In this guide I’m going to discuss ways to make meditation more effective. In particular, I’m gong to show you how you can change your perspective on anything just by meditating.
Now, meditation is an effective tool. You probably know already that meditation can help with anxiety, stress, and similar problems. But it goes beyond. Indeed, meditation can even change your perception of reality. And that’s huge. Because as human beings, our perception of reality is distorted. Our perception of reality is distorted by negative thoughts, beliefs, and negativity bias.
So, the way in which the mind works is like this. We perceive reality. However, we perceive reality filtered via our beliefs [1]. Now what do I mean by that? To give you an example, let’s say that you believe the world is an unfair place. If you believe the world is an unfair place, then you are going to perceive the world as such because your mind will accept any evidence that the world is unfair and your mind will reject any evidence that the world is actually fair. So, when you perceive reality, you perceive things and accept things that agree with your core beliefs. And you reject things that disagree with your core beliefs.
Now, this is huge because it massively distorts your perception of reality. It literally changes the way you see the world and all because of negative beliefs.
And THAT is the most effective meditation can be: By using it to change your perspective on reality itself.
You can use meditation to correct your negative beliefs so that you can perceive the world in a more realistic, more accurate and more positive way.
Now to illustrate this, I’m going to share some stories from my meditation students. I’m not going to name anybody because I’d like to protect their privacy. However, I’m going to use their stories to illustrate to you how you can use meditation to correct your mind, because as Lau Tzu once said, “If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”
So the first story that I would like to share is about a young lady who believed that everyone was judging her negatively. Now you can imagine how huge that is. If you walk around all day and every single person that you see, you believe that they are judging you in a negative light, that’s gonna massively affect you. It’s going to cause you anxiety and it’s probably gonna to make you dislike people because you believe that they dislike you. It’s gonna affect your relationship with everyone.
But you can correct that with meditation, as you can correct any belief with meditation.
So in order to correct this belief for my student, I gave her a very effective meditation which simply involved meditating on all the times in her life when people had shown her acceptance.
Now the core principle here is that your mind perceives things by your beliefs, and your beliefs are biased.
My student believed that everyone was judging her the natural way to correct that is to focus your mind on the times when people have accepted you. And so I gave her a 20 minute meditation session in which she meditated on all the times in which people had shown her acceptance, and then finally meditated on the idea of t
he world as an accepting place. Now she actually ended up crying at the end of this meditation lesson. And she said thank you, while crying tears of joy. Why? Because when you meditate on the opposite of a negative belief, you completely change your perception of reality. No longer do you see the world as a place where everyone is judging her. She saw the world as a place where people were accepting her. So that’s just one example.
Let me give you another example.
I had a gentleman, an elderly gentleman, who believed that the world is incredibly unfair and that he is always treated unfairly. Now again, if you believe the world is unfair, your mind is going to force you to perceive the world in as an unfair place. You’re going to focus on all the evidence that the world is unfair. And you’re going to cut out any evidence that the world is fair. So you can imagine how that belief affected this elderly gentleman’s view of reality. Everything he saw, he thought, was unfair. He thought his life was unfair. He thought other people treated him unfair, him unfairly, etcetera, etcetera. And it was causing him to feel incredibly depressed.
Now again, the core principle here is to realize that your beliefs are flawed and to meditate on the opposite of your beliefs, because that balances things out. We want the mind to be balanced.
What was the most effective meditation technique for this gentleman? As you can probably anticipate now, I gave him a meditation that was entirely about focusing on moments in his life when he had been treated fairly. We did a 20 minute meditation session, you know, starting with your traditional anapanasati or mindful breathing to help him to relax and, you know, stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and things like that, and then afterwards he meditated on all the times in his life when he had been treated fairly. And again, this shifted his perspective on reality because suddenly his mind was being forced to consider all the evidence that was against his negative belief.
And so what I would like for you to take away from this lesson is this. You should be aware of your beliefs, particularly your negative beliefs and then you should meditate on the opposite of your negative beliefs, because that’s going to create balance.
So let me do this with you right now. I’m going to do a quick 5-10 minute meditation which is going to change your perspective of reality. Now, as is always the case with my meditation lessons, I’m going to teach you how to do this. But I want you to do it in your own time by yourself.
Your Most Effective Meditation
- And so we’re going to close our eyes and just take a moment to correct your posture.
- And then I would like for you just focus on your breath as it moves around your body. Now that’s very important because it’s going to reduce sympathetic nervous system activity, promote parasympathetic nervous system activity, and reduce the effect of neurochemicals such as cortisol
- Now become aware of one negative belief that is holding you back. For instance, perhaps you believe that the world is a judgmental place. Now what I would like for you to do is to meditate on the times in your life when you have been shown the opposite of your negative belief. So, if you believe the world is an unfair place, bring to mind all the evidence that the world is actually fair.
- Continue to do this for ten minutes. And that is what I call meditating effectively!