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hey this is Leo for actualised org and here we're continuing on with my blueprint series which is over 100 of the greatest personal development concepts of all time that can be found on actualized org slash blueprint and the concept the recovering here is meditation alright so I want to actually make this really simple because meditation is a simple thing but first let's talk about before we get into the specifics of how to do meditation we're going to talk about what this is as a concept for personal development and then why it's important so it's a cause of personal development why is meditation important and what is it what is it it simply means that you make a practice daily I'm underlining and stressing the word daily of sitting down in a chair or wherever you want to sit down for 20 minutes closing your eyes or maybe even opening your eyes leaving them open and just clearing your mind of everything and sitting in silence for 20 minutes that's it that's all it is but beyond what meditation is is the really important aspect is that this is a habit this is not a thing that you do once and we're going to get into that a little bit more in the body now as for why it's important I think meditation is really really important for human beings for every human being because what it does is it helps us cope with all the stressors in our lives and there's multiple benefits to doing meditation and all of them have been very well documented scientifically also anecdotally and throughout millennia of practice by humans from from the ancient East and now to the West doesn't really matter here's what meditation will do for you number one is going to eliminate a lot of stress it's going to be much more calm and peaceful and when you're are when you are common peaceful that's a position that you can make much better decisions from that's a position that you can act powerfully from that's a position that you can create an amazing life from you can't do that when you're always stressed and bogged down with the miss of life so there's that it also eliminates those ants those automatic negative thoughts that we always have right whenever you're having a negative one of those negative thoughts spirals where you just say like oh well he did that to me and she did this to me and I'm gonna tell him this and she's going to say that and you have this whole concocted argument in your head going on and you worry about your business collapsing or your career not working out or dropping off your weight-loss plan or just any number of things that you can be worried about that is ruining the quality of your life but even beyond that it's also ruining the performance of your life you're not going to you're going to be living a very mediocre life if you're always bogged down in automatic negative thoughts in meditation is a really good way to to unhook yourself from that it also unhooks you from stimulation because we're always so overstimulated by the environment we're stimulated by food we're stimulated by TV we're stimulated by a hangout with people we're over stimulated at work and by our computers and we never just take the time to just kind of calm down and be happy in the moment when you do a lot of meditation you end up being happy just for being alive and for existing that's basically what it is it's getting you back in touch with how you felt as a kid because as a kid you can have all these things that you needed all you really needed was you needed you need some food ease the water you need some safety and some shelter but basically you didn't care about any of that because it's all provided for you and so you're just kind of happy being in reality and just existing and exploring what is here right now and being totally in the present moment not worrying about stuff and as an adult you get away from that and you get hooked on various sources of stimulation needing this hit of alcohol here needing to watch some TV needing some food needing this so getting hooked on that is is a problem meditation also just it makes you happy this is something you should want to be doing because it's a really good way to make yourself feel good in your body is to just sit there and be calm and be relaxed and connect with reality connect with existence rather than always be being be connected to like the social matrix that we are growing up in by social matrix I mean society all the demands of work and and politics and career and and family life like those are all like social obligations and social responsibilities but then sometimes you just want to hook yourself from all that and realize that everything's ok in the moment meditation is also good for improving your work performance especially if you're a very creative person if you're a high achiever type if you're an executive type and your thought process is important to the work you're putting out then you want to make sure that your thought process is clean it's streamlined it's not overly negative and it can be focused that's another thing that messes the meditation helps you with is it helps you with building up the free parental cortex building up your willpower muscles so that you can actually use your brain for being a really effective tool people that meditate a lot will have more willpower more discipline it's going to be easier for you to stay on your diet it's gonna be easier for you to stay and work extra hours at work if that's what is called for it's going to be easier for you to generate creative ideas so that's really good if you only do meditation just to get performance then that's still a really good reason to do it just for the performance that your brain gets and studies have also shown that just the health of your brain is going to get better meditation on a consistent basis will help prevent things like Alzheimer's disease and just keep your brain really healthy and active because you're using it you're stressing it when you're doing meditation you're like flexing a muscle and then lastly this is kind of a more obscure and spiritual point but you can actually use meditation to reach appointment alignment which I talked about in other videos I'm not going to cover here it's a really deep topic but if that's something that you're interested in then definitely check out some my other videos where I'm going to cover what enlightenment is and how you