Meditation for Busy Minds
Do you want to learn how to deal with stress more effectively?
Do you want to be pushed around by your fears and anxiety, or do you want to learn how to make better decisions?
You can totally do this! Decreased stress and anxiety, better sleep, and lower blood pressure are totally doable. All you have to do is follow this short and sweet guided meditation. Easy!
Check out what one of my busy students said:
“Oh my gosh I I cannot believe how much this has helped me. It's helped me think more clearly. I'm way less anxious…I never thought I could be a person who meditated, but here I am!”
Watch now and get started on a happier life!
Benefits of meditation:
These are just some examples that have been scientifically studied and proven. I chose research studies that had a sample size of 2,000 people or more so that you know you can trust these benefits:
Decrease stress
Decrease pain symptoms, especially related to chronic conditions like fibromyalgia
Reduce blood pressure
Decrease anxiety
Increase attention span
Better sleep
How to pick a meditation technique:
1.Make sure you like the technique; it should feel fun and a bit uplifting
2. Meditation strategy: mindfulness or concentration.
Mindfulness is like paying attention, for example watching your breath come in and out.
Concentration is to focus your mind on one thing, for example a mantra or short phrase you repeat that is uplifting
How to handle distraction during meditation:
Expect distraction. It’s gonna happen and it’s totally normal. Every time you notice you are distracted from your point of awareness and bring yourself back, you just succeeded at meditation!
2. Expect it to be challenging. This may be a new process for you
3. Expect to get emotionally stirred up. Sometimes we need to re-boot our mental computers because there is just too much stuff in our minds. Occasionally feeling unexpected emotions can be part of the process as your mind learns how to discharge old thought patterns, angers, and fears.
4. Look for the benefit of mediation after the practice! During it just let the experience be what it is. Notice how you feel throughout the day or week, that’s where you may notice some shifts.
Full Transcript:
Hello my friends and welcome to the Gita Brown show bringing harmony into everyday life. I love creativity and I love wellness and I've been teaching both for about 30 years. To be creative, t helps if you have a lifestyle full of wellness because that's where your creativity starts. My philosophy is simple and based in classical yoga tradition, simple practices done daily over a long period of time will naturally lead you to a lifestyle full of wellness and from there your creativity can flow. So you can think about today's show as a mini class with Gita. We're going to be talking about meditation and I'm going to take you through first like some myths in meditation. We're going to debunk a lot of those myths. I'm going to tell you my personal journey with meditation, which guaranteed is not always pretty cause it's not always easy. Of course, we're going to talk a little bit about the health benefits and all that good stuff and about halfway in I'm going to guide you through a simple meditation meditation technique you can use anywhere, anytime, and it is clinically proven.
Trust me, my friends clinically proven to work for you. So I love to teach. So I just want to break it down like a lesson for you. And like any good lesson we kind of have to start a little bit big picture first and then we go a little bit smaller in and zero down. Then I give you some personal examples and then we get to the nitty gritty of the technique. So if we zoom way out in meditation for a second, you might have clicked on this one, it's called "meditatio for busy minds," you might be thinking, yes, that is for me, please help!. But you might have some hangups about meditation, right? Most of my yoga students, when we start talking meditation, they look at me like deer in the headlights. It's full on panic time because the thought of like sitting there with no distraction in a quiet room with nothing, but your thoughts can be a little bit terrifying and it can also be super intimidating because you don't actually know how to do it and how to break it down.
But I've been teaching these techniques for, like I said, 30 years and I have literally taught hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people how to meditate. And for my students who have consistently done it over a long period of time, they report to meet all the time via text, phone call, face, FaceTime messages. Um, they send me emails and they're like, Oh my gosh, I cannot believe how much this has helped me. It's helped me think more clearly. I'm way less anxious and the benefits go on and on and on and on. So my point is if my students have done it and if I can do it, you can certainly meditate too. So let me just pump you up a little bit with some of the benefits to meditation. All these benefits I'm going to list out for you right now. Every single one of them has been researched and proven. And I'm not talking small research study with like 12 people.
