How To Achieve Meditative States (For People Who Find Meditation Tricky)

Some people don't like meditating and find it hard, stressful or frustrating. This method works well and you dont need to be all serious and weird about it. Anyone can do it and you can get great results quickly too, your body and brain want to go into that quiet state for a bit, feels good.

Richard Grannon is a psychologist specializing in CPTSD and trauma recovery. Richard is helping people to call their self back into being with psychology and philosophy through his YT channel since 2012.

Transcript

Guided meditation or a guidance into meditation or a guidance into not meditation But just sitting still for a little bit and letting your mind calm down and see what happens Okay. So the first thing is the physical I like to have my hands touching in the Zen tradition I was raised with we did that we don't have to do that. You can just do this or this I like to have them touching them crossed on top of each other feet flat on the floor back as straight as you can if you can support your own back you should as they're I think the Yiking suggests when you unify your breath with your thought and straighten the back your ego disappears just like that just like that I thought it took 10 lifetimes apparently it doesn't who knows let's give it a go so back straight feet on the floor no particular breathing style I think just do I like to do it as I just like to sort of notice my breathing maybe I'm breathing a little bit more deeply a little bit more smoothly a little bit more consciously but I'm sort of feeling like I'm letting the breath breathe itself and I just I'm present to the breath breathing itself and very quickly from just sitting still and becoming aware of the breath breathing itself I can feel my mental state my emotional and somatic state shift very rapidly it doesn't take a long time I think I think our bodies and our minds they want this really they want to go into this state of relaxed concentrated awareness it feels good I'm trying to remember what I'm supposed to tell you but I'm enjoying myself so you bring your attention to your body just gently just how do your feet feel how do your hands feel keeping your spine straight and your chest up your heart forward breathing but nothing weird just let the breath breathe itself by being in the body of course and noticing the breath of course you already know this it's a little trick if I say be present to the moment you might think oh that sounds a bit hard bit tricky but if you just sat still with your hands in your lap your feet on the floor gently breathing and noticing your body of course you can't do that and not be in the present moment it's magnetic it draws you to the present moment then when I've gone through those steps what I like to do to go through my next steps to get into a deeper state is I remind myself to listen not just with my ears but with my whole being in this way we can we can yin the mind we can yin the being we can yin our state so we can go from yang and projecting forward into our future and being busy and conquering the world which is good to being awake but yin and receiving and being pregnant with our own potential and letting that pregnancy grow and being patient so you don't just get half an idea and impotently squirt it out suddenly all my metaphors have become about sex and reproduction you hold it and yin is not emptiness yin is pure potential sometimes translated as chaos because when things have no form they could be anything and that is perceived by some people as chaos but I prefer to think of it as pure potential and you become pregnant for a moment with your own potential in an alchemical sense in a tarot sense we are become the cop and we stop wandering meaning we stop slapping reality around with our big yang stick making demands shouting our opinions and preferences let me take a little bath take a little break go into the cave and yin breathe a little bit more deeply only as deeply as feels pleasurable to you you enjoy it you're young your youngs are the yin are the lin your lungs are also yin fill them listen release the breath enjoy the moment let the energy of appreciation come into the moment and gratitude enjoy this holding this moment just as is don't try to stop the thought that the thoughts run observe them like a stream bubbles in a stream they splash by let the space between the thoughts grow if you want to relax and go deeper you can it's not necessary as much as you need to keep it organic keep it natural keep it pleasant don't make it some weird thing you just sat still really just enjoying sitting still what you doing I'm sitting still what are you thinking about not much to be honest not much what for it's quite nice what are you doing I'm being a cop yang off you can enjoy the words and you can enjoy the not words the space between the notes grows and in that space that's where the presence can enter turns my kind of called the felt presence of being I felt presence of being become aware of time passing breathing relax for some people the silence can be scary because makes them feel alone but you know this is easy silence is your friend and the empty space is your friend and this is where you can relax from where you can heal it's not really meditating it's just cooling the mind let the engine cool down give it space to breathe to digest to be patient to gestate thoughts and emotions and process them properly maybe all of our emotional trauma problems are really a problem of digestion I'm trying to rush out because we don't like the meal and we get indigestion very puke II give his face system can work very well it was around long before you were born it will be around long after we've all gone I'm far from being something that frightens you that should be something gives you a lot of relief you are thank God it's not on me