Meditation Tips

If you're looking for some tips on starting or enhancing your meditation practice, Cody and David dive into their own experiences and offer some great insight.

Transcript

Welcome to Energy Matters, Exploring awakening to your authentic self and finding purpose through mind, Body and soul with your hosts, Cody Edner and David Gandelman brought to you by intuitivevision. Net and groundedmind. Com. Hey everybody. Welcome to this episode of Energy Matters. This is David and I'm here with my infamous co-host, Cody Edner. And today we're going to talk about meditation tips, Which is I think what we're all really here for and share a few pieces on meditation and how we meditate, What we advise for beginners or advanced meditators. And I'm actually doing a working with this Facebook group right now with a 2Fit at Home, Ben Manning, It's a group of about 40 women who are just learning meditation. And I've gotten some amazing questions and they've really sparked an enthusiasm in me to look a little bit more at meditation tips for beginners. So I thought, Hey, Let's do an episode on this. So Cody, If someone was to come to you first time meditator, They've never meditated before, They're maybe a little bit intimidated by the process, Where would you start them off? How long would you tell them to sit for? What would be a couple of the first tips you would give? Yeah, You know, I do, I work with beginning meditators a lot. And one of the first places we often have to start is just with a conversation about demystifying, You know, What is meditation? So many people get this kind of big mental picture going about what they would have to do to meditate. And then they think, Well, I couldn't do that. I can't tell you how many times I ask a group, Okay, How many of you think, You know, Meditating means clearing your mind and stopping thought? And they all, Half of them or more will raise their hand and say, You know, That's why I don't think I can meditate. I can't stop thinking. So first part of it is demystifying it and kind of making it accessible to everybody because meditation is, It's simple. It's not necessarily easy to make ourselves sit there because there's so much stimuli and we're so sensitive in the body, But it's a fairly simple process. Once we get over the idea that it could be hard or it's a struggle, You know, It makes me think of the very, Very first time I meditated was years ago. I was like 14 and I got a hold of a, A tape that would guide you through meditation. It was a, I say tape because back then we had cassette tapes. So it was a cassette tape and I stuck it in my little cassette player and, And it was guiding me through a chakra meditation. And I remember I laid down to do this meditation and, And I remember just trying so hard to make it happen, Trying so hard that physically I was kind of creating effort, You know, I was kind of struggling to do this meditation. And of course, A little later I learned and realized that meditation works best in a very relaxed non-effort way. So the first step in creating meditation, Once we, We learned a little bit about what to do is kind of creating an environment that is comfortable and relaxing to the body. So that's, That's how long would you, Yeah. How long would you recommend someone who's just starting out to sit for, You know, That, That question, That's a really good question. And everybody asks that, How long should I sit for? And I hate to tell people to sit, You know, For a length of time where it makes it, They feel like they're having to force themselves to do it. So I think starting off slow, I kind of treat it much like exercise, Starting off slow and then building is important because frequency is more important than duration, Right? So if I'm doing a little bit of meditation every day, It will start to build pretty quickly. If I can only sit for five minutes, But I can get centered and collected and relaxed, You know, Within a few days, I might extend that to 10 minutes pretty naturally. But soon it can be a half hour pretty easily. I think the goal is to get above 20 minutes is to get to that half hour mark because it takes about 20 minutes to really just let all the noise and chatter fall away. Yeah, It does. And I think that's a great way to start maybe five, 10 minutes a day and then slowly over a number of weeks or months depends on you build up into 20 to 30 minutes a day. I think doing it twice a day too, If you can, Is great in the morning when you get up and in the evening, Maybe before bed. So you kind of really get used to the idea and the practice of sitting. How when let me ask another question, When someone sits for meditation as a beginner, Would you recommend them to just sit and watch their breath? Do they scan and just feel their body? Do they just sit in stillness and watch their thoughts? What would be a good place for them to start? What do you think? That's a really good question because there are so many different styles and modalities of meditation out there. And ultimately, You want to find the meditation that works for you, Right? That inspires you and that feels good and that you feel a change or shift happen and that comes with little or no effort. Meditation definitely takes attention. It's an attentive practice, But it doesn't necessarily have to be a struggle or effort. So I have like a series of meditations on breath with intention, I call it. So it's kind of learning how to sit with your breath and then hold an intention for yourself, Whether it's an intention to get centered or an intention to release and