I chose benefits here that have studies of 2000 people or more involved in this study. So you know that the science has really been run through these and you can really trust these results a little bit. So think about maybe if some of these situations apply to you and how you might feel if these were benefits you experience in your life. What if you had decreased stress? Check meditation can do that for you. Do you have pain on a regular basis, fibromyalgia or any other issue you're going through cancer treatment. You know that meditation done regularly. My friends, not just once, but regularly can decrease your pain symptoms. Isn't that cool? It can decrease your blood pressure, which is phenomenal. You want lower blood pressure, not only because it feels better for your body, but that reduces your chance of stroke. Fantastic. In another study with 2,466 people, they had decreased anxiety.
Anxiety is one of the number one mental health concerns in the United States today. So meditate regularly and you won't necessarily need your medication or it can be a great adjunct to that medication too. It can decrease depression, improve sleep. What else? Oh, increase your attention span. Listen up. Especially if you have add, ADHD or you have children with attention issues. Meditation can absolutely improve concentration and your attention span. And in that particular study, it was only four days of consecutive meditation. People had an increased attention span. Wow. Amazing. What else did I say? Improve sleep. Hello. That's a big one. Control pain on and on and on. I could go on and on, but all of those benefits can be yours. You can improve your life, you can calm your mind, improve your health, and feel all of those benefits starting right now today on the Gita Brown show. Are you excited?
But it's important guys, right? Because a lot of times when we think of meditation, we get like really serious and it's going to be something hard, but we forget to focus on what we're going to get out of it. Because focusing on like those big picture things, feeling better, having less anxiety, having better health. If you stay focused on those benefits, you'll be motivated to do it every day. It will pull you onto that meditation seat until you begin to feel the benefits for yourself. Make sense? So have a little goal kind of in mind for yourself. What are you wanting out of your meditation practice and picture yourself feeling that and that will give you a little traction while you get your daily practice established. So now that I hopefully have pumped you up a little bit and gotten you excited about meditation, I want to tell you a little bit about my own story so that you know that yes, I have struggled with things.
Then we're going to go into a few of the myths about meditation and break 'em on down. So if you're sitting there going, there's no way I can possibly do this. I want to talk directly to you. So for me, I started meditating in high school and luckily I didn't really know what I was doing and there's a huge benefit to being like completely ignorant that something is supposed to be " hard" because I just started buying, this was in the 80s y'all. I had the new age tapes that I got at a new age bookstore up in traverse city, Michigan. I was at Interlochen arts Academy for my junior and senior year of high school. And on the weekends they would take us into traverse city and I go into the bookstore with all the crystals and the incense and I thought it was all kind of weird, but for some reason I gravitated towards a set of meditation tapes. And I bought them and I just put them in and I just listened to them.
And it was the total new age stuff, right? It had like the synthesizer music and like the fake waterfall noise in the background and someone's speaking like this and now you will relax. But I did them and I noticed that like I felt better. And I noticed as a musician, I play the clarinet, I noticed that my music got a little bit better. My days were a little bit easier and my friends laughed at me because I started to try and rope all of them into doing it with me. I bring him over to my dorm room. And we'd lay on the floor and I'd be all serious because I really believed in this. I'm like, it feel so good. And they just couldn't get over like the dippy sounds One of them had like whale sounds in it and a flute, they just couldn't get over like the cheesy soundtrack.
So they would end up just laughing and it was a disaster. But I really liked it and I kinda kept doing that. And along the way then I found some really good teachers, live people, to teach me some more advanced meditation techniques. And then, you know, I grew up, I kept meditating and just kind of kept doing it. But then my life took kind of a downturn. And for those of you who know my story, have listened to other shows, The nutshell version is I married my childhood sweetheart. We met when we were only 12 years old. And we got married in our twenties and along the way he got addicted to drugs and alcoho.l and we went through some really, really dark times prior to our divorce. I really do believe, and know now, that I was watching him drink himself to death. And as you can imagine, that was extremely challenging,.sad.
