Note: This is a guest post by Zane Baker.
Meditation has been an integral part of my life.
For me, meditation made a huge difference in the way I show up to the world!
Growing up and living my entire life in a war zone had wired my brain to think in terms of fight or flight 24/7.
I didn’t realize how my environment conditioned my brain until I migrated to the US.
My first night in the US, I couldn’t fall asleep.
It was too silent. The sound of silence was piercing and my brain started to freak-out.
For the first time in my life, I realized that I have NEVER experienced silence.
Wars, bombs, and being alert was normal to me, and I honestly thought everyone in the world had to deal with this type of stuff.
After a week of no sleep, I finally confided in a friend about my predicament.
He was ex-military and he said, “Zane, giving your past, you most likely have PTSD and this new environment is triggering your brain.”
So in essence, my brain was freaking out in this new environment, literally.
So I freaked out that I couldn’t even fall asleep.
To my dismay, my friend shared that he’s seen it in many soldiers and people who witnessed a lot of trauma. He also shared that here in the US, PTSD usually gets treated with years of therapy and lots of medication.
I appreciated my friend’s advice, but the thought of being on medication and spending years on therapy just didn’t sit well with me.
Me and my freaked out brain was like: “OH HELL TO THE NO!”
And besides, as a newly immigrated alien, I couldn’t afford years of therapy and lots of medication.
So, I turned to the internet and started to search for natural ways to heal PTSD.
Weed was the highest recommended natural way to deal with PTSD on many sites and forums that I searched on. At the time, weed wasn’t even legal in California and for me as a newly immigrated American, doing something illegal wasn’t my first choice to manage my PTSD.
So I kept searching…
Reading forums and looking all over the place has finally paid off when I learned about mindfulness and meditation.
These two practices have really enabled me to take back the steering wheel of my own life.
Mindfulness has enabled me to remain present and aware while I experience life.
And meditation truly helped me get a hold over my hyperactive mind and process and release repetitive thoughts that can be triggered by PTSD.
To this day, I haven’t checked officially to see if I actually have PTSD. And at this point, I really don’t care to know, as meditation has truly healed my overactive mind and enabled me to lead a very transformed life.
Meditation enabled me to calm my overactive mind without judging myself.
I have been meditating daily since 2008 and I don’t think my life would be the same without this magical practice.
Here are the top 5 benefits I experienced in my life since I started meditating:
1. Making decisions clearly
Meditating daily has enabled me to access my higher faculty, I like to call it the God Within. Accessing that part of me has enabled me to make decisions faster and to persevere when things got tough.
We all have within us a superpower that we don’t access due to our very busy and technologically connected life.
I highly encourage you to unplug daily and cultivate a meditative practice.
Accessing my Higher Self often has enabled me to achieve levels of success I couldn’t even imagine before I started meditating.
2. Thinking before acting
Being mindful and present has really helped me to pay attention to my thoughts.
I became more intentional in my conversations.
My communication, verbal or written, was very clear and I hardly had any misunderstandings occur with other people since I started to practice meditation daily.
3. Letting go and releasing negative emotions
My meditation mentor taught me the practice of letting go.
He taught me to allow any thoughts that my mind can think of while meditating to come through. And when they come through to put them in a cloud and release them.
This practice has enabled to start treating my past and any negative emotions and blocks that way, too.
Since I started meditating on a regular basis, I made emotional cleaning part of my ritual during my meditations.
Whenever I am working on a deeply emotional issue, I keep thinking of all the energy behind that issue/situation and imagine all that energy going into a cloud and being released.
This is by far is one of the top favorite benefits I experienced from my meditations.
4. Heightened sense of clarity and intuition
Clearing my mind from the negative chatter and letting go of mental clutter has brought with it the welcome side-effect of heightened clarity.
When you release all that no longer serve you, you open up your intuition.
Not second-guessing myself has allowed me to make some key decisions based on my intuitions that yielded me some amazing dividends.
So are you ready to bring more clarity into your life?
5. Deep rest and deep sleep
I began meditating initially because I wasn’t able to sleep. To my surprise, one of the biggest benefits I gained from meditation was gaining the ability to fall asleep.
I learned how to relax my mind and how to enter the alpha and theta brainwaves. By accessing these waves often, I re-wired my brain and became able to induce sleep on demand if needed.
I have cured my inability to sleep for life. I teach this to all my friends and students when they say they can’t sleep.
To me, meditation now is part of my life.
It’s like bathing and brushing my teeth. I just do it without even thinking.
On my birthday this year, I downloaded the app Calm because I wanted to track my daily meditations. I love that app. I started on Jan 5th and I am on a 234-day streak and counting.
I personally prefer to meditate without any music or guided meditations but Calm’s ability to keep track of my times that I meditated has turned me to a regular user of the app ?
I meditate daily for at least 45 minutes.
Xoxo,
Zane
(You can learn more about Zane’s story here: Meet Zane Baker)
How to Cultivate a Meditation Practice
What’s funny is that Zane and I connected deeply based on our shared love for meditation and all things spiritual.
That’s why we co-created this article.
Now, the question for you is, are you “in-joying” the benefits of meditation?
The key is a REGULAR meditation practice.
You don’t meditate once and some 9th-dimensional light-being appears to clear away all of your problems.
These benefits don’t even happen if you meditate a couple times a month. They emerge out of a regular practice. This means daily, or at the very least a few times per week.
But here’s the disconnect…
Most people never create a regular meditation practice. They think it’s too complicated, too time-consuming, or that it’s just not for them.
Meditation can actually be simple, short and enjoyable for ANYONE. (Especially if you have an effective on-ramp).
That’s why I created the simplest way to cultivate a regular meditation practice. And if you already meditate, it’s the simplest way to deepen your meditation practice.
It’s called the Master Key Meditations.
This is a sequence of 8 guided meditations, to help you cultivate a regular meditation practice.
It’s so simple. All you need to do is press play and BE.
The meditations also build on each other, creating a synergistic effect that helps you deepen your meditation practice.
The Master Key Meditation series is the simplest way to build a regular meditation practice, and as a result, experience all of the amazing benefits of meditation.
Now that you know how powerful meditation truly is, let’s share the message. Just by sharing this article, you get a coupon code for the Master Key Meditations.
If this resonates with you, here’s what you can do:
- Spread the love and share this article
- Get your 22% off coupon for the Master Key Meditations
- In-joy your meditation practice
Much love & many blessings!
Wholeheartedly,
~ Stephen Parato
PS – Here’s the direct link → Master Key Meditations
