Debunking the 5 Most Common Meditation Myths | Light Watkins | TEDxVeniceBeach

Raise your hand if you've meditated successfully, a lot of hands draw, okay, let's be honest,

meditation

has a big image problem and I've been in the

meditation

space for about 15 years, starting as a practitioner and then apprenticed under my teacher. meditation teacher for many years and for the last eight years I have been traveling around the world to different cities teaching people from all walks of life the basic mechanics, physiology and biology of meditation and the general consensus is that my life would definitely be better. Yes I meditate but it's too difficult I can't calm my mind I can't sit still long enough I don't have time so I want to shed some

light

on what I think are the five

most

common

meditation

myths

in our society and I want to give you some advice that will help you make your meditation practice instantly more enjoyable and I want to show you how you can use meditation to literally create more time to be more productive and of course to change the world, but first I want you to close your eyes and I want that you imagine a white polar bear in your mind and keep your attention on this white polar bear in your imagination and then open your eyes, okay, raise your hand if you got distracted and thought about something.

Aside from a white polar bear, any time that was about half the room, close your eyes again and this time I want you to let your mind wander freely and be able to think about anything you want to think about, as long as you it's not about a white polar bear whatever you do don't think about a white polar bear it's very important look carefully open your eyes raise your hand if you accidentally thought about a white polar bear raise your other hand if you thought about it a lot al

most

everyone and that brings Let's move on to the first myth I want to talk about, which is that I'm a bad meditator if I can't calm my mind.

That white polar bear experiment we just did was a real study by a Harvard psychologist who wanted to see if it was possible to suppress certain thoughts, except they didn't sit for a few seconds, they sat for five minutes trying to focus on the thought. white polar bear and then for another five minutes trying not to think about the white polar bear and just like you, when they weren't supposed to be thinking about the white polar bear, they ended up thinking about it a lot and some of them were on the verge of obsession, that's all they could think about what the white polar bear is and the conclusion of this study was twofold, number one, if you focus on something after about five or six seconds, your mind will naturally drift to something else. unrelated thought and number two, if you try to suppress your thoughts, guess what is going to happen, you will end up creating more. of the thought you don't want to have, so suppressing thoughts does not lead to a very positive meditation experience.

Now, what they started studying at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology are these meditation styles called non-directive meditation techniques, they are actually very old meditation techniques, but they have just started studying them and these meditation styles do not use the white polar bear suppression method, but rather those meditators are allowed to let their minds wander and wander from one thought to another and what they discovered was that when you allow your mind to wander from one thought to another, it actually you reach a very high degree of mental and emotional processing. The other thing they found is very interesting: a wandering mind leads to a rested mind.

You activate this break. Network that can really bring your mind and body into a state of rest that is deeper than what you get when you sleep at night, so sitting comfortably and letting your mind wander will not only rest your body, but It will also bring a high level of order and efficiency to your mind so that the thoughts you have are not obstacles to your meditation, they are symptomatic of your mind actually working on autopilot through the problems you will have in your life next The myth What I wanted to dispel is this whole idea that there is no right way to meditate.

We've all heard that before and it's a little complicated because I think all meditations lead to the same goal, which is a greater sense of inner peace and happiness, but there are definitely best practices that will allow your daily meditation to feel much easier. and easy again is a subjective term, but this is what I mean. I'm going to tell you a little story just to illustrate this and I'm a little embarrassed. I admit it, but I didn't learn to swim until about nine years ago. Long story short, I was on a beach with five women and we were surrounded by volcanic rocks and they wanted to swim naked and I was single at the time, so this was like a golden opportunity for me, except I couldn't swim and there was no point easy entry into the water, so I had a dilemma on my hands and because I was afraid to admit that I couldn't swim, my response to that suggestion was oh, I'll just stay back and take care of your clothes, so needless to say, at The next day I signed up for swimming lessons and went to the pool and the coach asked me to swim across the 25 meter pool and I was able to.

I walked in and started doing my best impression of what I think a swimmer looks like, except I was crawling across the water and then I went out about 5 meters. I started drinking water. I could barely breathe and this twelve year old lifeguard almost had to jump into the pool to save myself and luckily I was able to get to the side of the pool before that happened, but the teacher pulled me aside and said, "You know what, actually "You have the perfect body for swimming, you just need to do it." lengthen and you need to twist your body this way and you need to kick like this, you need to make sure you breathe this way and she was teaching me the basic mechanics of freestyle and when I'm teaching meditation and I asked someone to show me how you've been meditating and What they do is do their best impersonation of a monk, they sit on the floor cross-legged, put their fingers together, and they don't know why they just do it. and you could see their brow wrinkle here, they're just trying hard and I'm not saying this is a wrong way to meditate before, for beginners, your meditation experience will look like my swimming experience, you'll just crawl. through their thoughts and it's not unusual for someone to come away from that experience feeling like meditation is too hard and it's not for me, so instead of sitting like that, I encourage people to sit like that, sit comfortably, have your back supported, use pillows and whatever you find. is that your body is not a distraction to the process, so if you are new to meditation you will want to sit as if you were watching your favorite television show and then if you employ those mental techniques to allow the mind to wander and take you to the drift.

You're going to have experiences that are a hundred times easier than anything you've ever had before, so you just have to do it consistently enough, which brings me to my next point. I don't have time to meditate. Well, you've heard this a long time ago. There is only one activity that I know of that will truly repay you for the time you spent doing it and that is daily meditation. This is what I mean, we all have a chronological age and we have a biological age, your chronological age of course moves forward once. Every 12 months your biological age accelerates or decreases depending on the amount of stress you have in your body.