And it threw everything that I believed about love and life into total chaos. But I had meditation. And meditation in those days was not fun. It was challenging, right? Sitting there with not only what I thought was his darkness, but what I was really sitting with was my own darkness. my own anger, my fear. I had extreme anxiety at the time and I had a real desperate sense that I was losing everything that was valuable to me in the world and that I was losing my sense of self worth. So meditating for me then meant sitting with all those dark emotions instead of pretending like they weren't there or acting like they weren't there, or pointing the finger of blame at him all the time. I actually had to just look inside and recognize that anger was my own, that fear was my own, that anxiety was all of my own. And that was when meditation really actually unlocked for me when it was actually really, really hard.
Now, I know I may not be convincing you right now to try meditation, but think of it this way, my friend. All of that darkness, let's just call it garbage. All that garbage I was carrying around with me was already inside of me. Whether I sat down and meditated or not, I was carrying around anxiety, anger and fear all the time. The meditation just kind of brought it up and stirred it up and gave me an opportunity to develop a different relationship to those difficult emotions. Does that make sense? A lot of times my students look at me when we're meditating. They're like, Oh, but I had all these bad thoughts and then this happened and that happened. The experience wasn't good and they get all caught up in like what comes up to the surface for them in the meditation. Here's the thing, my friend, anything that comes up in meditation is not something that was created by the meditation. That is stuff you are carrying around 24/7 so here's my question for you.
Do you want to carry around that darkness 24/7 and have it unconsciously motivating you and have it kind of pushing you in directions and not even be aware of how those things are making you make decisions for your life. Or do you kind of want to do a little bit of a check-in? And do you want to learn how to deal with that with equanimity? So that you can make decisions for your life that are going to help you move forward. So thankfully for me, I kept meditating all throughout that dark period and I still felt the benefits of the meditation. I was able to move through and make decisions that helped him and to help me end the relationship with the tremendous amount of love and support and caring. And I really do believe, I know for myself, that without meditation it could have been a very different story for the end of the relationship.
I could've continued to blame him instead of embrace him with compassion. And isn't that a nice way to be? So just so you know, I've been there. I know meditation isn't always easy, but now I can really help teach you how to make it easy for you so that you experience the benefits as well as coping with the challenges of it. Okay, so really quick some myths and then we're going to practice. Do you think that your mind has to be quiet while you're meditating? Here's the good news. It doesn't have to be, and I'm going to break all this down for you a minute, but let's just jam through it. You may be thinking, I need to have no thoughts while I'm meditating at all. My mind has to be completely a big blank. While that would be amazing, and if you could do that on your first try, you would probably already be enlightened and you wouldn't need to listen to Miss Gita going on and on about meditation.
Some people think they need to sit on the floor and have special incense, to have special clothes. You don't need any of that sit where you're sitting. No problem. Um, some people think I don't like doing it, which means it's not gonna work for me. Actually, you don't have to like doing it. Most of us don't like flossing or brushing our teeth. It's not like the highlight of our day, but we do it because we know what the benefits going to be. So you just do the practice and you observe the benefits after the practice. Um, and some people say, I don't have time and you have five minutes a day. Get over yourself. Come on. You don't have five minutes a day. You do have five minutes a day. You absolutely do. So let that one go. Please don't tell me you don't have time.
You do. Get real. So how to pick a technique I'm going to give in my podcasts. I'm going to give four techniques. We're going to do one today. How for you to pick a technique, make sure you like it, whatever meditation and do Miss Gita's, you do the app Headspace, which I love and I talk about all the time on the podcast. Make sure you like the technique number one, like it. Number two, if you think about the technique you're using and it makes you feel a little uplifted, like, Oh, like that's a fun toy I could play with. Cool, you're in good shape. There's kind of two kinds of meditation strategies. One is to be mindful and the other one is to work on concentration. So some of my students asked me just the other day, what does mindfulness even mean? Mindfulness means you could think of it like paying attention.
