Intro to Meditation - What am I doing exactly?

Hey, guys, this is Bea here in Sayulita. And today we are going to go over what is meditation, because I think this is a very common thing that people want to get into. But even from my very first experience with meditation, I kind of went in and by the end of it, from my personal experience, was like, what am I trying to accomplish here? What is stopping and focusing on my breath actually doing? How is this benefiting me? And that's kind of elusive. And, you know, some of the answers aren't quite as clear as I would have liked when I started meditating.

So from my experience over the last several years of getting into meditation and making it a daily practice, I'm going to kind of explain what I have found in terms of benefits and how it can benefit you as well. So when we actually stop our day and focus on our breath, it's once you realize that you have never done that since you were a child and you have that kind of revelation, then you start to crave this because it becomes an addiction, because there's so much outside activity, there's so many things going, going on, on in our world that create distraction.

So with that distraction, it creates natural emotional responses where we react to them. And that's kind of where our ego gets created. And we have an identity because we have so many things coming in, we have to react to things and we become a human, and we have an identity through this. Well, when we stop for a moment and we focus on our breath, we can almost gain a third perspective to ourself and even our ego and our identity that we've created over our entire lifetime. So at some point, you can actually step back from yourself at a moment, from a third perspective, and actually internally view yourself from an observer's perspective, which is something that is.

It sounds easy, but it takes a little practice to get there, because when things come up and thoughts come up, you naturally have an emotional response to that. And it's very easy to just react immediately. But we actually have a buffer zone before we react, and that's the observation state or the awareness state. So when something comes in, it's only information that's giving you a chance to choose how you want to react to that piece of information. So if something makes you angry, for instance, that can come in, but instead of reacting to the anger, anger and actually getting angry and running around and, you know, doing whatever you may do with that trigger, it gives us a chance to sit and watch it and look at it as if someone else is angry.

Like when you see someone else angry you sit and wonder why, right? You just look and watch their actions and throw a tangent and all this stuff and from your state of mind you are likely more calm watching that person go through this tangent and thinking kind of like oh how silly, like he could just do this and it would be fine. Well you can gain that same power with yourself and treat yourself almost as a second person to you. So if you get angry you can watch yourself and say why did I get angry about that and start to make a decision.

And when you come back out from that meditation you have a very, very clear or a much clearer answer as to how to go about these situations that are causing you troubles in your day. So that is just one of the benefits I found with meditation. So with that that's all we're going to go over today and we will guide you through another meditation tomorrow.