can reach it through the use of meditation but if you do meditation for a very very long time and you're very very disciplined of it you eventually can reach the point where you become so connected with reality that you feel like you are one with reality and all the pettiness in your life all the emotional hang-ups you have all the psychological and stability everything you worry about all that just melts completely away and I have not reached that state so don't hold me to that but that's what that's what the Guru's say when they get there so that can be a point that you can reach through meditation so that can be like your long long long long distance vision of maybe why you're doing it all right so let's get into the body of what meditation is some of the some of the subtleties of it and actually how to do it alright so the reason we do it is to control negative thoughts and there is this Buddhist idea the way that they label our mind is they have this analogy for the fact that your mind is like a drunk monkey not just a drunk monkey having that monkey chatter but it's like a drunk monkey who's been stung by a scorpion so just imagine imagine that imagine that image and isn't that true isn't that how our days are sometimes maybe for most of us too much of our days are like that wouldn't it be nice to back away from that and to calm that monkey down so that it's not always running around stung and drunk and doing crazy things kind of rein that thing in that's really why meditation is really useful okay as far as how to meditate there's a lot of stuff out there especially now because meditation is getting so popular in the West you've got so many books classes courses manuals videos look meditation at the bottom line is extremely extremely simple and there's way too much around it so I'm going to make it really simple as to how to meditate here's how you meditate alright if you follow this advice you're going to be doing it as efficiently as you can be doing it so you're not going to need to innovate on this it's really simple here's what you do you get a chair simple chair with a back on it you put it down you sit on it every morning you get a timer you put that timer on your cellphone for if you've a smartphone for example you put that timer for 20 minutes you sit down put your arms on your legs back up straight close your eyes and just breathe deeply normally slowly at a consistent even pace and sit there for 20 minutes straight and try to empty your mind of any specific thoughts that's it that's meditation and when some kind of thought does creep in there that gets ahold of you like for example you're sitting there and everything is peaceful and calm right is there everything's nice and then all of a sudden it's like oh oh I need to answer that email oh oh what happens if I if I stay in at work an extra hour then I won't be able to pick up the kids when you ask for having those questions in your mind you just realize that you're off track and you just let it go you let them go kind of like water passing under a bridge and you try to clean your mind and you sit there and you wait and you try to last it out and see how long you can sit through another period of meditation without getting hit by another thought and when you start initially this is going to be extremely extremely challenging because right now if you've never tried it then you probably think it's not I mean I know what you're talking about I can do that it's just going to be boring but we actually do it you're going to find out how challenging it is it's very simple but it's very challenging to actually do it because you're going to have thoughts creeping into your mind every thought is going to come in and you're going to realize you can very very keenly aware of just how many negative thoughts you're having and how automatic they are and how little control over them you do really have at least right now what's going to happen is that as you do this consistently every day for weeks and months and years you're going to recognize that you have more control and you're going to build up your willpower muscles to the point where your meditation sessions are going to get longer and longer and longer and you're gonna be able to go without having these thoughts get ahold of you and grab ahold of you and have some emotional effect on you now is the discipline that you're building has to discipline of meditation so very simple see there's no you don't need to take some class you don't need to read some book you don't need to go buy a pillow you don't need a special mat you don't need special shoes or clothes you don't need some special position you don't need to cross your legs in the full lotus position you don't need to do any of those things you can but you don't need to do any of those things in fact what I'm going to say is that all those are distractions those are rituals that people have built around in order to sell you stuff or because there's Dogma involved and ancient traditions of ritual that you don't need to get the core effect of meditation meditation is just sitting quietly and not thinking about anything it's just quieting your mind that's all it is and there's slight variations on it but that's basically what it is you can focus on your breath if you want to you can focus on on one particular launch or that you have maybe an affirmations you have something like I am peace I am peace I am peace and just keep repeating it and focusing on it but none of those things are necessary in fact I think the best way is to do it very simply and take all the extraneous superfluous stuff out because here's the problem is that even though I've given you the process it's a very dead simple process you're still going to want to be tempted to innovate on this process and somehow complicated which is the exact opposite of what the point of meditation is it's supposed to unhooked you from all that when you try to go and you take all these classes and read all these books and buy all this equipment that's the exact opposite of what meditation is intend to do meditation is intended to make you calm in the moment just being who you are as you are right now your current experience not needing to add anything to it so you don't need any of that stuff plus it'll save you some money save you some time and the biggest thing that'll save you is excuses for procrastination because here's