Debunking the 5 Most Common Meditation Myths | Light Watkins | TEDxVeniceBeach

raise your hand if you have meditated with success a lot of hands draw okay let's just be honest meditation has a huge image problem and I've been in the meditation space for about 15 years starting off as a practitioner and then I apprenticed my teacher my meditation master for many years and for the last eight years I have been traveling around the world to different cities teaching people from all walks of life the basic mechanics the the physiology and the biology of meditation and the general consensus is my life would definitely be better if I meditate it but it's too hard I can't quiet my mind I can't sit still long enough I don't have the time so I want to shed some light onto what I feel are the five most common meditation myths in our society and I want to give you guys some tips that will help make your meditation practice instantly more enjoyable and I want to show you how you can use meditation to literally create more time to be more productive and of course to change the world but first I want you to close your eyes and I want you to imagine in your mind's eye a white polar bear and hold your attention on this white polar bear in your imagination and then open the eyes okay raise your hand if you got distracted and you thought about something other than a white polar bear at any time now that was about half the room close your eyes again and this time I want you to let your mind roam free and you can think about anything you want to think about as long as it's not about a white polar bear whatever you do do not think about a white polar bear it's very important go okay open your eyes raise your hand if you accidentally thought about a white polar bear raise your other hand if you thought about it a lot almost everyone and that brings us to our first myth that I want to talk about which is that I'm a bad meditator if I can't quiet my mind now that white polar bear experiment that we just did was an actual study that was conducted by a Harvard psychologist who wanted to see is it possible to suppress certain thoughts except they didn't sit for a few seconds they sat for five minutes trying to focus on the white polar bear and then for another five minutes trying not to think about the white polar bear and just like you when they weren't supposed to be thinking about the white polar bear they ended up thinking about it a lot and some of them were bordering on obsession that's all they could think about what's the white polar bear and the conclusion from this study was twofold number one if you focus on anything after about five or six seconds your mind is going to naturally get diverted to another unrelated thought and number two if you try to suppress your thoughts guess what's going to happen you're going to end up creating more of the thought you don't want to have so suppressing the thoughts does not lead to a very positive meditation experience now what they started studying at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology are these styles of meditation called non-directive meditation techniques these are actually very old meditation techniques but they've just started studying them and these styles of meditation aren't using the white polar bear method of suppression instead those meditators are allowed to let their minds drift and wander from one thought to the next and and what they found was that when you allow your mind to wander from one thought to the next you actually get to a very high degree of mental and emotional processing the other thing they found is very interesting that a wandering mind leads to a rested mind you activate this rest Network that can actually get your mind and your body into a state of rest that's deeper than the one you get when you're sleeping at night so sitting comfortably and letting the mind wander is actually going to not only cause your body to rest but it's gonna bring a high level of orderliness and efficiency to your mind so the thoughts you're having aren't obstacles to your meditation they're symptomatic of your mind actually working on autopilot through the problems that you're having in your life the next myth I wanted to dispel is this whole idea that there's no correct way to meditate we've all heard that before and it's a bit tricky because I believe that all meditations lead to the same goal which is greater sense of inner peace and happiness but there are definitely best practices that will allow your daily meditation to feel a lot easier and easy again is a subjective term but here's what I mean I'm going to tell you a little story just to illustrate this and I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit this but I didn't learn how to swim until about nine years ago long story short I was hanging out on a beach with five women and we were surrounded by these volcanic rocks and they wanted to go skinny-dipping and I was single at the time so this was like a golden opportunity for me except I couldn't swim and there was no easy entrance point to the water so I had a dilemma on my hands and because I was afraid to admit that I couldn't swim my response to that suggestion was oh I'll just hang back and watch your clothes and so needless to say the next day I signed up for swimming lessons and I go to the pool and the coach asked me to swim across the 25 metre pool and I get in and I start doing my best impression of what I think a swimmer looks like except I was just dragging through the water and then I got about 5 meters out I started taking water in I could barely breathe and this twelve-year-old lifeguard almost had to jump into the pool to save me and I was able to luckily get to the side of the pool before that happened but the teacher took me to the side and she says you know you actually have the perfect body for swimming you just need to get longer and you need to torque your body like this and you need to kick like that you need to make sure you're breathing in this way and she was teaching me the basic mechanics of the Freestyle stroke and when I'm teaching meditation and I asked someone to show me what how have you been meditating and what they do is they do their best impersonation of a monk right they sit on the floor with their legs crossed they bring their fingers together they don't know why they just do it and there's you could see their brow crinkling up here they're just straining and I'm not saying that this is an incorrect way to meditate before for beginner your meditation experience is gonna seem like my swimming experience you're just gonna be dragging yourself through your thoughts and it's not unusual for someone to come out of that experience feeling like meditation is too hard it's not for me so instead of sitting like this I encourage people to sit like this sit comfortably have your back supported use pillows and what you find is that your body is not a distraction to the process so if you're brand new at meditation you want to sit like you're watching your favorite television show and then if you employ those mental techniques of allowing the mind to wander and drift you're gonna have experiences that are a hundredfold easier than anything you've had before then you just have to do it consistently enough which brings me to the next point I don't have time to meditate all right you've heard this one a lot there's only one activity that I'm aware of that will actually refund you back the time you spent doing it and that's daily meditation here's what I mean we all have a chronological age and we have a biological age your chronological age of course advances once every 12 months your biological age speeds up or slows down based on how much stress you have in the body this is a picture of my personal hero dr. Martin Luther King jr. this photo was taken during his last