#7 How can I meditate?

In my experience, if you want to wake up with your full consciousness, you will have to learn to meditate. It will bring you many advantages and one of the best meditation benefits is that it will create a space for you to feel, to meet with yourself, analyze your emotions and talk with your soul.

There are people who don’t meditate, understanding this as sitting with their eyes closed and practicing mindfulness. There really are certainly many types of meditation. Some people may prefer to play sports, run, walk, contemplate the sea or the fire, do puzzles, models or color, for example. All of these practices make you be present and immerse you in a kind of trance where your mind relaxes and thinking slows down. It can even be done with household chores like washing dishes. In these activities, the mind thinks slower and you reach more accurate conclusions because you have space to feel yourself and let emotions flow that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to see.

While all of this helps, in my opinion it will not replace everything you will gain from daily meditation. For me, all of these activities are complementary to your learning through meditation. Furthermore, the time you invest in these activities will not make you go deeper within yourself at the rate that your meditations continued over time would. 

As you begin to know yourself and begin to identify your emotions, you will be able to do brief and daily meditations on all of these activities. The result is that, whether you meditate or not, you will learn to connect with yourself several times throughout the day, whether taking a walk, washing the dishes, or listening to a song.

If you already meditate, this post will confirm what you already know. If you don’t meditate, then I hope to help you with my experience. There is one thing you have to understand. Knowing yourself should be a priority. I don’t know where you are in your life, but if you have found this page, it is because you want to wake up. And it must become your priority because you don’t like where you are now. So stop putting it off. Take time, look for a tutorial or meditation video and start.

In my case, I learned to meditate by searching for information on YouTube. I had already tried eating healthy, sleeping 8 hours, infusions of all kinds, training, relaxation exercises and I had left meditation for last, simply because I didn’t believe in it. It was a practice that I related to people very different from me. But the discomfort I felt in my life was so great that I had to try. Meditation was the only thing he had not tried and that was always recommended to know oneself and access one’s own inner world. I tell you this so you don’t think you are alone. Do you think people start meditating for pleasure? I don’t believe it. There must be an underlying reason that persists until you finally decide to face the fear of knowing yourself. Surprised? Most people don’t meditate because they don’t want to really know themselves, they don’t want to dig through suffering, guilt, loneliness or forgotten memories to heal the pain. Meditation will be one of your key tools to heal.

I will assume that you will seek information and know what you will have to do to be able to meditate. Meditation is very simple and you really won’t need to understand much or delve into styles. I started doing just a 5 minutes meditation every night. Soon your body will be asking for more. I sat in bed and with headphones listened to this song: La Lune

Listen to it, relax and close your eyes. Now it’s time to wait. Especially at first, you will feel stupid waiting for something that no one knows how to explain well what it is. In my case, the first few times I did nothing but think and think and it was impossible for me to silence my thoughts. This occurs largely because we have not learned to recognize that we are not our mind. You heard it right: You are not your mind. You will read this phrase many times in my posts, because it is devastatingly illuminating. When you begin to look at your thoughts as something foreign to you, something that your mind originates, you will begin to finally separate yourself from the ego. Then you will sense that where you are going with meditation, your mind will not be able to go. But if you continue to think that you are your thoughts, you will always be left outside with her.

I know it sounds paranoid, but it is true, and anyone who meditates can tell you that. At first, the mind goes crazy when you discover that you are trying to go somewhere without it. This discovery is for both of you, because you, by meditating, will discover that you are trying just that, something that you did not think was possible before.

This is the key point that allows some people to meditate and know themselves and others not. Those who cannot access will tell you that they simply relaxed and their pulse decreased, or that they became sleepy. I invite you to believe in yourself, believe that all this is possible and ask your soul to take you inside with it. You should know that this process is full of magic because there is no other way to describe it. The transformation that is experienced is incredible and that is why you must believe with all your heart that you will experience fabulous things. The meditation process is incredibly personal because you will discover fears and very loving emotions. You will probably cry many times in your meditations, when you begin to feel everything that is inside you.

During meditation, you will discover that your mind does not want to be silent. In my case, the first few times I thought a lot of things and I had to contemplate the thought and let it die down, always looking at it as if it were something foreign to me. After a few days my mind thought less, but imagined more.

In the stillness of my room, with the light off, my mind created images and memories, almost randomly. My mind did not receive a thought pattern and generated images that I contemplated. Sometimes they were what looked like cartoons, other times toys from my childhood and also images from my childhood. When I heard a noise my mind immediately sent me thoughts but I let them fade away again. This happened after 7 or 8 meditations, when I was already meditating for 30 minutes. That’s why I tell you to continue. Don’t expect anything from your meditations, just spend time with yourself. Learn to spend time feeling yourself.

One of the things I did was focus my attention on the blackness you see when you close your eyes. Sometimes it will seem that there are shades or orange tints in that blackness, other times that there are volutes or there is a soft movement. All these details served as an excuse for me to focus my attention on that blackness, imagining that it was my interior and that, if I tried hard, I could see its depth and move through it.

No matter what resource you choose, simply start observing what is inside you. And one day something will happen. In my case it was in the ninth or tenth meditation. Suddenly I became aware that there was an underlying sensation that had always been there, since it did not come from outside. Now I had finally stopped agitating my insides and I could notice how, in that calm, I perceived something that gave me great well-being.

It was a well-being that was always there but that I could never see with that clarity before. Then that new sensation began to get bigger and, despite not being very strong, it was new. It was new! And tears started to fall down my cheeks because I just couldn’t describe it because it was new. I was 42 years old then and I never thought I could feel something new. It took me 42 years to get there. I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t care either, because whatever it was, what was clear to me was that this was the way.

I can’t describe how momentous this is. It surpasses everything you imagine because it is not external to you, it is a real transformation of yours. Everything I tell you is little but I can assure you one thing. Everything that happens to you in this process is forever. There is no turning back, it is impossible. Once you are aware of something you were unaware of, you can no longer return to unconsciousness of it. That’s why I tell you to meditate, because all the effort you put into it, all the perseverance and your hours spent getting to know yourself will be worth it when you feel that you can actually feel yourself without needing anything external.

At that moment you will have broken down your barrier of disbelief. And from there you will love to continue investigating inside yourself, because now it will be easier to begin to distinguish your emotions and begin to feel the same sensation in other activities, since it is always with you and now you can identify it. The feeling is always there, you just haven’t paid your attention to it! Can you believe it? And when you discover that your being is always there with you, you will be overwhelmed by the feeling that life loves you and that you have never been alone. And that when you felt abandoned it wasn’t true. And you will discover that you were ungrateful for many things in your life, because the only thing life has always done was love you. And in the end you will see that if you continue on that beautiful path, you are going straight to love and God.