what's going to happen is that this thing is so simple that your mind can't accept that it's that simple so it us is in the in its infinite wisdom and it's infinite trickiness is what it does it convinces you that it can't be this simple there must be something more maybe I need this maybe I need that I need to take a class to make sure that I do it right and you start coming up with excuses for not to do it any sort of reason for not to do it to the point we're going to be sitting there on your chair doing your meditation and you're going to be doing it and then halfway through you're gonna have a thought like hmmm these this one thought keeps coming up I must be not meditating like some for some reason I'm just doing it wrong and so you get all butthurt about the fact that you can't meditate and you're going to start judging yourself for that and maybe you get through twenty minutes and you barely barely make it through you're almost about to quit but let's say you finally make it through to the 20-minute mark in your alarm rings and you're like god damn I made it through but something must be wrong this is like the fifth time in a row that I barely made it through I must have a second meditation I must need to go take a class or read a book or something or maybe I should just quit because I'm not getting I'm not getting any peace or calm from this I'm getting even more agitated that's totally normal anything that happens in meditation is totally normal the key thing is that you just try to Center your mind and clear it of thoughts that does not mean that to do a successful meditation your mind needs to be always clear of thoughts very very common misconception I think where people get totally misled for me this was a big realization is that literally anything that happens within the meditation session as long as you last out for 20 minutes and you at least try to keep your mind clear that's it some days that's going to be much easier than other days if you just had a break up the night before with your girlfriend or boyfriend good luck having a clean smooth meditation session the next morning you're going to be frantic and all over the place because that monkey chatter is going to be coming around and it's going to be running circles in your mind and you're basically going to be totally out of control but you know what you still do it and that 20 minutes that you put in is still 20 minutes of meditation even if it was little windows of two seconds here in two seconds there where your mind was clear and the rest of it was filled with a bunch of garbage and nonsense so it is that's fine that's the process and when you start it is going to be challenging that's what I mean by this thing being really difficult because you're not going to be able to do a smooth even minute of meditation all of this meditation but you're not going to be able to do a smooth minute of no thinking is more accurate way to put it and that that's going to frustrate you because you're going to assume that you've got it all handled and that your mind is clear and you've got good willpower and you're totally in control but you're going to become very quickly shocked and awed into how little control you really have because what's gonna happen is maybe going to last for like 15 seconds before some negative thought creeps up or your imagination kicks in and you start fantasizing about something and what you gotta do is you're just going to say okay I recognize now that I'm thinking about something that's off track and I'm just going to let it go like water under a bridge and clear my mind you just keep clearing your mind and you don't judge yourself for the fact that you weren't able to clear your mind sooner because sometimes what will happen is that train of thought will carry you so far like let's say you're sitting and meditating and you've done the first minute and it's all clean and good and then something something snaps into your into your brain some thought and it just carries you and it carries you along maybe for two whole minutes and it sneaks up so suddenly on you that you don't even realize that it's been carrying you along for two minutes and then by the time you realize you're like oh damn that must have been a long time that I've been thinking about this this stupid situation and then the next thought you're gonna have is oh damn I messed up two minutes worth of meditation the fact is that that's just the process of it you're learning to build your willpower muscles and don't judge yourself all you do in that case is you clear your mind when you realize that you've wasted two minutes thinking about some thought you clear it and you begin anew you're still going for twenty minutes so it doesn't matter those two minutes still count towards you twenty minutes but you clear your mind and you forget about it you let it go you don't get hooked on it and if you do get hooked on it which of course you will at the beginning you'll start to doubt yourself and you'll start to judge yourself and criticize yourself recognize that you're doing that and let that go you just keep going through that process sometimes it's a really kind of stop and go stop and go stop and go grindy kind of process it's not smooth when you do for a long time and become silky smooth and polished that's kind of the state that you want to get to and when you do that when you get out of meditation you'll find that your life becomes silky smooth - not always but it's going to be more smooth than it was if you didn't do it okay so that's how to meditate and some of the common concerns that people have about it let's talk about actually turning this into a practice because if you're not going to do this daily I'm telling you right now don't even start don't start meditation unless you're committing to do it for at least 20 minutes every day doesn't matter what in the day morning is better because you have less your energies are still within you you still have a lot of energy you're not falling asleep because you just woke up and has to be quieter in the morning less obligations more obligations at night less distractions in the morning so morning is best 20 minutes every single day weekends and weekdays every single day and you don't do this for a month you do this for the rest of your life this is one of meditation practices this is one of those things that's subtle you have to appreciate