speech the mountaintop speech which was the day before he was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee he was 39 years old in this picture and when they did the autopsy on his body famously they said if we didn't know that was dr. King we would have thought that was the body of a 60 year old man all the stress and the pressure he was under aged his body nearly 20 years more than his chronological age and what's come to light recently in the last 30 years or so is that meditation has a reversal effect on biological aging there was a study that was published in the International Journal of Neuroscience showing that if you had a matching chronological and biological age on your 30th birthday and you started meditating daily by the time you were 35 you had the skin elasticity and the sexual responsiveness and the auditory threshold and the vision and the memory of a 23 year old version of yourself in other words your biological age was 7 years younger than you were when you started meditating so saying I don't have time to meditate it's kind of like saying I don't have time to file my tax refund where I was going to get back half of the money that I paid out the next one is meditation will solve all of my problems you've seen these people running around and evangelizing about meditation and I'm going to contour dick myself here for a moment because if you dig deep enough you can find all kinds of studies and claims showing that meditation does all wonderful things like reversing your biological aging and resting your mind and body and there's studies that show meditation will help you curb your chocolate cravings it'll help you drive better it'll give you mind-blowing sex experiences it will help you win the Super Bowl apparently and there's a lot of correlation here but we're kind of light on causation in my personal opinion the problem with these kinds of studies to me is that it's not possible to weigh all of the variables that were involved in a particular study there's one study that gets cited a lot in meditation circles and I've cited it before myself and it involves meditators showing up to a lab room getting connected to electrodes right now a lot of you guys meditate imagine you show up to this lab they have you take off your street clothes put on hospital gown you go sit down in a chair it's a steel folding chair it has a hole on it and then they connect electrodes to your scalp and then they put a gas mask analysis machine over your nose in your mouth to measure for oxygen consumption and then they put an ocular gram on your eye to measure for eye movement and then they put a reference point on your earlobe and then they put a cardiogram on your heart to measure for heart rate activity and then they stick a catheter in your arm to take blood samples while you're meditating and the other palm they put a galvanic skin response device to measure for sweat and then you feel some petroleum jelly underneath your butt and they take a wreck little monitor and they slide that up into your butt it's a measure for body temperature because all the other officers are being used for some other kind of measurement and then they tell you okay relax and meditate of course everybody who is in that study reported having horrible meditation experiences and you would have to and I would have as well but what was interesting is that when they looked at the meta-analysis from that study and they saw the results in their physiology they actually had very positive changes and they ended up coining this term from this study called the relaxation response which gets cited a lot when people talk about the benefits of meditation the next one is success in meditation is based on the stillness of my mind right meditating successfully has nothing to do with how still your mind becomes so you just need to get that thought out of your head now nobody got that huh okay how do you gauge progress in meditation if I'm sitting in meditation I'm having all these thoughts how do I know I'm successful with meditation a lot of the times you won't know you're successful until someone else realizes it in you first there was a woman that I taught to meditate back in New York City and she was in her 40s she's a lawyer very type-a personality and she came to me and I gave her everything she needed to be self-sufficient and I told her with time and with practice you're gonna have some positive changes which is all I ever tell people because I don't know what's gonna happen to them but I know that whatever happens to them is gonna be amazing so she goes away she comes back a year later and I'm teaching another group of people to meditate and I get to the part about the positive changes and she lays into me and she says like I came here a year ago I've been meditating every single day I haven't noticed any positive changes I don't think meditation is working for me and I said you know I'm sure some positive things are happening in your life but a lot of the times you won't see it first and by this besides that we don't know what's being prevented because you're meditating and that needs to be considered as well and so she leaves a bit disappointed and she sends me this email six months later and she says light I have this story too I think you'll find very funny I was out to dinner with my husband recently and we got into one of our regular arguments where I was right and he was wrong you know the usual and I was just able to let it go and continue enjoying my meal and then about 20 minutes later when he was sure that the argument was dead and buried he said honey three months ago if we had an argument like that you would have left me in the restaurant and now you were just able to let it go he said I think that meditations working so that's how we wanted to find success in meditation how much more adaptable are you being in your life and meditation is going to cause that that little gap that little moment that breath that you take just before you were gonna honk the horn or that moment of reflection just before you were going to say that thing that you would have regretted five minutes later my teacher says you know never miss a golden opportunity to keep your mouth shut so let's do this everybody let's close your eyes one more time and I want you to just kind of settle in and just start to notice your breathing very gently you don't have to control it just notice it and I want you to expect your mind to wander off at some point to some other thought maybe about the chair about your body about the time or something you're gonna do later on tonight and when you are aware that you've wandered you just gently come back to noticing your breathing all right slowly open your eyes isn't that so much easier than fighting the mind and doing the whole white polar bear thing in meditation literally just ten minutes for that ten minutes every morning and you will refund back some of that wear and tear on your body and you will bring more orderliness and efficiency to your mind and you will cultivate inner peace and happiness and you will feed that out into the collective consciousness we don't live in isolation so however we're feeling inside is gonna ripple out through our universe through our community and so that's our personal individual responsibility every single day we're feeding something out into the collective and my message to you is just to let that be peace let that be happiness let that be the highest expression of yourself thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 904,086

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Behavior, Consciousness, Decision making, Happiness, Life, Life Development, Life Hack, Meditation, Mental health, Mindfulness, Personal growth, Success, Teaching, Visualization

Id: Xco3UjLLvGo

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2015