How Meditation Changed My Life | Mamata Venkat | TEDxWayPublicLibrary

Transcriber: Tímea Hegyessy Reviewer: Denise RQ Meditation has been part of my

life

. As long as I can remember, I have personally been practicing it for 5 and a half years. I have been a coach for the last 8 months. But I'll talk about that a little later. My college career has been unconventional, to say the least. I started out as a medical student, getting halfway through my first year of college, before realizing that it really wasn't for me. I

changed

majors about 4 times before finally pursuing international studies and ultimately choosing public health. I think it took me a long time to figure out what I want to do with my

life

, for several reasons.

First, I had always struggled with self-confidence and set such high standards for myself that every time I failed to meet them or felt like I wasn't doing what I was supposed to do, instead of finding strength from that situation, I would beat myself up. fail. Second, my idea of ​​success, happiness and satisfaction until recently was completely wrong. We live in a world that encourages this idea that to be satisfied internally we have to depend on external circumstances. This is an idea that has been instilled in our heads, probably since we were able to understand what happiness, success and satisfaction were.

Obviously, these are different concepts for different people at different times. It could be small things like spending time with friends and family, or reading a good book; or get good grades, get the job you want, find the person you should spend the rest of your life with. While all of these things are great, we still rely on things outside of ourselves to make us happy. This idea of ​​creating external substances has been magnified with the rise of technology and the advent of social media. We really can't exist without our devices anymore, it's almost as if our phones have become other organs in the body that we can't live without.

No offense to anyone, but I can guarantee that the moment I'm done speaking, most of you will subconsciously pick up your phone and check your text messages. (Laughter) And social media... social media has created this idea of ​​false happiness and contentment. Nobody wants to share the bad moments of their life, nobody wants to share their mistakes or failures. That's why social media has made it seem like everyone is always successful, happy, and satisfied all the time. What happens if things don't go the way we want? What happens if we don't get the grade we want? What happens if the person we thought we would spend the rest of our lives with breaks up with us?

Or do we get the job we want, but it has a negative aspect? Like if our boss sucks or we have a horrible coworker. Suddenly, the concept that gave us internal satisfaction is now negative externally. What I realize more and more is that our success is not only temporary, but our happiness is conditional. We are only happy or satisfied because something external makes us happy and satisfied. We are never truly satisfied just for the sake of being satisfied. That's when I realized it was going wrong. Let me back up a little. Anyone who knows me knows that my entire life I have followed a one-way path to becoming a doctor.

My family is full of medical professionals, and at age 5, I declared that I was going to be like them. Of course, my amazing Indian parents let out a huge sigh of relief because they didn't have to convince me to go into medicine. For a long time, that was what I wanted to do until I started learning more about myself, my passions and interests. Suddenly, becoming a doctor was less what I wanted to do and more what I felt compelled to do. Because all my life I have been taught that to be successful you have to be a doctor.

I was always a strangely docile child, I always knew that my parents knew what was best for me. So instead of having the confidence to defend myself, I moved on. Fast forward to my first year of college: I was miserable. I was taking classes I hated and doing poorly in them. The person I thought I would spend my life with broke up with me the moment he went to college. I was still living at home, so I felt like I wasn't having the normal college experience. After years of having a plan and direction for my life, suddenly, I was lost.

When you're going through tough times or a breakup, everyone tells you to go out and do things for yourself. And I did, I went out with friends, I went to curl up with a book in a bookstore, I joined our Bollywood Fusion dance team at school, I got a massage. But those were temporary satisfactions. I still came home and still felt internally dissatisfied with myself. Social media became the bane of my existence. I would see my friends, my ex, and all my classmates posting photos of their college adventures, their dorm rooms, their new friends, all this new stuff.

