The 3 Keys to Meditation
– Bonus Lesson
Learning to Breathe Again
I first read about abdominal breathing from a second hand book I bought at university 20 years ago.
It was this little purple book on esoteric yoga called ‘Raja Yoga’.
I loved it, all the talk of secret mystical abilities available to someone when they train in yoga had me hooked.
However, the thing that really changed my life from that book was how it coached me on shifting the position of my breath.
Naturally as we age, our breath becomes more shallow. This means we don’t take in as much oxygen.
We slowly stop breathing deeply, not using our lungs to their full capacity.
Let’s do a quick test.
Put one hand on your chest.
Then put your other hand on your belly.
Now, breathe normally.
Don’t try to control your breath, just breathe as you usually do.
Now, which hand moves more?
For most of us, unless we’ve been trained, the hand on your chest will move more.
The difference is often so much, that for many of us, the hand on our belly doesn’t move at all!
If you have a chance, watch a baby breathe.
Their whole belly puffs out like a balloon, naturally breathing deeply.
Babies naturally breathe with their belly, as a natural extension of getting their nutrition from the umbilical cord when they were in the womb.
If you look at the anatomy of our lungs, when we only breathe with our chest we’re not using the full capacity of our lungs.
The way to fully, deeply breathe, is to do what’s called diaphragmatic breathing or abdominal breathing.
This is the breathing that is taught to singers, martial artists, qigong and yoga practitioners to fully utilize their lung capacity.
When you expand your belly out when you breathe in, you use your diagphraghm to draw air deep down into the bottom of your lungs, invigorating your blood with oxygen.
Abdominal breathing is powerful. It will bring you both energy and relaxation.
Make sure you try it today.
Lesson Summary
- As we age our breath tends to become more shallow, located primarily in our chest.
- Breathing into our belly, using our diaphragm, allows us to fill our lungs properly, breathe deeply and relax.
Today’s Exercise
The best way to practice abdominal breathing is by doing the exercise I asked you to do before.
With one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly, breathe slowly and deeply, but try to move the hand on your belly through your breathing.
Don’t force this process.
It’ll feel strange at first.
Just try and remain relaxed and use your attention to guide your breath.
You can combine this with the breathing relaxation exercise you learnt in the 2nd key to Meditation lesson.
Practice abdominal breathing a little each and you’ll be amazed by how quickly you’ll start to naturally just do it!
Your body will quickly remember to breathe like this.
Good luck with this and I’ll see you with the 3rd Key to Meditation soon!
For breath is life, so if you breathe well, you will live long on earth.
– Sanskrit Proverb
Free Course – 3 Keys To Meditation – 2nd Key – Current Subscribers
The 2nd Key to Meditation
Welcome back to my mini course on the 3 keys to a successful meditation practice!
How did you go with the exercise of checking in and noticing your thoughts?
Did you find it hard to stop for a moment and observe what was happening inside you?
When you were observing, how easy was it to be the observer, and not get caught up in your thoughts?
Hit reply on the email you just got from me and let me know how you found the practice.
The Second Key
So, in the last lesson we learnt the first key to meditation – meditation is not about stopping your thoughts.
Meditation is about becoming a peaceful observer of your inner world.
To to do this, you’re going to need to focus your attention – the second key to meditation.
In virtually all meditation practice, you pick something to focus your attention on.
You sit down, relax your body and mind, and shift your focus onto the thing you have chosen to use in your meditation.
Holding your attention on your chosen object is the goal of your meditation.
But what about when your attention gets distracted by random thoughts from your mind?
Don’t worry when it does. It does for us all, even the most experienced meditators!
This is the other reason your attention is so important.
It’s only through your attention that you notice you’ve drifted away from the focus of your meditation.
And when you notice this, you can then refocus your attention on the object of your meditation.
Your attention is the thing you have most control over in your life, even though I know it doesn’t always feel like it!
And using your attention wisely is the thing that’s most important in transforming your life for the better.
Your ‘mind’, your ‘ego’ or whatever name you want to call it – the thing that actually produces your thoughts – has convinced most of us that it ‘IS’ us!
Yes, your mind is a powerful tool you can use to positively shape your life.
But, your mind can also hurt you when it’s allowed to direct your life by default.