that's right it always was and it always will be I just passing through breathe more deeply as you are enjoying that listen come to your body say hello buddy notice that notice yourself noticing her observe the fact that you can observe things observe yourself observing and if you observe yourself observing that you're observing you'll notice that at this point a lot of your identity starts to fall away because I'm so busy noticing that I'm observing that I'm observing that I can observe it's like I become pure observance itself and all our identity politics stuff is just kind of just kind of fades away and you can break down the boundaries between you and your washing machine okay at this point some people will be feeling me the presence a little stronger I know I am and you can let yourself merge with that the full presence of being it's from within you and it comes from without you from outside of you as well and it will be looking to merge with you I think when people get scared of meditation and mindfulness it's because they're probably doing it correctly and the presence arrives and they think oh no I'm going to disintegrate don't worry you are but just a little and it will be pleasant and you'll go right back to being you afterwards how's wonderful is that may or may not be allow yourself to merge with the present become aware of time the present says time but you'll notice the presence is all around you it's fluid and it's time but it's time that's stopped or at least it seems to have stopped it hasn't stopped it only seems to have stopped because for a few seconds we're in the eye of the storm the storm of time the eye of the storm of time is now now now now now now that we've experienced a little bit of presence we've let ourselves sit in the present moment and full nowness can be quite intense it's also a way of letting your ego to sense a great which means that you should be able to expand your consciousness outward and you'll find that the gap between you and other things has temporarily disappeared push out a little bit further and you'll see that you are this and that this is you push out from within time from this moment outward outward outward look for the thing that is not you you won't find out it's all you so inside of 14 and a half minutes we've disintegrated our ego and we've experienced if only for a few seconds unity consciousness and the felt presence of being open your eyes actually it was 17 minutes I lost time so there's really nothing more to it than that that's the way I take myself through it I don't really do it for a set period of time I do it for as long as seems pleasant you know feels good and I just enjoy the experience these things that are presented to us has been like you know up there out there foreign exotic ancient not of now they're not that big of a deal the solution of your ego practice this seven days in a row and dissolution of the ego you'll begin to feel the beginnings of that inside of a three-minute meditation if you just talk yourself down in the way that I said get the right stance the right posture become aware of your breathing listen and then allow the space between your thoughts to extend a little bit you don't switch your thoughts off that's like a perfectionist state I don't even know if they really do that they could be blagging us how would we know and then the ego starts to dissolve not long after that if you continue to listen and you do you're listening in a state of appreciation and gratitude and you're enjoying it you're like I'm holding the moment and this feels good and the felt presence of being will arise and it's it's very distinct you know when it's there it's like it's like walking into an energy field and it's right there it's intense from there you sit with that you breathe into that listen to that then we seek to break the time bind we come into the now the eye of the storm the apocalypse the ever-revealing moment that's where people I think I really scared I mean the felt presence of being is a bit scary at first because like wow that feels alien but the really scary thing is to come into now because there's no it sort of presents us with well the apocalypse that's the horror of the apocalypse it's right there it's right here I'm in it it's unfolding right now and you're moving beyond words but from there as I said inside of 17 minutes you can start looking at experiencing unity consciousness Oh lofty goal ten years of meditation no 17 minutes will do it you've started to experience it you're like oh I'm expanding my consciousness outward and I'm looking for that which is not me and I can't find anything that isn't me I'm not coming across anything and going oh that's definitely not me it's all me and I'm all that and that is all me and we are all one unity consciousness I mean if you walked around as there for an hour on a busy Sunday afternoon with loads of chaos and kids screaming and people blowing their noses on you and you still maintain that that would be something pretty special I think that's what the higher level dudes and dudettes do but that's because they've been doing it for years so even in rubbish surroundings or annoying surroundings they can maintain that but for the rest of us normal folks accessing a meditative state shouldn't be something weird and it shouldn't be something painful or torturous or or fetishized it's right there your body and your brain hopefully everybody who's done this will have found out to be quite pleasant it's a it's not it's not a hardship go back and do it again see if you can remember it and do it without any guidance and see how you get on play with it it's yours ladies and gentlemen thank you for your time and your attention and I look forward to speaking again soon Cheers

Reviews

Fabulous. I love your candor, your voice, your simultaneous deep regard and disarming playfulness. Well done.