Meditation Makes For Success

The most influential and successful people meditate everyday.

Straight up, meditation is badass! If you’re not meditating, you’re not living to the fullest or accessing your fullest human potential.

Most people wiggle around the idea of mediation or even the conversation of beginning to meditate. And rightfully so, it can be boring at first. But I believe if you know the secret most people don’t know about meditation, you will have a life changing experience in your next session.

The common perception of meditation is that it’s some uber boring distraction in the day when people force themselves to be alone in silence, sitting still and avoiding their overly incessant thoughts. This perception can be intimidating and deterring.

However, meditation is the exact opposite of this perception. Although the less desirable elements of meditation do exist in every meditation practice, I believe those perceptions are simply misperceptions.

The defining difference between loving to meditate and avoiding it like the plague is realizing that the time spent alone is far from alone, and the incessant thinking of thoughts is actually you performing meditation properly!

Several analogies that come to mind which may better explain what meditation should feel like are: getting lost in your favorite fiction books or comics, watching your favorite sports team attempt a last second chance to win the game, or being out on a golf course.

For me, meditation is the equivalent to the feeling of laying on the beach on a perfect sunny day with a margarita in hand.

Whatever analogy you want to use, meditation rocks! It not only allows you to have mind altering experiences similar to that of hallucinogenic and mind-expanding substances, but also at the same time you will be completely healing your body from any “dis-ease,” while manifesting the successful life you desire.

I realize these are bold statements about the benefits of meditation, however they are the truth. The drugs people use to expand their minds and heal their bodies are all a tool that catalyze the mind to generate expansion and healing. Your mind is completely capable of reaching these levels of function without any assistance if you take the time to train it.

HOW & WHY

In a nutshell, meditation is nothing more than sitting quietly and allowing your brain to dump. Think of it like a computer. If you put too many things on your desktop or even your hard drive, the computer gets confused and slows after a while. It’s important to clean and organize these places to ensure your computer continues to run quickly.

Our brains operate much like computers in this way. The information you collect through your 5 senses can stay with you throughout your day and sometimes even weeks and months. Yes, you need many of the pieces of information you collect from your surrounding environments; however, like the computer, if you don’t take time to organize and clean up your files then your mind gets confused and even can begin to slow its processing speed.

The good news is our brains are far more efficient and resilient than computers so we can simply close our eyes, meditate and allow the unnecessary info to be reorganized or dumped.

The secret to proper meditation is where most people give up too soon. The part of your meditation where your brain begins to chatter or have incessant thoughts is when this dumping and organizing process begins.

Meditation Instructions

1. Align your back. You can either sit in a chair with your back tall and your feet flat on the floor, or lie in a straight line facing upward on a couch or the floor. The key is to be relaxed in the position you choose.

2. Close your eyes and direct your gaze to either the tip of your nose or between your eyebrows. Keep your eyes closed while you maintain your gaze.

3. Allow your breath to flow naturally and do not focus on it.

4. Continue to allow your thoughts to flow into your mind and let them flow out.

5. Around the 10 - 15 minute mark notice a subtle shift in your body’s energy. Likely the feeling like you are on the verge of falling asleep, but still conscious.

6. This is your parasympathetic nervous system taking over and you are entering a deeper meditative state.

Experiencing this deeper level may take a few practice rounds, however know even the smallest time practicing is having profound effects on your body and mind. So if you can change your association, get excited about this chatter knowing this is your brain executing the function it’s designed to do to keep you healthy.

Before you know it the chatter will seem to come to a stop. This is the part which varies from person to person. People describe the chatter stopping in different ways. For me, it feels like a switch is flipped and a lightness comes over my body. I then feel relaxed and free.

And others will actually fall asleep. It’s totally okay if you do, that just means your body was tired on a deeper level than you were unaware and needed the sleep. It’s a good idea to set a timer for 30 mins in case you do fall asleep in the beginning stages of your practice.

Typically I experience the feeling of stillness around the 15 minute mark in my meditation. I honestly have brain chatter from 10 - 14 minutes and then I drop into stillness. My belief is to continue to observe the chatter but not react to it, knowing that my brain is just dumping out useless information. And if the information is that important then it will be there when I finish.

It’s the stillness where true magic happens, and once you experience this concept you will never be the same again.

Scientific Proof

Science is beginning to define what happens in our bodies when we meditate to stillness. The human body has two nervous system functions it operate in: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic is the system when we are moving around throughout our day. The parasympathetic is the system we are in during sleep.

The parasympathetic nervous system is recognized by science as the state when your body is able to heal itself.

It’s almost as if the body is capable of regenerating itself on the molecular level while in parasympathetic. This is why one of my friends in Hawaii was able to regenerate his entire body and motor functions, creating what western medicine previously could only explain as a miracle. 

As technology increases we will continue to see explanations of the transformation and healing that takes place in our bodies during meditation.

For now, I would recommend making 15 - 20 minutes of daily meditation part of your lifestyle and health routine to give your body the proper opportunity to be the healthiest version of you.

We spend so much time on other areas of our fitness, why not focus on the foundation of optimal health: the mind-body connection?

Josh was born and raised in Lexington, KY. He played collegiate soccer at Transylvania University where he also studied business and psychology. Upon graduating college in 2002 he chose to begin a professional career as a restaurateur. Josh watched his business grow exponentially over the course of a decade, while he watched his health steadily declined. In 2011 Josh developed a mysterious disease, that modern medicine could not explain. He decided to embark on an optimal health journey to discover a cure. His journey lead him to receive his certifications as a personal trainer, RKC Kettlebell instructor and Yoga Alliance instructor. Josh’s unique combination of business, personal training and ayurvedic nutrition experience organically spawned a system that is guaranteed to upgrade the life of everyone from office executive to professional athlete. Josh now pursues his passion in teaching others to find their perfect work, life balance.

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