So mindfulness meditation might be sitting and watching your breath come in and out. A concentration. Meditation, on the other hand might be something like repeating a phrase or a mantra, just a phrase that you repeat over and over and letting your concentration focus on that thing. Okay, makes sense. So how to handle distraction during meditation. And then we're going to do one, and I can't wait cause this one that I'm teaching you today is one of my favorite ones. So here's, here's the thing. Expect distraction when you meditate. Number one, expect distraction. It's just normal. Every time you get distracted and meditation and you bring yourself back, you have just had a successful meditation. I'm going to say that again. Every single time you notice like, whoops, I was thinking about what I have to do later today or make dinner or you know, I was thinking about what I have to pick up for the kids or this or that or this or that.
Every time you notice that and bring yourself back, you just succeeded at meditation, so that's a success. It's not a failure. That is such like a relief for most of my students and for me too, cause I get caught on these thought loops sometimes and I got to bring myself back. That's a success. Expected to be challenging. It's normal. This is not a thing that your typical Western person does. Sit quietly and observe their thoughts or their breath. It's going to be challenging. That's totally normal. Like I said earlier, expect to get stirred up. Expect some of that stuff that's in your subconscious to kind of come up. You kind of think of meditation this way, like you know when you're running your computer or your smartphone and there's just like way too many windows open and there's way too many apps open and everything's binging and boom it, and then you notice that like things are moving slower and the computer is kind of laboring.
Sometimes the computer even gets a little bit hot. Okay, you got to close all those windows. You need to shut the computer down, give it about 60 seconds and then reboot. Meditation is a little bit like that, letting all that stuff that's in your subconscious kind of slowly shut down and be dealt with and then you get a little reboot there. It's can stir things up for people. That's a good thing because it means you're getting rid of all of that garbage and rebooting. Look for, here's another little tip. Look for the benefits of meditation after you've meditated during it. Just let the experience be what it's going to be. Some days it'll feel good, some days it feels like total crap. It's just I'm all over the place, but look for the benefits after. Look forward in the rest of the day, the rest of the week. That's where the benefits usually show up.
So the experience itself doesn't have to be you sitting on a lily and meditating with no thoughts. It's just to do the practice itself and that's good enough. So let's do one right now, and I know some of you guys love to listen to this show as a podcast, and a few of you have told me that you're driving. Dude, if you're driving, don't meditate right now. That would be a bad idea. Just like hit pause, listen to something else. But when you get to your destination, do the meditation. It's only going to take five minutes. You can totally do it. And then when you walk into wherever you're going, you've got it. If you're listening on your commute, some of my Boston peeps say they listen to this on the T. You can totally meditate on the T. just do it right now. It's fabulous.
I just don't recommend doing it while operating heavy machinery. Okay. So let me walk you through the steps of how to meditate and you're going to do it right now. First thing is you have to align your posture a little bit, right? If you're kind of sitting all crooked or hunched or slouched over, the energy can't flow and it'll be harder to concentrate. So sitting in a chair is really nice. You can also sit on a couch, but wherever you are, you kind of want to get it so that your knees are over your ankles so that you're comfy and that your shoulders are kind of over your hips. And I love to think of the crown of my head. The top of my head is kind of floating up a little bit, so it's kinda getting taller and taller and your hands can just be kind of relaxed.
Usually palms down on the lap is kinda nice, but just take a moment to kind of sit a little taller, a little more free in the body, and you can kind of wiggle around a little bit. You can kind of let the shoulders relax. You can kind of start to let any tension in the belly draw, maybe tension in the jaw and for this you know you can close your eyes if you or if that's awkward. Just bring your gaze towards the floor and let your vision kind of go a little bit hazy so that you're not really focusing on anything. It's more like a soft focus. The meditation technique we're going to do today is going to be one where we focus on repeating a simple phrase. The phrase we're going to use is ohm shanthi and it's just a word that represents peace, but it also has in it that vibration of peace itself.
