How Meditation Makes You Better At Life!

In this talk, I go over how meditation can help make you better in all aspects of your life. This is because the practice itself develops certain qualities which are beneficial for your life, both on and off your meditation cushion. According to Shinzen Young in his book "The Science of Enlightenment", these main qualities are: 1. Concentration; 2. Discernment; 3. Equanimity, and 4. Calm. I talk about how these qualities can positively impact your life with specific everyday examples.

Transcript

This is Ish and today I want to talk to you about how meditation can help you make you better at life.

So I was really recently inspired to make this talk after noticing the effects and benefits that meditation has had on my life outside the cushion.

And I was recently reading a really great book by Shinzen Young and the book is called The Science of Enlightenment.

I highly recommend it.

And in this book he talks about the qualities that meditation develops within your practice and also off your cushion as well.

And these qualities are concentration,

Discernment,

Equanimity,

And then as a bonus calm.

So you'll notice that every worthwhile spiritual practice or discipline has these qualities and develops these qualities within you.

So let's just take Vipassana meditation as an example.

So in Vipassana you're focusing on bringing your awareness from everything around you to one singular point within your body and you're training your mind to bring your concentration back to the specific point over and over again and this develops your concentration.

And then the second quality that it develops is discernment which is basically noticing the differences between different sensations within your body and you're also becoming more and more mindful of your responses and different things within yourself and how you are unenlightening yourself.

And that's discernment because you're essentially taking a view of detachment and you're able to detach yourself from the flurry of emotions or sensations within your body.

And also Vipassana trains you to develop equanimity which is being okay with whatever that's going around you.

So this is feeling okay with good sensations in your body and also bad sensations.

So whenever you have an ache or this feeling that doesn't feel good you just notice it without any kind of judgment,

Just observation.

And you can also look at another practice like Zen meditation and the same qualities apply where you're concentrating your mind and even the Shikantaza style of meditation where you're not essentially focusing on anything there's an immense amount of concentration developed within that.

And you're also focusing on discernment so you are focusing on where you're being unenlightened.

So koan's are very good at this where in the Zen tradition you have different poems or riddles which help you get out of your mind and your habitual thought patterns.

And then you have the Zen style of meditation which is very focused on posture so you're going to be sitting upright and you can move so even if your knees are aching and you feel like fidgeting you're trained not to so you're essentially training yourself to be okay with discomfort.

And I can go on and on about different practices that embody this such as yoga and other practices as well but these same principles apply.

So let's see how these qualities can really impact your life.

So for me personally I found that these qualities of concentration,

Discernment,

Equanimity,

And calm have definitely improved over the years of my meditation practice and has affected different parts of my life.

And one example is work.

So as my day job I work as a recruiter so basically I call different people up on the phone and try to see whether they'd be a good fit for a certain position that I'm hiring for.

So I recently started a new recruiting job and I've noticed that my ability to perform well in the job has improved a lot since my previous recruiting role and if you look on paper nothing has really changed since my last recruiting role and the one that I have now.

So I'm essentially using the same tools and doing the same things but I found that because of the qualities developed in meditation I'm able to do a lot better.

So for example I'm able to concentrate my mind and as a result of doing this of having high levels of concentration I'm able to get more work done in less time so that's obviously an added benefit and discernment is also I'm able to kind of piece together how I am failing and doing things that are unproductive because I can now train and have a more self-awareness essentially and then also with the qualities of equanimity and calm with certain jobs where things are just out of your control and things go bad like sales or recruiting or anything that you have where things are bound to go wrong and things are outside your control well then I have a better response to that.

So in the past if I submitted a great candidate and for whatever reason they weren't a good fit so let's just say they found another job or the job closed and they weren't a fit then I would be pretty upset and I'd be disappointed and it'd be a setback which would impact me for let's just say a couple hours.

Well now if that happens I only feel slightly frustrated but I'm able to choose a better response and the gravity or impact of that setback doesn't affect me as much.

So you can see how this practice of meditation can allow me to stay resilient and also stay very productive and focused.

And just to touch upon the second quality bit more of discernment you can see how self-study and exploration of how you function and how you are unenlightening yourself you can see how you can do that.