When your mind’s in charge, your entire life is driven by unconscious habits and beliefs. These are beliefs you’ve picked up from your childhood, your parents, your friends, beliefs you may not even consciously believe in!
When your attention is consumed by your mind’s constant stream of thoughts, you’re just a witness to your life, with your mind reacting to the world.
This is one of the most powerful benefits of meditation.
By meditating, by training your attention, you find that you have more control over your life, more control over your decisions and their outcomes.
This puts you in the best position possible to start creating that life you’ve always dreamed of.
Meditation Science – Heart Disease
Did you know that meditation can help with the symptoms of heart and cardiovascular disease?
Researchers have found that meditation positively affects hormone levels in the body, helps regulate blood pressure, protects against vascular damage, enhances insulin resistance and promotes other positive changes on a cellular level that are associated with the health of the body’s cardiovascular system.
Helping people that already suffer from problems with their heart and also helping prevent problems happening in people that have healthy cardiovascular systems, these studies give even more reasons how meditation can have a positive effect on our health and well-being.
- Schneider, R., Alexander, C., Staggers, F., Ormejohnson, D., Rainforth, M., Salerno, J., Sheppard, W., Castillorichmond, A., Barnes, V. and Nidich, S.(2005). A randomized controlled trial of stress reduction in African Americans treated for hypertension for over one year. American Journal of Hypertension, 18(1), pp.88-98.
- Loucks, E., Britton, W., Howe, C., Eaton, C. and Buka, S. (2014). Positive Associations of Dispositional Mindfulness with Cardiovascular Health: the New England Family Study. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 22(4), pp.540-550.
- Koike, M. and Cardoso, R. (2014). Meditation can produce beneficial effects to prevent cardiovascular disease. Hormone Molecular Biology and Clinical Investigation, 18(3), pp.137-143.
Stress and Attention
One thing that can make it really difficult to focus your attention during meditation, or really focus on anything, is when you feel agitated and stressed.
It’s much easier to focus your attention and not get caught up in random thoughts when you’re relaxed and calm.
The funny thing is, training your attention through meditation will help you relax your body and mind, making it easier to focus your attention, which then makes it easier to meditate!
It’s what you call a virtuous cycle (as opposed to a vicious cycle).
In today’s exercise that I’ll get to in a minute, we’ll be doing some focused breathing to help train your attention and create a sense of peace and relaxation.
This focused breathing will help you relax, help focus your attention, which then helps with your meditation practice.
Slow, deliberate breathing has been used as a method for calming the mind for centuries.
Many different spiritual and religious practices use this important power that we carry with our breath.
Sayings like “Take a deep breath” and “slow down, take a breath” reference this wisdom we all have, but don’t act on often enough.
Now, modern science has caught up with this traditional wisdom, giving us scientific explanations on exactly why focused breathing helps our body and mind become relaxed.
How the Breath Creates Calm
Slow, focused breathing stimulates the body’s parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
The PNS is responsible for your body’s relaxation, rest and healing systems.
At the same time, slow, focused breathing actually ‘turns down’ your body’s sympathetic nervous system (SNS).
The SNS is associated with your body’s fight or flight response. This is the process that activates when we have to suddenly run or fight for our lives. This increases our heart rate, breathing rate and floods our body with adrenaline.
What we call the feeling of ‘stress’ in our modern world is when our fight or flight response is incorrectly stuck in the ‘on’ position, without a break or release.
Say we come across an angry grizzly bear in the wild and our fight or flight system is activated.
When we either fight or run from the bear (I’d recommend running!), the vigorous activity uses up the stress hormones released during the confrontation.
Then, after the danger has passed, we return to our normal, relaxed state.
But for most of us now, ‘fight or flight’ comes on because of pressure we feel from work, or from our home, or because of thoughts or expectations we put on ourselves.
We never escape our stress, because we carry the main source of our stress around with us, inside our own heads.
Lucky for us, we each have powerful tools we can use, whenever we want, to turn this off and relax our body and mind.
These tools are our attention and our breath – both trained and developed in meditation.
Lesson Summary
- Focusing your attention is one of the most important aspects to successfully meditating.
- Developing a state of relaxation is the best way to get control of your attention.
