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Meditation Hacks For Quieting Your Mind

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Do you have trouble keeping your mind quiet during meditation?

Most meditation systems try to get you to stop thinking during meditation. This is very difficult to do, especially for beginners.

A much better system that I have found to work for me is to instead keep your conscious mind engaged with simple visualizations to keep it occupied during meditation.

Here are some very simple visualizations you can use to keep your conscious mind occupied during meditation:

  1. Start Off With The Elevator

    Start off by closing your eyes and imagining yourself being inside an elevator. Imagine standing in an elevator, facing the door and looking up at the digital display up top which shows the current floor as 50. Now imagine feeling the elevator going down, and watch as the digital display starts to count down from 50 down to 49, 48, 47 all the way down to zero.

    Not only does this keep your conscious mind engaged with the exercise of counting backwards from 50 to 0, but it also puts you into a deeper state.

  2. Enter The White Room

    Once you go all the way down to zero.  Imagine the elevator doors opening and you now see a white room that seems to go on forever.  You step out of the elevator and you’re in a white room with no walls.  The white glow of the room makes you feel safe and welcome and relaxed.

  3. Enter Your Board Room

    Once you’re in the white room, imagine seeing a rather large room ahead of you that has glass walls all around.  It’s a board room with a board room table in the middle and chairs all around.

    Walk into the room, and sit down in the chair at the head of the table.

  4. Invite Others In

    If you prefer, you can imagine inviting others to join you in your board room.  You can invite your mentors in, your friends, family, a pet or pets, a fictional character, or anyone you’d like.  It doesn’t matter if they are alive or passed away, if they are a real person or a fictional character like Yoda.  Feel free to invite anyone in that you like.

  5. You Can Chat With Them

    If you invited anyone into your boardroom, you can have an imaginary conversation with them, or just simply hang out in their presence.

    You could imagine a caterer coming into the room and bringing a delicious lunch for everyone.  It’s totally up to you.

  6. You Can Be Alone

    If you prefer, you could also imagine being in the board room alone.  Just being there quiet with your thoughts, or with some animals. You could make the boardroom table disappear and your chair could become a massaging recliner that gives you a full body massage.  It’s totally up to you.  Just try to make the experience as relaxing and enjoyable as you can.

  7. The Simplified Version

    This type of visualization will keep your mind “busy” enough to get you to stop thinking about your TODO list or the things you forgot to do this morning etc.

    However, if you find this type of visualization too difficult for you to imagine, another simple method of keeping your conscious mind quiet is to imagine a symbol, like for example the infinity symbol and just imagine drawing it out in your mind.

    Imagine drawing the symbol with a pen made out of light, going around in one direction and then coming back in the other direction, and then back again.  Just keep mentally drawing that symbol over and over again ,and as you do this, it will keep your mind occupied.

    You could even time the drawing of the symbol with your breathing, such as make it so that it takes one breath in and out to draw the symbol.

    It doesn’t really matter what symbol you choose to use.  You can pick a symbol, a letter, a word, or even just focus on a sound, but the important thing is to just keep your mind occupied with SOMETHING, while you just sit, breathe, and relax.

    Over time, you may find that your conscious mind just kind of “falls asleep” and no longer needs to be occupied and you’ll then enter this state where you’re awake, and aware, but just not really thinking about anything.

Give it a try and see how it works for you. Leave me a comment below and let me know if you enjoyed this post.

How to Literally Add and Remove Gray Matter From Your Brain With This Simple Exercise

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There’s an exercise that I’ve been doing for about 19 years now, and more actively in the last 10 years or so that a recent Harvard study has shown to correlate with an INCREASE and DECREASE in brain gray matter in certain areas of the brain.

Participants in this study performed a simple exercise for an average of just 27 minutes a day for a period of 8 weeks.

At the end of the study the participants reported reductions in stress, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared to pre-participation responses.

Skeptics may argue, however, that such indicators are somewhat subjective so the Harvard research team went a step further and took pre and post MR images of the participant’s brains so that they could scientifically and objectively analyze if there was any changes to the actual brain.

What they discovered was rather amazing.

Participants who performed this exercise showed increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, the area of the brain known to be important for learning and memory and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.

Furthermore, participants who performed this exercise showed decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that plays an important role in anxiety and stress.

Let me rephrase this in a different way, because sometimes when researchers start throwing weird names like hippocampus and amygdala around, our minds literally shut off and stop listening because we don’t understand the jargon used.

Here’s the much more simplified version of what this study shows in plain English…

Basically… there’s a simple exercise you can do, that can LITERALLY get your body to strengthen the parts of your brain you want to have more “brains” in, like the part of the brain that helps you LEARN and REMEMBER STUFF…. while simultaneously decreasing the strength of the part of your brain that makes you feel ANXIOUS and STRESSED OUT.

Think of it like going to the gym and lifting weights to strengthen your muscles, except with this exercise you strengthen your BRAIN not your muscles.

Have you ever seen that movie called Limitless?

In the movie, the protagonist gets his hands on a new drug that changes his brain and allows him to LEARN FASTER, REMEMBER BETTER and it gives him MORE CONFIDENCE (ie. less stress and anxiety).

Remember that?

Do you remember how awesome that dude become after taking that drug?

He went from being broke, depressed and miserable to being rich, confident and fulfilled.

Now… as far as we know, there’s no such drug out there.  (Although I’m sure someone is working on it. :) )

But follow along for a second here…

… because what I’m trying to explain to you is that you don’t need a drug.

Harvard has proven that we already have the ability to RESHAPE our brains and make them able to learn things faster and to remember better, while simultaneously removing stress and anxiety so that we are more confident.

What Harvard won’t tell us – however – is what this secret exercise is!

I’m just kidding… they reveal the exercise.

It’s something so simple, and so easy, and so common that the majority of people will completely ignore it.

Skeptics may even make fun of you for thinking that this exercise actually does something.

But science doesn’t lie.

The exercise that Harvard got those participants to do was meditation.

Yup… meditation.

Crazy, eh?

I have an incredibly good memory when it comes to remembering things and I’m one of the fastest learners I know.

I’ve also been doing meditation at least a few times a week for 19 years, and almost on a daily basis for the last 10 years.

I journal, and I meditate all the time.

Do you?

Would you like to learn how I do my meditations?

Comment below and let me know.

(Source: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain/ )