Well that is a lot helpful in all aspects of your life because if you really think about how much you can accomplish if you don't have self-limiting beliefs or how you're self-sabotaging yourself and this will actually allow you to perform better without not shooting yourself in the foot essentially.

So I gave you an example for work and this practice of meditation can help you in other aspects of your life so if you take relationships meditation can help you become more present in that so this is not only romantic relationships but also social relationships as well because if you think about it you're very mindful and aware and you tend to bring more undivided attention to the person that you're talking to which is always a great thing and especially nowadays people tend to be checking their phones all the time you might be having dinner with someone and they're on their phones or checking their emails or social media and meditation will teach you to bring all your awareness so even if you're with someone and tend to just have a distracted mind the other person can sense and feel that so meditation allows you to become very focused and be with the person 100 percent and that's always a great thing and if you practice something like loving kindness where you're extending compassion and love out to other people this will make you more compassionate and more empathetic as a human being and another added benefit of meditation is you're able to understand how your ego functions and what usually triggers you and what makes you feel more heavy and constricted rather than being very open and aware so you come to a relationship or friendship with with less baggage and that's always very attractive because i don't know if you've ever been around a lot of negative people and that tends to bring your energy down when they're always complaining or feeling very uh like they act like a victim or they are stuck in their own ego patterns so the practice of meditation will help you detach from that and then if we look at another field such as sports we can see how meditation can help you with that namely the constant concentration part the equanimity part and calm and meditation allows you to have a greater mind-body connection so if you're practicing a technique of meditation where you're focusing on the inner sensations you're very much aware of your body that can help you in sports a lot with the mind-body connection and then also you'll tend to fumble less under pressure because oftentimes you have these very peak experiences where there's a lot of high stakes experiences where you have a lot of pressure involved and you have to perform and a lot of people end up like tripping up on themselves and get become very nervous but meditation makes you a bit more calm and able to just act in a spontaneous response so it'll make you very good in high pressure situations and also with meditation you're able to tap into the flow state a lot easier and this is the period of just being completely within your zone and you're not thinking and you're able to just completely act in a high performance situation and another field i'm going to talk about is art so i've also talked in a different talk on how meditation makes you more creative so typically in your sitting in your meditation practice you'll have all these really great and inspiring ideas just pop out out of nowhere and meditation can really foster a period of an atmosphere of creativity and this will obviously help any kind of artist or musician or someone who's in a creative field because you can come up with new possibilities on your cushion and i'll also give you a controversial example of how meditation can make you better in all aspects even the bad parts of your life so if you choose to drink alcohol that's one thing where meditation can actually help you and obviously meditation and alcohol don't really mix because alcohol doesn't really help your spiritual life but if you do decide to drink i have a more you know balanced approach on that and it can actually make you more mindful and enjoy the experience of drinking and you'll typically notice that when some people get very drunk or intoxicated they'll all these like negative ego packages just come up out of the blue you've heard of like the angry drunk or someone who gets really drunk and they just cry about their problems well with meditation it'll actually help you enjoy the feeling of being buzzed but not have all these excess baggage come up so in a way that can actually help you with that and there's actually a 11th or i think it's 11th or 12th century monk named aq and he was a zen monk and he was known to be enlightened but he also used to drink a lot too so that's just one example out there but the main point i'm trying to make is that meditation will help you become better in all aspects because it reduces the intensity of negative situations in your life because you're training yourself to become you can uh bring equanimity to everything around you and in the same time it allows you to enjoy the good experiences in your life because you focus on it and it grows so it meditation is like a container where you can program very good beliefs if you choose to but if not if you still have the bad habits in place you'll tend to enjoy that too but it's better to program some good beliefs so this is why it's also helpful to add some positive actions like gratitude lists and law of attraction techniques such as visualizations so you are on the up and up in life so i hope this helps and inspires you to continue your practice of meditation and just as a recap among many different qualities that meditation develops the main things that shins and young and what i also believe in as well is that meditation develops your concentration it develops your discernment it develops equanimity and then as a byproduct of your practice it also develops calm and these are all very good practices and qualities that affect not just your meditation sitting on the cushion but it also affects all areas in your life and if you bring these specific qualities and all activities it makes you better at that so i hope this helps thank you