I felt like a failure for a couple of reasons. One: I had nothing to share on social media. I was still living at home, I didn't feel like I was having the conventional college experience. And two: as an Indian, I was not meeting the standard of success that had been dictated to me. I wasn't doing well to be a doctor. But since that was all I knew as success, I kept going and my GPA and self-esteem failed as a reason. So how did I change this? How did I change my life? Like I said,

meditation

has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

My dad has practiced a form of

meditation

called Raja yoga, or yoga of the mind, for over 35 years. My mom started shortly after she got married. Just as people go to church, temple or synagogue, meditation is my way of life; It's all I've ever known. I always knew I was going to start practicing meditation at some point; I tried it a couple of times my freshman year of college, but at the time my parents thought it would be good for me or help me get out of the rut I was in, and I completely rebelled. Fortunately for me, very fortunately, I have amazing friends and I have to show photos of them, because they are my whole world.

I was very lucky to have friends who were not only beginning their college careers, or were in the middle of their college careers, but who were going through similar things to me, and hadn't developed the resistance to mediation that I had. . One of my friends convinced me to go to a mediation retreat one weekend. At first, I complained and complained, wanting to stay in my own little bubble of self-pity and misery. But in the end I'm very glad I went, because it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. So what is meditation?

I'm sure everyone here has a general idea in their head of what it is, but I'll just give a few more definitions. "Meditation is an exercise that trains your mind to regulate itself. It is the ability to concentrate on one thing continuously without interruption. If practiced properly and diligently, it is a constant reconnection with your true inner self." Many people put aside the concept of meditation because we think, "How do we function without our thoughts?" "How do we spend the day without thinking?" Another thing people don't realize is that just as our bodies require physical activity to stay strong, healthy and active, our minds are muscles that also require exercise and regulation to stay strong, happy, healthy and active.

Many times people neglect their minds because they forget this point. If you think meditation is difficult, you are absolutely right. It's very difficult to get your brain to shut up for more than five seconds and not think about something else. That's another reason why people don't try it. The first time I sat down to meditate, it felt like every thought I had ever had in my 18 years of existence decided to come into my head at that exact moment. No matter how many times I tried to push them away, ignore my thoughts, or try to enter a state of thoughtlessness, they kept coming back.

I thought, "Why am I doing this? Another thing in life I'm failing at; why am I trying?" The second time I sat down to meditate during that retreat, my thoughts decreased by a quarter. The third time I sat down to meditate during that retreat, they decreased by half. Little by little, it was like I was starting to see the world in high definition. Not only could I see my external circumstances very clearly but I was finally beginning to see my true inner self with an objectivity and clarity that I had never had before. The meditation practice I am a part of prescribes meditating twice a day for an hour each time.

Once in the morning for an hour, once in the evening for an hour. I'll be totally honest, it took me a long time to get to a point where I was consistent with this. Some days I was doing a great job. I get up, I meditate, I go to bed and I meditate. Before going to bed I meditated and I was fine. But other days, more bad than good, I would just be completely lazy and stay up all night watching Ellen videos and then wake up late the next morning instead of meditating. My reasoning for this was, "I'm young, I have the rest of my life to work on my meditation practice, I don't have time to watch Ellen videos anymore." (Laughs) But I think it took me a long time to connect with my meditation practice because I wasn't used to the silence that comes with meditation.

Believe. As humans, we thrive on noise because it makes us feel like we are doing something. So I sit down to meditate and about 5-10 minutes into it I realize that I crave noise and need some kind of distraction. So I stopped meditating and immediately grabbed my phone or laptop. What this taught me was that I had reached a point where I hated silence. This also taught me how noisy my world was. Noise is not just sound or cacophony, noise is the frustration you feel with a family member or friend. It's writer's block, it's not understanding a concept in school.

Anything is noise if it is loud enough to distract us. When I realized that I had come to hate silence, it made me examine my routine; I realized that I couldn't go a day without sound, noise, or distractions of some kind. I would wake up in the morning and half-meditate before giving up because it became too difficult. I would immediately grab my phone or laptop and play music and videos while getting ready for school or eating breakfast. I would drive to school with music, I would get to class, I would be fine; About halfway through class I got distracted thinking about the video I saw.