- Paying attention to your breath is an excellent way to promote relaxation, and is also a profound meditation technique.
Today’s Exercise
Today you’re going to learn a powerful breathing exercise that will bring you into a state of deep relaxation, helping you focus your attention when you sit down to meditate.
And it’s as simple as breathing out longer than you breathe in.
To start, take a moment and close your eyes.
Breathe in through your nose while counting to 6.
Pause briefly.
Then, breathe out through your mouth, this time counting to 8.
Repeat this exercise at least 4 times.
Make sure the pace of your counting is consistent, so breathing out is taking longer than breathing in.
If this is too long, breathe in to a count of 4 and breathe out to a count of 6.
It’s OK to adjust the count if you need to, just keep the out breath 25-35% longer than the in breath.
Notice how you’re feeling before the exercise and notice how you feel after doing your breaths.
Notice anything that’s changed with your thoughts and how you’re feeling.
Do this at least twice a day over the next few days.
Good luck with your practice over the next few days and I’ll be in contact soon with the final lesson!
I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Free Course – 3 Keys To Meditation – 1st Key – Current Subscribers
The 1st Key to Meditation
Welcome to my mini course on the 3 keys to a successful meditation practice!
I’m so pleased to have you here and am honored to have the opportunity to share these powerful meditation secrets with you.
Learning the few key things I’m teaching in this course can help you avoid a lot of the problems people experience when they start to meditate.
Armed with the knowledge you’re about to learn, you’ll be ready to start your own meditation practice and experience all the amazing benefits that meditation brings.
So I’m guessing you’re here for a couple of reasons.
Maybe you’ve heard about meditation and looked online for help, but you’ve got no idea where to start.
If this is you, you’ve come to the right place.
What I’m going to share with you will help you get started meditating and help you avoid some of the problems people have when they first start a meditation practice.
Or, maybe you’re someone who knows about the benefits of meditation and has tried to do it, but you still haven’t been able to ‘get it’.
You’re struggling with meditation – both making time to meditate and getting the most out of it when you finally get a chance to try.
If this is you, I’m excited you’re here because I know I can help you get over these problems.
I first started experimenting with meditation over 25 years ago.
But in that time, it took me years to really ‘get’ what I was supposed to be doing.
Then after I figured this out, it took me years more to get myself to meditate regularly!
The reason I put this course together is to help people like you start and continue with a meditation practice, avoiding the problems that most people face.
A Common Meditation Problem
The problems people have with meditation are very common.
Most people experience the same set of issues that stop them meditating regularly, or even stop them meditating at all.
I asked my over 120,000 social media connections from all over the world for the reasons they struggled to meditate.
It was amazing how many people said exactly the same thing.
I know many of you reading this have tried to meditate, but quickly gave up because you thought it was either too difficult, or even “impossible” for you to do it.
I learned that the most common belief of people who’d given up trying to meditate was they thought they couldn’t do it!
And the main reason people gave when they believed they couldn’t meditate was:
“I can’t stop my mind thinking!”
The First Key
So, now I’m going to share a secret with you…
Meditation is NOT about stopping thought!
Meditation is not about ‘not’ thinking, not about emptying your mind.
When I first tried to meditate, I thought the same thing.
I would sit down and try and force my mind to stop thinking.
You can imagine how successful I was at doing this.
Not very.
The whole idea of trying to stop my thoughts only seemed to produce more thoughts!
So, me sitting down and trying to stop my thoughts, trying to create a calm mind was having the exact opposite effect – I was just becoming more stressed and frustrated.
What I didn’t understand at the time was…
IT’S THE MINDS JOB TO PRODUCE THOUGHTS!
That’s just what it does.
You can’t force your mind to stop making thoughts.
It just won’t work.
So your goal during your meditation isn’t to stop your thoughts.
Your goal during meditation is to not focus on the thoughts that your mind produces.
You allow your mind to create whatever thoughts it likes,
BUT…
You don’t follow these thoughts.
You don’t attach to these thoughts.
And therefore, you don’t encourage the mind to create more of these thoughts.
The underlying purpose of virtually all meditation techniques is to give you
a point of focus for your attention that is NOT your thoughts.
That’s it.
One thing to focus on that isn’t your thoughts.