This is a photo of my personal hero, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this photo was taken during his last speech, the mountaintop speech, which was the day before he was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, in this photo he was 39 years old and when they did the autopsy on his body, they said that If we didn't know it was dr. King, we would have thought it was the body of a 60 year old man, all the stress and pressure he was under aged his body almost 20 years beyond his chronological age and what has recently come to

light

in the last 30 years is that Meditation has a reverse effect on biological aging.

There was a study published in the International Journal of Neuroscience showing that if you were of a matching chronological and biological age when you turned 30 and you started meditating daily when you were 35, you had the same effect. the skin elasticity and sexual responsiveness and hearing threshold and vision and memory of a 23-year-old version of yourself; In other words, your biological age was 7 years younger than when you started meditating, so saying I don't have time to Meditate is like saying I don't have time to file my tax refund where I was going to get back half of the money I paid. .

The next meditation will solve all my problems. You've seen these people run. going around and evangelizing about meditation and I'm going to describe myself here for a moment because if you dig deep enough you can find all kinds of studies and claims that show that meditation does wonderful things like reversing biological aging and resting the mind and body and there are studies which show that meditation will help you control your chocolate cravings it will help you drive better it will give you mind-blowing sexual experiences it will help you win the Super Bowl apparently and there is a lot of correlation here, but we In my personal opinion, there is some light on the causality, for me the problem with this type of study is that it is not possible to weigh all the variables that were involved in a particular study;

There's a study that's cited a lot in meditation circles and I've cited it before and it's about meditators showing up in a lab room and hooking up to electrodes right now. Many of you meditate. Imagine that you appear in this laboratory. They ask him to take off his street clothes. Put on a hospital gown. Go sit down. Sitting on a chair, it's a steel folding chair, it has a hole in it and then they attach electrodes to the scalp and then they put a gas mask analysis machine over the nose in the mouth to measure the oxygen consumption and then they put a gram ocular. in your eye to measure eye movement and then they place a landmark on your earlobe and then they place a cardiogram on your heart to measure heart rate activity and then they place a catheter in your arm to take blood samples while You're meditating and on your other palm they put a galvanic skin response device to measure your sweat and then you feel a little Vaseline under your butt and they take a little smashed monitor and they slide it up your butt, it's a measure of the body temperature because all the Other officers are being used for some other type of measurement and then they tell you, "Okay, relax and meditate," of course, everyone who is in that study reported having horrible meditation experiences and you would have They had to do it and so did I, but the interesting thing is that When they looked at the meta-analysis of that study and saw the results in their physiology, they actually had very positive changes and ended up coining this term from this study called the relaxation response, which is cited a lot when People talk about the benefits. of meditation the next is success in meditation is based on the stillness of my mind, right, meditating successfully has nothing to do with how still your mind becomes, so you just need to get that thought out of your head, Now no one understood it, huh?

How? You measure progress in meditation. If I am sitting in meditation. I have all these thoughts. How do I know if I am successful in meditation? Many times you won't know you are successful until someone else notices it in you. First there was a woman that I taught to meditate in New York City and she was about 40 years old, she is a lawyer with a very kind personality and she came to see me and I gave her everything she needed to be self-sufficient and I told her With the Time and practice you will have some positive changes, which is all I tell people because I don't know what will happen to them, but I know that whatever happens to them will be amazing, so she leaves and comes back. a year later and I'm teaching another group of people how to meditate and I get to the part about positive changes and she attacks me and says like she came here a year ago.

I have been meditating every day. I didn't notice any positive changes. I don't think meditation is working for me and I said, you know, I'm sure there are some positive things happening in your life, but a lot of times you're not going to see it first and this is why on top of that. We don't know what's being avoided because you're meditating and that has to be taken into account as well, so she leaves a little disappointed and sends me this email six months later and says, "I have this story too, I think you do." You might find it very funny that I recently went out to dinner with my husband and we had one of our usual arguments where I was right and he was wrong, you know, the usual and I was able to let it go and continue enjoying my meal and then about 20 minutes Then, when he was sure the argument was dead and buried, he said, Honey, three months ago, if we'd had an argument like that, you would have left me at the restaurant and now you could have let it go, he said, I think. that meditations work, that's how we wanted to be successful in meditation, how much moreadaptable you are in your life and meditation is going to cause that little space, that little moment, that breath that you take just before honking or that moment of reflection just before you were going to say that thing that you would have regretted for five minutes.

Then my teacher says you know, never miss a golden opportunity to keep your mouth closed, so let's do this, everyone, let's close our eyes one more time and I want you to calm down and start noticing your breathing very gently. You don't have to control it, just notice it and I want you to expect your mind to wander at some point to some other thought, maybe about the chair. about your body about the time or something you're going to do later tonight and when you're aware that you've strayed, you just gently notice your breathing again, okay, slowly open your eyes, isn't it a lot easier than fighting? ? mind and do the whole white polar bear thing in meditation, literally just ten minutes for those ten minutes every morning and you will take back some of that wear and tear on your body and bring more order and efficiency to your mind and cultivate inner peace and happiness and you will feed that into the collective consciousness.

We don't live in isolation, so whatever we feel inside will spread through our universe through our community and that is our individual personal responsibility every day. We are feeding something to the collective and my message to you is simply to let that be peace, let that be happiness, let that be the highest expression of yourself, thank you very much.