There would be so much chaos around me and within me due to my thoughts and distractions that I would come home and feel frustrated, and I would let that frustration out to my family members without knowing what to do with it. I would start my homework and I would feel frustrated because I didn't understand the concepts, but that was because I had music playing in the background. I try to sit and meditate at the end of the day, but I would give up again because there were so many things going through my head. It bothers me when I can't fall asleep and I get frustrated because I feel like I'm not making progress in my meditation practice.

What this taught me was that to create a true connection with my inner self, I had to learn to love silence. To learn to love silence, I had to really use my willpower and commit to my meditation practice. To sustain the love of silence that I cultivated internally, my internal environment had to interact with my external environment. The more I meditated, the more I began to learn to love silence internally and the more my internal environment began to reflect my external environment. That's when I started to see the changes in myself that I wanted to see.

Here are a few: “How Meditation Creates Interaction: The Internal with the External.” Confidence: As I said before, I have always lacked self-confidence, but creating a constant reconnection with my inner self took away that fear of confidence. Suddenly, I was able to stand up for myself, I felt more confident in myself, and that gave me the courage to eventually change my major to International Studies and get rid of this idea that to be successful I have to. do something big Replace the positive with the negative. Like I said before, we can get the job we want, but there will always be something negative or something we don't want to deal with.

Suddenly, the entire environment becomes negative. Cultivating a connection with my inner self through meditation has allowed me to see the positive in any situation, no matter what it is. Exercise: not only exercise of the mind but exercise of the body. When you take care of yourself internally, you have the ability to take care of yourself externally as well. Communication: It seems like I talk a lot up here, but I'm actually pretty unassertive most of the time, so by creating a connection with myself through meditation constantly, I was able to say the things I needed to say, speak. defend myself when I needed it.

Minimize stress and anxiety: Being able to build self-confidence made me take on challenges without any worry or fear. Stay in the present moment: It's easier to live in the past, it's more fun to live in the future, but it's better to stay in the moment. And that's what meditation does for you.Compassion, tolerance, acceptance: being able to see everyone as themselves thanks to reconnecting with myself. Willpower: Meditation is difficult; but if you create the willpower to stop your brain from thinking enough, you can practically create the willpower to do almost anything. The ability to love: As cheesy as it may sound, the more I could love myself, the more I could love everything around me.

There was only one time in my life when I really strayed from my meditation practice: when I was working on President Barack Obama's re-election campaign. This is the day my father and President Obama went public with their bromance. (Laughter) Anyone who knows anything about our campaign knows that the energy there is so strong that you really don't need much more to sustain you. I realized that I tried to take the energy of this campaign and use it in my daily life. But once again, I was relying on external circumstances to make me feel good internally. I was able to do a lot of really interesting things in my last year of university, I went to study abroad, a trip to Europe to study Human Rights.

I got to be on Wright State's Model United Nations accredited team, but it wasn't so much about the great things I was doing, but more about committing to my meditation practice, committing to my inner self, making sure that all the values ​​that I created within me. I expressed myself in everything I did, so I did what I was supposed to do to the best of my ability. When I was very lucky to get the internship at the United Nations, I carried that same mentality with me. So what I'm learning more and more is that we shouldn't rely on external circumstances to feel satisfied internally.

True success comes when you take the time every day to work on yourself internally and cultivate the values ​​you want to see in yourself internally; then, being able to hold on to those values ​​and express them in any external circumstance, whether positive or negative. One of my best friends, Suraj, recently wrote a blog post about this. We think that changes come to us as we age; We think we'll learn to cook when we move out and get more exercise when we really need to. But that is not the case. We will learn to cook when we decide.

We will learn to exercise and exercise when we choose to exercise and exercise. My internal sense of self did not change until I made the decision to change my internal sense of self. For me, true success is being able to learn more and more about myself, every day, with my meditation practice; and use and express it in any situation I find myself in. Thank you. (Applause)