get grounded or an intention relative to creating your day and imagining, You know, Forward, Something that you might want to have in your day. So I do like the idea of just sitting with oneself and collecting one's attention to the body and to the moment, To present time and noticing the breath as a beginning point. But that is a big question. Where do you like to have people start? Honestly, Kind of similar, But it also depends on the person a little bit, What they're needing. I like to almost, I don't like to give advice outside of context too much. I like to look at them and see where they're really at. So some people, If they're like incredibly stressed and have an incredibly noisy mind, They really can't sit still, Then I'm more apt to give them tools to use. So how to ground themselves, How to clean out the noise in their head. So they're actually kind of actively doing something because the idea of sitting in stillness for some people is almost like terrifying. And I think people who suffer from anxiety are really high levels of stress to stop and to be totally still is difficult because the world is still moving and that gap kind of lights something up in them where they're noticing or becoming more aware of their anxiety and that can be difficult at the very beginning. And I think that's why a lot of people quit meditation early on is because they have a really hard time just sitting still. So it depends a little bit on the temperament of the person. But the way I started was reading an Eckhart Tolle book when I was 16 years old and just sitting, Being present. And for me, It was like, Oh my God, I've been living in the future and in the past, My mind is everywhere but here. And this guy is saying, The only thing that exists is here. I had this like explosive kind of awakening moment when I read that because no one had ever said that to me before and I recognized it so concretely that for me at first, I would meditate really deeply and for long periods of time and just be present. It didn't matter if my legs are crossed or I was sitting in a chair or if I was anything I was doing. It was just it would just like happen. And that was pretty cool for me. That was how I started. So it's hard for me to say how you definitely should start. But at the same time, Yeah, I think structure is important if you can be consistent. And I also think being guided in the beginning is really helpful because, For example, If someone's listening to a teacher and they're being guided, Then they're not going to end the meditation until it's over. Whereas if you're meditating on your own, You're going to stop the second your nose is itchy or you get a feeling of like emotional disturbance or a ripple in your mind and like, Oh, I got to go do something else. But if you're guided, You're probably more likely to make it all the way through to the end of the meditation, Because it's kind of strange to get up in the middle. So guidance is a really great way to start as well. And enthusiasm, We have to actually want to meditate, You know, People who go and exercise to lose weight out of total resistance usually don't stick with it. And people who go, Oh, I'm out of shape, I can't exercise. Well, You're never going to get into shape until you exercise. And people say, I can't meditate, My mind is noisy. Well, You're never going to have a quiet mind until you meditate. It's pretty much the same thing. And so the people who resisted the most sometimes need it the most, But they have to be willing to really do it. And meditation has become such a popular thing now and mindfulness that so many people seem to be doing it because they think they should, Or other people are. But you have to have a level of desire to really want to do it too. Yeah, In order to stick with it, Certainly, Because it is one of those things that you want to create as a practice, Right? It's not that I become a meditator and I meditate a few times and I say, Well, I know how to meditate now and move on. Meditation is really a practice. I mean, That would be silly. It would be kind of like saying, Well, I'm going to go to the gym and I go get a personal trainer and they teach me how to do a routine. And I said, Well, I know how to work out now. I'm done. Not work out anymore. So meditation is very much something that you want to build into a practice. What do you think in terms of if someone had to get this question off in like posture? Do I sit in a chair? Do I sit on a pillow? Do I lay in bed? Do I lay in bed? Yeah. So, You know, I had that first few experiences where I was trying to meditate and I was laying down. And then shortly after that, I went to a formal meditation class where we had structure and I learned visualization techniques to meditate, Things that help to focus the mind and extend that time of meditation so that, You know, If you sit with nothing to do for five minutes, You might get bored at the end of five minutes or less. But once you learn how to start to focus your mind and you have some visualization techniques or some kind of intentions that you're focused on or things that you're kind of moving toward, Then it becomes easier to meditate for a longer period of time. And I learned really that it is important to sit upright in a chair and to have good posture for a number of reasons. There's a number of physiological reasons. There's a number of mental reasons as to why that is. Certainly laying down, You know, You can meditate, But you tend to very often fall asleep, Right? It's very easy to drift off. And that's not horrible. I mean, That's not