The power of meditation

Since the beginning of the year, I am back to meditating everyday, so now over 40 consecutive days. In another post I'll talk about how to create an habit (which is hugely helpful) but on this one I want to talk about the benefits of meditation and what it's doing for me.
Basically at the hear of my return to meditation was the book 'Full Catastrophe Living: using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain and illness' from Jon Kabat-Zinn.(Full Catastrophe Living)
The book basically reminded me of the benefits of meditation and since I had a very stressful year last year and want to cope better this year, I decided to get my practice back into shape.
Basically I started by doing 12 mins of meditation each morning. Started by normal sitting meditation and lately have been doing also lying down body scans.
What has it done for me:
- really helps lift the cloud of obsessive thinking... very often I can get stuck on thoughts and worries about work (eg what if this happens? or oh, I need to do that task). Meditation puts things in perspective
- helps me relax. While I meditate, I become aware of tensions I am carrying in my body, and by just becoming aware of them, I already relax it a little. Also by 'looking' into them with my breathing, I can relax them further
- helps me more in the moment. This is very closely linked to the 1st point, of escaping the incessant thoughts. Without this cloud of thinking, I can actually pay attention to what is happening and respond adequately. And this has immediate impact: for example in sport, I find that my reaction times are better and I am also able to use my instinct much more and therefore perform better
- by being more aware of the moment, I engage more in conversations with others, that are then more pleasurable and rewarding!
- by being much more in tune with my body, I am now much more aware of what my body needs. For example, usually after work I would get home and try to wind down by doing a number of things, sometimes even pushing myself to do them, like watching tv, reading a book or playing a game. Now, sometimes I understand that I just need to lie down and go to bed earlier... or that a walk would be great... or yes, a book would be very nice. I can listen more to the body and give it/me what it needs. And this has impact on my energy.

Of course somedays it is really difficult. My mind is just going everywhere at the same time and it can actually feel stressful to meditate. But even then (maybe even more so then!) meditation helps. It makes me aware of this. And every time I become aware that my thoughts are somewhere else, I just pull them back into the breathing or into the body scan, and that in itself is helpful.

1 more interesting point that I am finding is now the need to do it for longer than 12 minutes in the morning. After 12 minutes I put the alarm for at least another 6. And often I start meditation and only start the alarm after 2 minutes of settling down. In the last week or so, I've also meditated for a bit at night... my body is now craving it. From fighting it, the body now feels the need for it.


It's really healthy and good for me. I'm over the moon that I am doing it again - and I think setting the habit up was the trick that helped me the most. So more to come on that, on habit setting.

Raising self esteem, raising self confidence

I recently had a session with a facilitator at work: my team got together with this said facilitator to understand and agree how we could work better together.

At the beginning of the session, the facilitator talked a bit about self esteem and self confidence. How self esteem is something we build up since young age, whilst self confidence is also built up but varies according to different situations (eg we might be very confident at playing tennis, but not at all speaking in public). An interesting point that she mentioned was that self esteem though is the base, the foundation - from which self confidence builds on.

Imagine a chart: if your self esteem is low, draw an horizontal line at number 20. Self confidence than varies from that number, eg can go +5 up to 25, or -5 down to 15.

While if your self esteem is high, say at 80, self confidence could make it vary between 75 and 85 - at a much higher level.

Obviously it is not that simple and numerical but anyway it did sound very credible and reasonable that self esteem is actually the base, the foundation. If we have low self esteem, we will approach new tasks with a dread for failure... Whilst with high self esteem we may be more positive and believe we can do it, therefore dramatically increasing the likelihood of a good outcome.

In summary, my take out has been to highlight the importance of self esteem. For the last few years I have been thinking how my self confidence has been low... and figuring ways to improve it, reading about it, etc. While actually, it might be more critical for me to work on my self esteem.

In fact... I am quite sure it is mainly on my self esteem that I need to work on. I know I am quite hard on myself, I do tend to be a perfectionist. It makes highly critical. And I know I do have a little critical voice that is quite intensive and persistent sometimes!

As I went back home, I came across a book I had ordered years ago, but never really had read: Maximum Achievement, by Brian Tracy.

There is a lot of richness in the book... as I read it, it hooked me.

I picked up a very useful technique or exercise there, something that I had actually done years ago, with great results: repeating mantras or affirmations to myself.

I used to repeat 'I like myself' or 'I am good, I am very good, I am excellent'. Or write down quite a few times. It does wonders!

The fact is that our subconscious can only hold 1 thought at a time. So, at least for a while, we make it positive! (and probably much more realistic!). And for a while we quieten the negative critic inside.

The amazing thing is how visibly sometimes I noticed my body relaxing! Letting go and feeling better about myself! And a positive outcome taking over me! Absolutely unbelievable.

It does have a much stronger effect if you repeat these sentences to you while relaxed.

Brian also refers to an exercise that I learned years ago, about autogenic relaxation - the exercise where, lying down, you say 'my left arm feels very heavy...' then 'my left lef feels very heavy'... and they do start to feel very heavy and you relax very deeply. You can use this exercise as a starter to then speak more powerfully to your subconscious, as it is more relaxed. Just say 'I like myself'.

I promise: it is really powerful and life changing.