Focus on that one thing, and allow your mind and thoughts to do whatever they like!
Take the example of going and watching a really great movie.
When you sit in the cinema and watch the movie, you actually ‘loose yourself’ in the story.
The outside world fades away, your own thoughts fade away and you become totally engrossed in the movie you’re watching.
Now, what if I told you that you ‘were’ the movie?
You’d probably say I was crazy.
But that’s exactly what happens with us and our thoughts.
We get so engrossed in our thoughts, we believe we ‘are’ our thoughts.
But through the practice of meditation, we come to realize that we are the observer behind our thoughts.
You help guide your thoughts, but you don’t actually create them.
YOU are not your thoughts.
Meditation Science – Stress
Numerous studies have found that meditation is a great tool to help alleviate stress.
Some of the most uncomfortable symptoms of stress are caused by activation of the amygdala – often referred to as the brain’s fear center.
Scientist’s have found one of the ways meditation helps reduce stress is by actually reducing the size of the amygdala.
As the amygdala shrinks, meditation also seems to cause the part of the brain associated with ‘higher’ brain functions like awareness and decision making to grow.
The clinical treatment protocol – Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) – has been developed as a direct result of this success. MBSR is now used throughout the world successfully treating a variety of ailments, with stress related illness the top of the list.
- Lazar, S., Kerr, C., Wasserman, R., Gray, J., Greve, D., Treadway, M., McGarvey, M., Quinn, B., Dusek, J., Benson, H., Rauch, S., Moore, C. and Fischl, B. (2005). Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness. NeuroReport, 16(17), pp.1893-1897.
- Hölzel, B., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S., Gard, T. and Lazar, S. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), pp.36-43.
- Desbordes, G., Negi, L., Pace, T., Wallace, B., Raison, C. and Schwartz, E. (2012). Effects of mindful-attention and compassion meditation training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6.
So back to the movie example.
Imagine this time that you’re not engrossed in the movie.
It continues to play in front of you, but you’re also aware of the people sitting near you.
Maybe you have some thoughts about a particular camera angle used, or a line spoken by the actor on screen.
You are consciously observing, but gently detached from the scenes that are unfolding.
This state of gentle observation of your thoughts is what you need to cultivate during your meditation practice.
I’ll talk more about this in the next lesson.
So, try not to become frustrated with your mind and the thoughts it creates.
Your mind can be one of the most powerful tools in your life when you understand its purpose.
When you can effectively guide your mind so that it works for you, not against you, in everything you want to accomplish it can change your life.
And the most effective way I’ve found to do this is through a meditation practice.
Lesson Summary
- The goal of meditation is ‘not’ to stop your thoughts
- The goal of meditation is to be aware of, but not focus on, the thoughts your mind produces.
Today’s Exercise
So, I’ve got an exercise for you to do over the next couple of days till I send you your next lesson.
I want you to start to strengthen the observer part of your mind.
One of the keys to any program of personal development is the simple, but often difficult act of remembering to remember!
If you don’t constantly remember to do the new thing you are trying to learn, you’ll never succeed in making it a habit.
So, to help you remember to remember, to help remind you to do this throughout the day, I want you to draw a circle on the back of one of your hands.
It doesn’t need to be large, just big enough so you’ll notice it throughout the day when you glance at your hand.
When you see the circle, notice what you’re thinking about, notice what your mind is doing.
Notice what thoughts are bubbling up to the surface of your consciousness.
And as you notice, try not to get caught up in your thought stream.
Just notice how thoughts appear and disappear all on their own, without any real input from the ‘you’ that’s doing the noticing.
Now, don’t put any pressure on yourself when doing this.
Just use your attention lightly.
When you do get caught up in your thoughts, that is OK.
When you notice that you’re caught up in your thoughts, gently bring yourself back to your role as the quiet observer.
Congratulations on getting through your first lesson of this mini-course!
Good luck with the exercise over the next couple of days.
I’ll be in touch soon to reveal the next key to your meditation practice.
Meditation gives you an opportunity to come to know your invisible self. It allows you to empty yourself of the endless hyperactivity of your mind, and to attain calmness. It teaches you to be peaceful, to remove stress, to receive answers where confusion previously reigned.
– Wayne Dyer