the end of the world. It's just if I'm wanting to build a practice where I'm starting to meditate and I'm, You know, Meditating for a half an hour a day consciously or an hour a day, Lying down, I may have a hard time achieving that. Yeah. What would you say to someone, I get this question a lot too, Is I, What if I get distracted or I always get distracted? What do I do then? A lot of people, They try to meditate and they just keep getting distracted. Yeah, That's a really good question. I get that question. And I also have that experience, Right? So I start to sit down to meditate or I'm trying to meditate and either something comes up in the environment around me that wants to distract my attention. You know, Suddenly everything else needs to be done or I get to the point where I'm starting to meditate and then the first part of meditation typically is recognizing the distracted mind, You know, Really recognizing those things that are pulling our attention here and there and actively noticing them. I think a big part of meditation is simply actively noticing, Actively becoming aware of what that inner part of you is doing. We're so absorbed in the world, Right? We're actively aware of what everybody else is doing when we're out in the world or what's going on around us. And meditation is in part simply turning that attention inward and becoming actively aware of what's going on in that inner environment and noticing. Yeah. And one of the most useful things for me when I started meditating and to this day was to just kind of learn to become the witness of all the thoughts that you're having. So the same way if you were laying on your back and looking up at the sky and there were clouds moving through the sky and the clouds take your attention, The clouds are kind of like your thoughts. They just move across the screen of your mind. But if you just bring your awareness back to the sky, Into that space that the thoughts move through and notice that you're just the watcher, You're just watching, You're not those thoughts. So easy for us, Like when we go to the movies, We become the movie. When we have an emotion, We become the emotion. When we have a thought, We become that thought, We become that movie playing out in our own heads and we can literally be sitting at a table with a group of friends at dinner and having our own movie play in our heads and not even hear what the other people have to say or with a partner. Honey, Are you even listening to me? You're not listening. You're just in your own movie. And for me, I grew up that way. I was constantly, Constantly in my own movie. But the other side of that, And I want to bring another piece to this whole being distracted part that I don't think a lot of meditation teachers touch upon because they always say come back from being distracted. But I often do the opposite. If something distracts me, Sometimes I'll give it attention. So if you're a sensitive person and you sit down to meditate and something keeps pulling on you, Well, Maybe that's something wants your attention and needs your attention. So if there's an emotion that keeps playing over and over, Then you can try to meditate over here and ignore that emotion. But you're not going to get very far because your energy is in that emotion. Emotions have kind of a deeper gravitational pull of energy than thoughts or are just intention to be free of thoughts. The real energy is in what we're experiencing in life. And so you can't avoid conflict or avoid relationship conflicts or work conflicts or anything that needs your attention indefinitely. And a lot of people use meditation to try to unplug and escape from what's actually happening. But I think meditation is a great opportunity to reflect on what you're going through and to start to kind of heal it and shift the energy of it. So for me, If I'm having a whole kind of succession of thoughts on one topic, I start to reflect on why, What is the truth about that? What is really going on in there that I can learn? Because we don't take that much time to reflect. And the more awareness you have of your own space of your thoughts and of your emotions, The more you're going to start to kind of pull out of that. And then your meditation sit can really spark a level of kind of opening up doors to answers that you've been looking for, Like, Oh, This meditate this relationship, It wasn't for me. I was so disturbed. God, This job was just the wrong job. No wonder I've been so unhappy. And I tried to meditate every day. And I'm just sitting here feeling worse and worse and worse. So you might have to actually approach it a little bit differently and go, Okay, If this thing really needs my attention, Then I'm going to give it my attention rather than what we usually do is just overanalyze the crap out of something while we're walking around in the world. We normally don't just kind of sit back, Start to relax and go, Let me just look at this from a neutral space. What is true about this? What's not true about this? What do I need to learn? So meditation in that way could open up a lot of doors. And I don't think you need to be an advanced meditator to use it in that way. I think that a lot of people quit meditation because they don't think they can use it in that way. So other than watching your breath, You can explore your entire life in your inner space in 10, 20 minutes. Who knows? You know, Sometimes it takes three hours to get to something. And sometimes it takes five minutes and there's no way of telling really. How long Cody, Do you tend to sit for? That's a very good