the subtlety of what meditation is it is not this huge supercharging effect on your life at least not initially it can be that way after months and years but it's not going to be that way in the first month and it's not even going to be that way in the first five months I'm just telling you the way it really is I'm not being pessimistic or having some limiting beliefs this is how it is Buddhist monks will meditate for six hours everyday for decades before they get the full effects of meditation so you got to figure that if you only do it for 20 minutes you gotta at least do it once a day to get some sort of effect and that's what is so important is that you do it daily you have to do it daily I'm stressing this because people just don't do it they don't do it daily I'm guilty of it myself so you gotta do it daily and to do that here's a secret is you have to convince yourself of the importance of meditation because I rattled off a list of all the benefits that you can get better brain health and better performance at work less stress more happiness potentially enlightenment I told you these things but right now your mind isn't bought into it yet you're not bought into it you don't see how it could practically improve your day to day you don't see that and that's what you got to change is you got to change your relationship to why meditation is important because really if you don't see that it's not going to be a Praia nuff priority for you to do it consistently throughout your day and you're going to get distracted by everything else and you're just going to say ah it's not important I'll I won't do it you have to really treat it as something important the way I do meditation right now is I do an hour of meditation every morning and I've committed to doing it I just started I've done I've done 30 day challenge of meditation before but right now I just started really doing it much more seriously because I have recommitted myself and I made a mental shift into why meditation is important for me and the way that I'm doing is I'm using an audio program to help me along it plays like nature sounds in my ears and it also plays by Arnold beets which actually helps to put your brain in the right meditative frequency I'll talk more about that in other videos which is actually a really powerful tool it's called holosync and there's other programs out there but the point here being that I've committed myself because in my mind I painted a vision of what I'm going to be like a year from now two years from now 10 years from now 20 years from now when I do my hour of meditation every morning for me that means creating a business that's many many many times more profitable than it is otherwise for me it means being much more fulfilled and happy for me it means having amazingly smooth relationships and being like really calm and imperturbable emotionally having full control of my emotions it means having a really healthy and strong brain that I can use to solve complex problems creative problems analytical problems that I'm faced with all the time in my business in my life for me this is it and also for me that vision includes letting go of all the stuff from the past that I'm still holding on to because that's another effective meditations that gets you psychological development it's almost like doing therapy but on a more subtle scale so it's kind of like my therapy and to me to release all those negative blocks that I have it's going to literally move me and evolve me to new levels of of consciousness and just like performance so I'm doing it for both the performance but then also for how it makes me feel and the health benefits and I'm just like I'm really bought into that vision right now so for me committing an hour every morning now is easy because I'm committed but for you it's probably not because you don't have that vision yet so you have to do whatever you have to do to build that vision for yourself it's probably going to mean that you're going to try meditation out if you haven't before and you're going to try it out you're going to just experiment with it then maybe you'll quit maybe you'll do a 30 day challenge like I did when I started out and you'll last through the whole thing and you like it but then you you don't see the benefit of it in 30 days and so you drop it but if you read the literature and you listen to enough videos you listen enough self help products you're going to start to understand the subtle benefits add up big big big big time and then you're gonna be bought in and you're gonna be doing it so go ahead and get going on that journey and then of course what I want to mention here is a lot of people will tell me oh I'm not meditating because and they give a bunch of excuses like I'm not meditating because I don't have enough time in the morning I'm not meditating because when I sit down and meditate my mind is going all over the place and I find it difficult I'm not meditating because I haven't I haven't studied the techniques I'm just going to go and take a class next month and then I'll meditate after I take the class or I'll read this book or I don't have the right pillow to put under my ass when I'm sitting down in the half Lotus position all of those are excuses because meditation is super super simple all you do is you sit down close your eyes and sit there for 20 minutes so the real reason that you're not meditating is because you're lacking discipline and you're lazy and your lower self is coming up with all sorts of excuses to keep that laziness in place it doesn't want to crank it doesn't want to crank itself up to a new state it likes being where it is it likes being comfortable exactly where it is that's your lower self that's your reptilian brain and your reptilian brain wants you to be lazy and so it'll come up with a thousand excuses literally you can come up with a thousand excuses for why to procrastinate and why not to meditate and the real reason behind all that is that you're lazy and you have it geared yourself into action you haven't created a vision for yourself so go ahead create that vision and then you will be on track alright this is it for me I'm going to be signing off go ahead comment as always I love to get your comments share and like this and then go to actualize that'll work for more videos on advanced personal development just like this and check out my personal development blueprint