What is meditation?
There are many types of meditation. One way to meditate is simply having quiet time with yourself to make sense of your experiences, especially difficult ones. When you take a break to sit down quietly and allowing yourself to experience your thoughts and emotions without judgment – that’s mindfulness meditation. Just allowing, experiencing and most of all accepting whatever it is you’re going through.
We know that repressing emotions can be detrimental to our physical and mental health. There is scientific proof of this. Here’s a scary finding published by the International Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research:
Studies demonstrated that individuals who repress their emotions also suppress their body’s immunity, making them more vulnerable to a variety of illnesses ranging from common colds to cancer. Individuals who mask and deny their inward feelings, or outwardly vent their emotions, characteristically suffer most. Other findings have demonstrated that patients with cancer chronically mask their experiences and feelings and are more liable to die despite treatments compared to expressive patients.
Meditation and acceptance
Self-acceptance is one of the best outcomes we can hope for in meditation. Rather than feeling anxious or fearful of what we are going through, by observing without judgment, we learn to accept things as they are, which as it turns out, may not be as horrible as we make it out to be.
We often create stories in our minds. We dramatize events. We label people. We judge everyone around us and worse of all, we judge ourselves. When you meditate, it helps quiet down the voices of the “judge” and the “victim.”
Try it for yourself. Be the observer of your mind. Listen for the voices of the judge and the victim. See how you may refrain from these voices. As we let our emotions and thoughts come out as they are, we avoid repressing them. Instead, we listen and we hope to catch a glimpse of the truth – which is often very simple and far less dramatic than our incessant thoughts make it out to be.
In this way, we learn to accept things the way they are which liberates us from so much unnecessary heartache. Similarly, we make peace with ourselves as we embrace our worldview and in essence, our self-identity.
Be a warrior
Acceptance does not mean defeat or apathy. It means seeing clearly from a place of calm and clarity. In such a frame of mind, we gain a sense of knowing. This means, knowing when to act and knowing when to let go.
Don Miguel Ruiz says “The big difference between a warrior and a victim is that the victim represses and the warrior refrains.”
Meditating on your thoughts and emotions allows you to nudge the judge and the victim in your head. Not in a way of fighting them off, but in a way of recognizing them and seeing them as voices that no longer serve you. Therefore you can let them go. Gently nudge them out of your experience.
Rather than being a victim, you can be a warrior. This is how meditation can help shift your perspective. By observing your mind, you learn to refrain from fear-based actions and emotions. Instead you become a warrior and you take a stance in being comfortable with who you are and genuinely expressing yourself from a place of calm, clarity and compassion.
As a warrior, you can easily ward off not only the judges and the victims in your head, but in real life also.
What is freedom of thought?
Meditation is not all serious. You can use that quiet time to let your mind wander. Exercise your freedom of thought. Let your imagination go wild. Let go of the dramatic stories where you think the world is unfair and everyone is out to get you. That’s an old story.
Instead, think forward. Create a new story. Do you often find yourself the victim? What if you can be your own hero? Of course you can. Who’s to stop you? You have freedom of thought. If you keep thinking forward and imagining a more desirable future, not only is it fun, you are literally creating new neurological pathways in your brain. You are creating possibilities. You’re not just wishing. You are invoking. How fun is that?
Albert Einstein says “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Sit down and be still. Meditate to gain clarity and to spark your imagination. This gives you the freedom to see more than what is in front of you. Like Einstein says, imagination widens your perspective, you see more of the world – more of “what could be” rather than just a limited perspective of “what is.”
You have freedom of thought. It’s one of the best gifts of being human. You can play the victim or the judge or you can be the heroine of your own story. Choose wisely.