call it a space of awareness the field of awareness is filled with content an emotion is a piece of content a thought is a piece of content and itch on your ass is a piece of content your mom or your dad yelling at you while you're meditating that's a piece of content your cat coming up and sniffing you or licking you while you're sitting there that's a piece of content everything is a piece of content now usually what we do is we get sucked into this content and we get sucked into our thoughts stories and into our emotions your job here is just to become aware that all this stuff actually is content and it's happening within this field of awareness and that awareness itself is not the content this is a very freaky thing so one way you can do this is you can sit there and you can notice that things enter awareness and then they disappear from awareness so they arise and they die and then they rise again and they die again and this is happening constantly but what you need to do is you need to focus your awareness not on the content but kind of like you zoom out and it's almost like you're looking at yourself from a third person although recognize that when you sit in meditation you look at your cell from a third-person in your mind's eye that actually that's just more content right you can't escape content content is always there so what you try to do in this advanced stage here is you just focus your awareness on the fact that content is arising and you try not to get sucked into the content and you keep your awareness on the fact that you're aware and you try to maintain that as consistently as possible without having your mind wander off course and of course inevitably it will wander off course if you first start doing this you'll probably only be able to do it for 5 or 10 seconds before your mind wanders of course so what do you do your mind wanders of course you bring it back it wanders off course again you bring it back it wanders off again you bring it back sometimes it'll wander off and you'll be wandering off in fairytale land lost in content for five whole minutes until you realize oh [ __ ] I forgot about focusing on my awareness I've been focusing on the content it's like ah man those five minutes were wasted more content oh [ __ ] that's more content more content damn it I'm not meditating properly more content right so you can be playing these mind games with yourself just bring yourself back as best you can sometimes you'll have sessions where it's going to be really hard and you'll be wandering all over the place and that's the whole point of meditating is to again build in this discipline and over the weeks and months as you practice this you'll get better and better and better the other thing I recommend that you do is I recommend that you open yourself up to the question of what is awareness anyways it's a very profound question perhaps the most profound question you can actually answer in this lifetime so when you're sitting there and you're practicing this stage 3 start wondering kind of like what is awareness I think I know what awareness is but it's so hard to put your finger on it I have no clue what awareness is how could that be my whole life is constructed out of awareness and yet I don't know what awareness is so just kind of open yourself up to wondering but one warning here is that don't try to logically think your way into a logical answer when you're meditating there's no introspection going on here there's no thinking stuff through this is not therapy you're sitting and you're just observing you're not allowed to think about stuff and try to figure stuff out that's something different all right so that's stage 3 now let me would do is let me talk a little bit about some of the common mistakes that I see people making with meditation and I make all these mistakes myself so that's why I'm so familiar with them so let's just run down this list real quick first one is panic and frustration when you realize that you can't control your thoughts so when you first start meditating you think like wow I got to sit there and just kind of control my thoughts and then you're in for a rude awakening when you discover that actually you have no control over your thoughts so don't fall into that trap could it be that you actually don't have control at all over your thoughts would that be acceptable to you if you discovered that about yourself well leave that possibility open and see what you think about that question a couple of years after you've meditated consistently for day after day after day for years on end then take a look at that answer another pitfall is assuming that meditation should be calm and peaceful no no no no no if you start meditating and the first few years that you meditate it's going to be the exact opposite of that meditation is going to be frustrating and annoying you're not just going to be sitting down and listening out like a yogi that happens after decades of meditation and perhaps enlightenment another mistake is not using a timer I recommend you get a digital timer I recommend that you set it for 20 minutes you don't look at it while you're meditating but you turn it away from you I also recommend that you don't use a smartphone for meditation as a timer you can in a pinch but I recommend that you don't because your smartphone has all these distractions on it notifications and messages and emails and texts so that doesn't make your job harder yet and you know a separate digital timer they're real cheap these days another common pitfall is trying to stop thoughts completely which I already kind of addressed don't try to do that again in fact we're going to discover through lots of meditation is that you have no power to stop your thoughts and that this is not something that's really even necessary to do for proper meditation the common pitfall is resisting thoughts that arise so you're sitting there a thought comes up and like [ __ ] I should have had that thought you're resisting it stop resisting it okay another common pitfall is daydreaming meditation is not daydreaming now when you do that stage one that I told you about it might feel a bit like you're daydreaming because you're just letting your mind wander anywhere the difference though is that in this stage one yes you're kind of daydreaming your thoughts can go literally anywhere don't control them at all but you're watching them you're being aware of them which is not what a typical daydream is typical daydream is you're caught in the daydream in the fantasy of the daydream here you're always aware that you're daydreaming or at least you're trying to be next pitfall is trying to meditate when you're tired a lot of times what I find myself is that you know I have a bit pretty busy schedule I run a business in fact I run multiple businesses so um uh you know there's a lot of other stuff that I could be doing in my life besides meditating that's frankly cooler than meditation so what I often do is I try to you know slot my meditation time somewhere in the day where I'm kind of tired I'm not at my peak of mental clarity maybe I've just had a big meal or I just woke up and I'm still kind of groggy or I'm about to go to bed and I'm kind of sleepy or it's middle of the day and I'm kind of feeling it taking a nap but I decide to meditate and those usually end up being the worst meditation sessions because you're just not able to focus you're not at the peak of your comen ttle clarity so best time in the day to meditate is whenever you have the highest mental clarity if that's morning for you great that's a common one for me personally in the morning I'm a kind of groggy so I'm actually likely to fall asleep in the morning so for me the ideal time to meditate would be sometime in the maybe late morning or early noontime but I often fail at that because it's just that like that's my prime time that I usually want to allocate to working on my business or shooting a video or something