Meditate to Connect to Your Inner Jedi:
It's a self that is there underneath all the craziness of the day, the expectations and the pressures and the masks that you wear just to get through it. Take a breath right now and ask yourself, is there anything you hear that your true self wants you to know?
Spend a few moments listening. Listen. If any thoughts come, just let them go. Don't think. Listen. What do you hear?
“The Force will be with you, always.”
“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?”
I think of quotes as little messages that people in the past leave along for us to help us navigate life and just love the wisdom that they contain. So love studying quotes.
The first quote I love because it's a fun way to remember that there's a force within you, one that is powerful and with you always. The second I love because it reminds us that the natural answer is already within us. All we have to do is wait for the mud of our mind to settle at that point when it settles the right action, the wisdom naturally arises within you.
Today I want to talk with you about meditation.
We all know we should meditate. Most of us have tried it, maybe even downloaded an app, or are on YouTube, and maybe we even enjoy it, but it seems like many of us don't really understand just how powerful meditation can truly be, and how important it really is to connecting to your true self.
But meditation can be Jedi Master powerful and get you in touch with your inner Jedi Master!
To start off with many people and meditation teachers explain it like this: you've got to meditate because it helps with anxiety and depression and it helps you stay calm and peaceful. All true and all important.
Meditation involves realizing you're the observer. You're the one who who knows that you're having thoughts–you’re not the thoughts themselves. Don't believe all the thoughts you have. You're the presence that holds all the thoughts. You're the presence that holds what is happening, what you're experiencing.
This is all true and all very important to know, but that explanation never totally fully did it for me.
Here's the explanation I wish I had known:
First, the big thing to understand is that there is a secret garden inside yourself where you are nourished, where you are held, where all the things you're longing for, they're all there, and you can just rest. You can just be. You're like a tree planted by a river, just nourished when you're there.This place actually exists inside you. It's there. It's just that so many of us have forgotten that it's there. So many of us have not accessed it, not been able to. But when you access this Sacred Garden inside you, this place of peace, and when you live from it, it will lead you home to yourself.
Meditation is the primary way to access this secret garden.
But I came up with another way of explaining it. It's called LIGHT. It's an acronym to help you understand how meditation is so powerful and how it can make you like a Jedi.
L: Listen to Yourself
I: Integrate Guidance into Action
G: Gently Clear Your Mind
H: Heal Your Brain & Body
T: Transform How You Experience Life
L- listen to your true self:
Meditation is all about listening. In our modern days, we're so caught up in thinking. We're always thinking thinking. Thinking is great, we can’t let it get in the way of forgetting how to listen.
It's all about listening, learning how to listen, listening to yourself, not listening to your thoughts.
Meditation is quieting your mind so you can listen to and connect to your true self and what it has to say to you.
I- Integrate Guidance into Action:
First you listen, and then meditation helps you integrate what you hear and translate it into actual action into your life.
In modern life, there are so many distractions, so many things you could be doing, so many things you could be consuming, so many things you have to do to keep up (or that you feel like you have to do to keep up); so what happens is stillness in our life is lost. But stillness is needed so that you can hear and listen to yourself. When you cultivate stillness, when you can hear yourself, you're able to put it into action in your life.
A person's life is just reflection of what's actually inside them, the energy that is inside them. So it's important to cultivate that energy, because anything external in your life is actually a reflection of the internal. The external is reflection of the internal.
G- Gently clear your mind:
Your true self, you can think of like a diamond. It's really beautiful, but every day, there's just stuff that happens in a day, it's stressful, and this happens, and then that happens, and it just collects on the diamond that you are like a residue. Meditation helps you clear the residue away so that you can access the diamond that is you. And when the diamond of yourself is clear, then your actions that come from that have that clarity too. When your diamond has a lot of crud on it and a lot of residue on it, then your actions come from a place of that.
For example: I get many emails in a day, and there was a time I used to reply to emails right away, especially ones that made me anxious or stressed, I would just like react to them–just open the emails and respond right away. I didn't realize was I was writing from a state of stress and reactivity versus rather than responding mindfully. So that energy was baked into the messages I would send. And when the person would read it, they would feel that, and then they would respond to my reacting, and what would I get back in their response was a function of what I had reacted to. It's like throwing a stone into water, and just like creating all these ripples that don't need to exist. Once I started meditating, I could really feel a shift in my life, because I was able to be more present and intentional with my decision making and how I respond to things. I wasn't reacting anymore. I was choosing how to show up.
Meditation is important to help you clear your mind and energy–it’s how you clear the residue so you don't pass on to next person, and it doesn't come back to you, like that quote I shared by Lao Tzu in the beginning. Let the mud settle. When mud settles, clarity arises. And when clarity arises, you can act wisely, and when you act wisely, it impacts the decisions and that you make in life and all that comes back to you. That's the Jedi aspect of meditation that's very powerful.
H- Heal your brain and body:
In our bodies there are proteins and molecules that help us repair, and if you're constantly working and stressed out, they just can't keep up. Meditation actually feels really lovely, because it helps you regenerate and nourish yourself.
But in Western culture, we spend so much time working and making money to then buy procedures to help us with our health problems that we've gotten from working all the time.
Meditation is a different way of healing yourself. Meditating on a regular basis, handling stress, can help your body repair on a daily basis, preventatively.
T- Transform how you experience life:
Think of life like surfing. One of my favorite Jon Kabat Zinn quote says you can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
There's always waves in life, and you. Each of us is learning how to surf those waves. We're all on our own surf boards. And when you're surfing at any point in time, there is a still point to be accessed so that you can stay on the board in the water. In every moment is a practice in our lives, which is to find that still point that helps you surf on the water. When you access that still point in a moment, it's like the water and wind are helping you along as you surf, you begin to experience flow in your life, you begin to be one with the Tao.
The practice of meditation, the practice of life, is actually learning how to be connected to the still point at any moment, so that you're always responding to life from that place.
Why does meditation matter?
Meditation brings you back to your light. Listen, integrate, gently, clear, heal and transform your life. If you're not meditating seriously, you are missing out on fundamental aspect of yourself. You're not going to be able to access your true self without it. You're not going to be able to access this really important state of consciousness, of listening, learning how to listen to yourself and hear what it is that you need, want, or the best course of action for yourself. And that's a really difficult way to live.