question. It can vary. I like to meditate for an hour a day. But at the minimum, A half an hour seems to be a pretty good amount of time. So in other words, An hour a day may not be an hour all at once. It might be a half an hour in the morning and a half an hour in the evening. There's a couple of different things that I like to play with in meditation. And one is, Given time, That I have time, Is to take the meditation off the clock. So I'm not really meditating to a point in time, But I'm meditating more to a particular state within a particular space. And however long that takes is how long that takes. So sometimes, Like you're saying, It can take maybe a half hour. That same space maybe takes a couple hours. Yeah. And what I kind of say to beginners sometimes is there's a tendency, I think in the beginning, You need more discipline. So maybe timing yourself more at first until you find kind of a consistent structured practice. And then it can kind of turn into an intuitive practice more, Like what you're talking about, Where you're at. For example, Remember we had Lynn Manning on the show and she teaches about diet, Intuitive eating. And she mentioned that in the beginning, You need a really good strong structure maybe to get off sugar, To change your diet, Like a very fine-tuned structure. But then after the first month, When you're done with that, Then you could start moving into more of an intuitive space because now your body is not addicted to sugar. If it's addicted to sugar, Then you're going to intuitively think you want sugar, But you're not really in a neutral, Healthy place. So if you're mentally not in a neutral, Healthy place, Then you probably need more discipline at first. And then when you find that, Then you can open it up to wherever you want to go. Right. Well, And like I was saying when I said I sometimes like to take myself off the clock, That minimum really is a half hour, Right? I'm going to sit there at least a half hour. And then I like to sometimes not be tied to the clock. So it is very helpful to use time in that way, Certainly, And I do most, You know, Much of the time. The other thing that I would bring out that you had been, Were talking about in terms of following your attention, Because that is a meditation that I like to teach, Is kind of going into meditation where we experience our attention going all over the place and there's all these distractions. We can very often kind of fight with that because it's like I'm trying to control my attention. I'm trying to, You know, Focus and be in control. And when my attention's bouncing around, It feels like I'm not controlling it. But there's an assumption in that, That I should be controlling it, That that attention is just bouncing around randomly. And I would put forth the idea that perhaps that's not random. Perhaps your attention is going to those places that you need to notice, That you need to reflect on a little bit, Even if it's just momentarily. I may need to reflect on my attention goes to a conversation that happened earlier in the day and I may simply need to notice that I was still in the background processing or thinking about it. And the minute I notice that, My attention will tend to come back to center or to what I'm doing. And then it may be something I need to reflect on more deeply, Like you were saying, Where you have to really sit with it and step back, So to speak, And reflect and say, Okay, What is this telling me? What is, Is there a lesson here for me? Is there an answer I'm subconsciously looking for? I think one of the big steps we grow in the beginning, Yeah, I'm trying just to make myself sit there and I'm trying to do all these things. But as we start to build a practice and grow in meditation, I think one of the things that we can grow into recognizing is that that attention isn't random and I can just sit with an awareness of it and I will get a lot of insight and answers through that process. Yeah. I want to expand on a piece of that. So a lot of times when we first sit down, If we've been watching television, If we've been communicating with other people on our phones, There is kind of like an echo or reverberation of all that information and energy. So maybe the first five minutes there's like a sludge that comes off or 10 minutes or 20 minutes, Depends how much TV you've been watching, How much external input you've been taking in. So there, I do think sometimes there's that sludge. That's my experience too. There's a sludge that comes off. Your mind is still processing the last things you were looking at and taking in and then it starts to still move in other directions and not get still. And I think that's where some of the really gold is, Where you're going to find some of the stuff that you're working on. The other thing that I want to mention, We only have another few minutes here, But I think that one of the cool things about sitting to meditate is you step back from the world. Whether you're a beginner, Intermediate or advanced meditator, You're stepping back from the world for a moment. And you know, Our whole lives are horizontal. So we move forward and backwards, Right? Our roads are horizontal. Everything is horizontal. We don't look up at the stars because there's too much light pollution. We don't touch the earth because we live on cement, Especially if we live in the cities. If you live in a city, You don't see the stars, You don't see the earth. And so you live in this horizontal kind of realm. And when you meditate, I think it opens up an opportunity to go, Oh, Hold on, Let me get a little bit more vertical here. Let me look up at the stars. Almost in an intuitive way with my eyes closed. Let me reconnect with the earth. Almost, Yeah, In an intuitive way. And you start to come out of the world. And I think people who have the ability to step out of the world have a lot more to offer the world. All are great artists and musicians and scientists and inventors. They were able to kind of tap into another dimension of life that wasn't just there physically present in that horizontal space and then come back into that space and share things that would change the world. So I think you'd be surprised how that could happen to you and how quickly and radically it could shift you when you do that. And they say we have an average of 65, 000 thoughts a day, Right? 