So at both points to piece, but by repeating ohm Shanti, you're actually building the vibration of peace in your body. It's just a way to concentrate. You could also choose any other word or phrase that signifies peace to you. So you have your body kinda settled, you have the top of your head is kind of long and free and you just kind of start to really release that stress. The eyes might be closed. I like to close my eyes, helps me focus inwardly rather than outward. And just take maybe three breaths in and out. Take one breath in
and you can sigh out through the mouth to release tension. And then just another inhale in, ah, exhale out, release any stress, any tension. Let the body just kind of relax and then just do one more cleansing breath in. Yeah. Now and you can do this repetition of the mantra either with me out loud or you can just do it mentally the whole time, but just follow along. So you just very simply begin to repeat the mantra and a let your entire awareness focus on the mantra. If there's other thoughts running alongside by saying the mantra, no problem. If your mind wanders, no problem. You just keep bringing it back and back to the mantra again and again.
So you just start by simply saying it aloud. [OM shanthi] the feeling that vibration in the body own. [OM shanthi]sang it out loud as a great way to keep your attention focused on it, particularly if you have a very busy mind. So a few more just verbal repetitions. [OM shanthi], and then you can slowly doing it out loud. And if you like, you can just keep doing what they call lip movements. So it's just like your mouth thing. The word own [OM shanthi] you're still keeping that awareness. I'll keep speaking it and then you just go to just doing it with just the mouth movements. No sound [OM shanthi]
[OM shanthi] now you can drop the movement of the mouth and try some does mental repetitions. I will repeat it mentally and out loud for you to hold that space. After about nine repetitions or so, I'll drop even saying it and we'll just do some repetitions silently together.
[OM shanthi]
[OM shanthi]
[OM shanthi]
[OM shanthi] Shine. The continuing with silent repetition of the mantra. Any time your awareness drifts away, just gently bring it back. Silently. Repeating the mantra. Awareness, resting on the mantra, allowing all the thoughts to be gathered. Joining with the mantra in one stream, few more silent repetition,
slowly ending the repetition of the mantra. Opening your eyes are widening your vision. You can kind of move around a little bit. Just take a breath in and out. Ah, I feel more calm. The vibe here in the studio is calm. So you just meditated. Don't you feel so proud of yourself? Isn't that amazing? And so simple. Can't you see yourself doing that anywhere even for two minutes a day? So my friend, the important thing is that you just pick a technique and you just stick with it. You can grab this podcast anytime you need it and just forward right to the spot where I start guiding the meditation and just let me guide you every day for five days in a row. So that's my challenge for you right now. And your homework, head over to gitabrown.com and drop in the day. You're starting in the comments right there.
Drop in any questions you have, any challenges, anything that I said that wasn't clear because I'm a teacher and I really want to teach you. And I can only teach you if you asked me some questions and we can go back and forth by asking a question there at gitabrown.com you're also helping your fellow students who might be challenged by some of the same things you are. We can kind of share and build our meditation meditation technique that way. So drop a comment over there. Let me know when you're starting, what you're committing to and just any stuff that comes up for you that I can help you with along the way. So please, if you do this type of meditation every day, you will decrease your stress anxiety, improve your health and your wellbeing. If you don't do this, you are going to be still carry around all that garbage that is inside of you.
And you don't want to be like that anymore. You hit play on meditation for busy minds cause you're ready to shift your life, right? So let's shift it together. Let's get meditating. Let's start to spread some of that peace within ourselves and then our to our family, our communities, and to the world because that's how change happens. And then your creativity and your wellness just flow really naturally. So let's end today with a chance for peace. Let's send out this good vibration we created, sent out some peace to the world. This is a chant in Sanskrit from the integral yoga tradition. This is a chant for universal peace. I'll do it in Sanskrit three times and I'll give you the English translation afterwards. You can join me or just listen, whatever feels good.
Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu
May the entire universe , and you my friend, be filled with peace and joy. Love and light. Ohm. Shanti. Peace to you guys. If you liked this, hop on over to gitabrown.com Starting February 2nd of 2020 we're going to have a winter wellness challenge. Seven days of more stuff like this. You can find more there. I've also got a great course relaxation rescue. So if you'd like to just relax for your meditation, you can take that mini course. Lots of great stuff for you there. I'll see you over at gitabrown.com Have a peaceful day. My friends Om Shanti. Peace.
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