You Don’t Meditate To Heal. You Meditate To Change.
How meditation can help us get everything we want
As originally published in Change Your Mind Change Your Life on Medium.com.
Image: francescoch on iStock
Meditation is nothing new. It has been around for centuries. And in recent years, much has been written about the plentiful benefits of meditation. But many people still believe that meditation is about healing. This article explores the notion that instead, meditation is about change.
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This article is also an expansion on insight #6 of my recent article “Quite Possibly the Only Knowledge You Need To Change Your Life” after multiple requests to expand on the insights with ways to implement the lessons learned.
As humans, we often wait for something to go wrong before we change. Radical life changes tend to take place after we hit rock bottom, are diagnosed with a serious illness, or lose something or someone we thought we couldn’t live without.
For me, it was the first. My rock bottom was in early 2020. I had a choice to make — to live or to die. But if I chose to live, something had to change. And that something was me.
I remember the feeling of wanting to die. Everything else felt like too much — and I had nothing left to give. And yet, there was that inner part of me telling me “Not yet”.
And so began my journey of self-evolution. COVID actually came at a good time for me, because everyone else being in lockdown made my isolation feel less lonely — and that helped with all the shame and guilt I felt at the time.
Over the next years, I immersed myself in all kinds of healing modalities, from cleaning up my diet to detoxing my home. From psychotherapy to plant medicines. From books to courses and seminars. From fitness training to climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. From getting certified as an integrative health coach to getting certified as a hypnotherapist. The list is long.
Throughout it all I began to understand more and more about the mind-body connection. And all of a sudden so much of my life began to make sense.
But whilst I absorbed and integrated this newfound understanding into my life, my progress of getting better felt slow.
And that’s because I was focused on acquiring knowledge — to understand and avoid making the same mistakes in the future. I remained primarily in my conscious mind, which is in beta brainwaves. Our conscious mind is where there is logic and reasoning.
The purpose of meditation is to get beyond the analytical mind and tap into our subconscious, where our habits and behaviours reside.
When we open the door to alpha or theta we get past the analytical mind so the body can absorb the information.
I wrote more about our brainwaves in “Why We Feel Like We Are Not Enough.”
When we slow our breathing, we slow our brainwaves and can move from beta (our conscious analytical mind) to alpha and further to theta, a hypnotic state where we are open to suggestions. This is where we are conscious in our subconscious mind.
Meditation means “to become familiar with”.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge of the self is self-empowerment.
And this is important because as adults we move through life mostly on autopilot. 95% of how we operate is driven by our subconscious.
So as we become familiar with our unconscious thoughts, our unconscious behaviours, and our unconscious emotions, and we make them familiar to us, we begin to truly know ourselves. When this happens, we are no longer the program, but instead the consciousness observing the program.
When we can objectively look at our subjective self, we can see things for how and what they truly are, as opposed to our interpretation of them. If we can get beyond ourselves, we can choose new, upgraded beliefs about ourselves and upgrade our emotions accordingly.
Our emotions are our guidance system and determine the frequency we emit, because everything is energy. The better we feel, the higher our vibrational frequency. I wrote more about this in “3 Steps to Magnetising Everything You Want.”
First, WE have to change. Then, our lives begin to change.
We must feel healthy before we can heal. We must feel wealthy before we can be rich. We must feel loved before we can attract a loving relationship.
If we keep focusing on what we don’t have, we are living in lack, expecting something outside of us to make us whole.
We must feel whole because we are whole. And when we feel that, we live in a state of abundance. And when we live like that, the life we desire must manifest. It’s physics.
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Since integrating this knowledge into my life I have come to realise the importance of noticing the little “proofs of concept” to help keep up momentum.
I know we all want the “big” things to happen “now” — health, relationship, career and money — but like with almost everything in life, learning how to raise our vibration is like learning any new skill. It takes a lot of practice. So celebrating the small wins is important.
For example, I have a lot of essential oils and love candles. A few weeks ago I started to wonder if I could make my own candles, something I’d never done before. Less than a week later an invitation to a candle-making event showed up in one of my chat groups, and the location was 10 minutes from where I live!
I have experienced so many examples like this lately. They may be small steps, but they are showing me that my vibration is rising and that I’m on the right track.
If we can truly live in this new state of being at a new frequency, the unexpected begins to occur.
Wherever you are on your healing journey, always remember that YOU ARE ENOUGH.