98% of those are just kind of repetitive mumbo garbage. That's my clinical term. And so to pick out two or three really important validating creative thoughts is like getting a needle in a haystack. It can be difficult because there's so much noise and then we think we're not creative or not special or our thoughts don't matter. And the more you start to meditate, The more that sludge starts to come off and the more your awareness expands, The easier it becomes to go, Oh, There's the one thought that I really need. Sometimes there's this kind of idea in meditation circles that you just should thinking is bad, Not thinking good. Well, For me, That's ridiculous, Right? Because Einstein thought of the theory of relativity and Tesla thought of alternating currents and William Blake thought of his poems. And so thought is a necessary component and interface between two different worlds. And so we want to have really great, Useful, Productive thoughts and minimize the ones that are straining our energy. So if you're just beginning meditating and you're listening to this, Use your meditation as an opportunity to open up to all of that. Because if it's just sitting and watching your breath for seven minutes a day, You're probably not going to continue for very long. So be inspired in whatever way it comes to you. Yeah, I think that's great. I was sorry, I was having a thought. No, I think that's very, Very true that in meditation, That it is an active space of bringing your attention inward and tapping into or connecting with a deeper part of yourself that ultimately is where true creativity, True inspiration flows from. And I think one of the reasons people say thought is bad is because you can't necessarily think your way to that space. It's a place of awareness, It's a place of perception. And in meditation, We're moving out of the thinking mind, And I don't mean the creative thinking mind, I mean that repetitive aspect, The processing mind into opening up, Opening up hopefully and connecting with or awakening to the intuitive mind, The mind that can envision something new and different and be inspired. And then thought arises from there. I think that's the thought you're talking about, That would be the creative, Empowered thought. Yeah, Absolutely. So building a practice is how I like to think of it in terms of my meditation. It is like any art, It's something that frequency is the important thing and giving it a go. Now, I think you're doing a meditation, A retreat coming up, Is that? Yeah, It's not coming up too soon, But we're just announcing it actually. Well, It depends when you listen to this, I guess. Me and a teacher, Taylor Varner, Out of San Diego, We are doing a retreat just south of San Diego, May 18th, Actually. It's a four day retreat on a beautiful, Beautiful lavender farm. So it's going to be yoga, Meditation. You have an in-house chef to make all the food. It's going to be a very nurturing experience. You should come. Yeah, It sounds wonderful. I'm sure we'll be hearing more about that as it gets closer. Yeah, You can be a discount. I'll give you a discount for letting me stay at your house recently. Yeah, I think we're about out of time. But the last thing I would say, If you're starting out in meditation, Find a couple of teachers you like, Find some guidance, Whether in person or over the internet, And find a structure and a practice that suits you because everybody's different. I can't say Zen is the way to go or Vedanta or, You know, Transcendental Meditation. It really depends on your dispositions as a person and what works and doesn't work for you. So you might have to do a little bit of exploring. Thank you so much for sharing, Cody, And everyone for listening. I hope if you are just starting your meditation practice, You really ground into it and really make a shift in your life with it because it's one of the most incredible tools that's been around for thousands of years to really shift someone's consciousness and make a difference. So thank you for listening and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you, Everybody. See you soon. You've been listening to the Energy Matters podcast with Cody Edner and David Gandelman brought to you by intuitivevision. Net and groundedmind. Com. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or Soundcloud. Com.

Reviews

Appreciate these valuable insights for our meditation practice. Thank you🙏

I love the part where you focus on your thoughts instead of trying to get rid of them!

Very helpful, it points to a lot of questions beginners may have, and I particularly enjoy the laid back tone. Thanks!

Find your space!

Meditation takes a willingness and is a practice that allows us to move from the horizontal to a vertical perspective from which Blake like inspiration flows. Thank You !