like that so it is important when you meditate here's another pitfall not accepting whatever happens in meditation a really good trick you can try is just when you sit down right before you start meditating remind yourself just to accept everything that's happening right now in the present moment literally accept it all like if you have a toothache accept that if you're asked is eaching except that if you've got some problem at work except that if you don't want to meditate except that if you're failing to meditate properly except that if it's a bad time in the day that you chose to meditate accept that accept everything negative that normally you would resist and that's very counterintuitive because we feel like oh well I don't accept all the bad stuff let me just accept the good stuff except when you do that you don't realize that you can't accept the good without having the bad come back and bite you in the ass you have to accept it all as a totality that's something you'll learn as you continue meditating deeper and perhaps the last pitfall is trying to get somewhere with meditation it's like you're sitting down you're meditating right in this moment but then you have like this goal it's like well today I want to release all my thoughts today I want to be perfect or I'm working towards enlightenment or this or that or I want to achieve some super peaceful state right you set a certain like agenda for your meditation stop doing that stop trying to get anywhere with your one session now in the big picture over the long time horizon I think you should have some goals for your meditation you should be aiming for enlightenment and you should be aiming for more peace of mind and you should be aiming for all this cool stuff that you can get with meditation but not when you're actually sitting down to meditate drop all those goals because what those goals are going to be are just going to be more thoughts that are going to prevent you from being able to actually achieve those goals so those goals undermine themselves all right and also a point I want to make is that you will have bad days when you're meditating some days you're just going to feel shitty some days you can be real tired some days you're gonna have a really unruly mind that's going in ten different directions and that's okay except that to allow that and be ready for that sometimes it will happen is you'll have like ten straight days of really consistent high-quality meditation you're very calm and focused and everything's going great and then on the eleventh day your mind is just going nuts all over the place you can hardly sit still for 20 minutes let alone keep your thoughts from wandering in a thousand different directions and then you start to doubt yourself and start saying oh [ __ ] I'm not progressing fast enough man I thought I was better than this you just gotta allow it because your mind every single morning you know your mind is in a different place and different stuff is happening in your life so you're going to feel differently depending on where you're at alright so those are the pitfalls make sure that you be mindful those notice them in yourself if you're making them now let me end by just giving you your meditation schedule here's what I recommend you do with all the stuff that I told you I recommend that basically you follow my instructions to the letter and what that means is that you actually rewatch this video for every stage that you're practicing so if you want to practice stage one rewatch that part if you want to practice stage to rewatch that part if you want to practice stage three rewatch that part and right before you sit down and meditate maybe you even want to take some notes on what I said so that you know exactly what you should be doing like you have a little instruction sheet I found that very very helpful very helpful because otherwise if you don't kind of recenter yourself with the instructions then you're going to forget them and you're going to wander all over the place here's what I recommend as far as the schedule goes if you're starting at the newbie level stage one go do stage one for a whole month thirty days straight at twenty minutes a day without missing a single day if you miss a single day you have to restart that whole cycle from scratch until you get thirty consecutive days after you've gotten 30 consecutive days of stage one then go on to stage two make sure you reread the instructions for Sage 2 and then you follow that for 30 days consecutively without missing a single day if you miss a single day you have to restart that cycle so then you complete stage two then you move on to stage three and you do that one for 30 days consecutively otherwise you restart the cycle and that's it and then after those you know 30 days times three that's 90 days after those 90 days are over which you can do is you can return to whatever stage you want or perhaps just continue with the most advanced stage stage three also that point I think you're going to be in a nice position to start doing maybe some enlightenment work which I talked about in other videos I'm not going to talk about that here and you can also start experimenting with various other meditation techniques what I found helpful personally for myself is that I have to try out a bunch of different techniques just to see what fits me it's almost like wearing them you know shoes you go to the store to buy some new shoes you got to test out 5 10 different pairs before you find some comfortable ones and sometimes you actually got to take them home and wear them for a week before you realize that they're not really that comfortable so when you're spending a whole month on each one of these techniques I think that's the best way to go and that's what I recommend for you and also what's nice about setting up this way in stages is that you it's almost like you kind of set little you know goals for yourself not day to day but month to month and I find that that's important because otherwise your meditation habit just gets very stale you're always doing the same thing it's not exciting when you set it up in this kind of stage like fashion then you know you got one month to go then thus you're looking forward to the second month and you're looking forward to the third month and so on and so forth so you want to be kind of switching it up and also what it does is it gets you awareness of how your mind works and how these techniques work from multiple perspectives which I find in the end is a very helpful to understanding yourself because that's what you're trying to do here all right I want to give a quick credit to Peter Ralston who I got this idea of stages from stages of meditation I think it's very a powerful idea but I'm signing off I'm done here go ahead post your comments down below click the like button please share this video with a friend and finally come sign up to my newsletter right here at actualized org it's a free newsletter I release new videos and new content every single week I've cool new projects planned for my subscribers which I'll be releasing the next 6 to 12 months so I'm going to be working actively on that but the reason you want to sign up is because I want to help you to self actualize and I think that meditation here is a really powerful topic I'm going to be shooting more videos in the future about how to meditate more effectively and other techniques you can try because this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as meditation goes and what you could achieve with meditate to me this is the most powerful habit but besides this habit there's a lot of other stuff we need to talk about to help move you towards the kind of powerful exciting life that you want to create for yourself and it all starts with self mastery if you can master yourself specifically this thing up here the mind if you could master your psychology then the world will be your oyster sign up and I'll see you soon you