1 Mindset Shift to Inspire a Daily Meditation Practice

4 benefits of meditation.

I’ve quit mediation multiple times in my twenty-nine years of life.

Sit crossed-legged with the back of my hands placed on my knees focusing on my breath? Or watch television and scroll through my phone during commercials?

I chose the latter often until meditation wasn’t on the menu of “Things to do When Bored.”

But since I was in middle school, you couldn’t keep me away from lifting weights or playing basketball.

My dad introduced me to weightlifting when I was thirteen years old so I could hit the ball farther in baseball. I was hooked.

The thought I could build my strength and become superhuman motivated me to lift daily, which in retrospect, probably wasn’t healthy for a thirteen-year-old to do.

But my motivation to become stronger dwindled as my aesthetic physique improved. I was always the fat, chubby kid in elementary school. But I lost a lot of weight while exercising and was getting attention from girls for the first time. Could there be any stronger motivator than female attention to a teenager?

I made the basketball team in eighth grade and lost even more weight. From eighth grade to senior year of high school, I played basketball every day.

Yes. Every day.

I was obsessed with the sport. I didn’t miss a Laker game and Kobe is (not was) my idol. I truly believed if I worked hard enough, I could get a college scholarship.

Life had different plans. After senior year, I prioritized weight lifting and went to the gym six days a week (only taking Sunday off), and finally got a six-pack.

Currently, I don’t lift as much because my values have shifted. From teenage years to late twenties, my aesthetic and love of the game of basketball inspired my daily exercise.

Today, five months before thirty, overall health and well-being are at the forefront of my goals. I do yoga, foam roll, and use a massage gun daily.

And yes, I do what I couldn’t do through the first twenty-nine years of life — meditate.

We Need a Reason Why

“He who has a why can bear almost any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Humans have a reason for everything we do.

We work to pay the bills. We eat when we’re hungry. We sleep when we’re tired. We distract ourselves with people, parties, television, and smartphones to decompress or run away from our problems. We have sex to recreate life (and relieve horniness).

We do every activity in our life because we believe it will benefit us in some way. Otherwise, why would we do it?

I could never stick to meditating because I didn’t understand how it could benefit my life. But after years of research and implementation, here are the 4 benefits of mediation that motivated me to practice daily:

1.Heal Trauma

“As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are ‘Notice that’ and ‘What happens next?’ Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.” — Bessel A. van der Kolk

Mr. van der Kolk is the author of The Body Keeps the Score — the prominent piece of literature therapists, psychiatrists, and the everyday human refers to to understand the biology of trauma and how to heal it.

In the book, he notes that yoga and meditation were the only two modalities that reduced the negative effects of trauma such as anxiety, phobias, low self-esteem, unhealthy relationships, and addiction.

Mr. van der Kolk’s work was the reason I began a consistent yoga and mediation practice because trauma is the invisible disease that controls human cognition and behavior.

And trauma isn’t limited to rape victims and war veterans. A disapproving comment from a parent, unrealistic values set by society, and misinformation from social media and influencers could inject shame into your soul.

In other words, we all have some sort of unhealed trauma. So a daily yoga or meditation practice will benefit you regardless of your age, the color of your skin, and what has (or hasn’t) happened to you in your life’s journey.

2.Self-Discovery

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” — Aristotle

Isolation and disconnection to others have increased due to COVID. I haven’t seen my closest family members in almost a year. And I’ve only seen my newborn nephew a handful of times since he was born five months ago.

But physical disconnection was rampant before COVID. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness were global issues before the invisible disease because we are disconnected from the most important person in the world — ourselves.

Teal Swan — a famous spiritual teacher with nearly one million Youtube subscribers — recommends a practice called integration to help facilitate self-awareness, knowledge, and connection. Integration also eliminates shame, reduces anxiety and depression, and improves overall well-being because integration is another form of unconditional self-acceptance.

She uses mediation to practice integration. She recommends sitting with yourself and consciously accepting all that is you: your fears, your worries, your aspirations and dreams, and the feelings in your body.

“Are you mediating to tone down or to really let your feelings speak to you about the personal truth contained in them?” — Teal Swan

3.Stress Reduction

Cortisol is the stress hormone that disrupts our cognition, ability to fall asleep, increases depression and anxiety and inflammation that triggers the growth of cancerous cells (1).

Cortisol also affects the physical body. It increases irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia.

An 8-week mindfulness meditation program reduced and eliminated many of the mentioned effects of stress and cortisol (2).

4.Lengthens Attention Span

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Heminway

I want to become a full-time writer.

To achieve my goal, I have to write, a lot. And not the feeling or belief of faux writing many words — the misperception that one has done more work than they really have.

I used to be a faux volume writer. I’d write for four to six hours and look at what I accomplished and realize it wasn’t much.

“Why or how do you write for hours but get little down?”

I was distracted. My fifteen-minute breaks turned into hour-long sessions of swiping, watching Youtube, and impulse buying non-essential items from Amazon.

I was tired at the end of the day, but not because of the amount of writing I accomplished. But because humans get tired as day becomes night.

Today, I can genuinely say I write, a lot. I don’t check my phone; I have it face down. I only take breaks to eat, shower, exercise, do yoga, and you guessed it — meditate.

Meditation has improved my ability to focus. But don’t just take my word for it. Studies prove my experience.

One study found that meditating for only 13 minutes a day for 8 weeks increases focus time and memory (3).

Types of Meditation

There are many forms of meditation. List includes:

• Mindfulness
• Transcendental
• Mantra
• Vipassana
• Chakra
• Focused Attention
• Body Scan
• Loving Kindness

I treat meditation like lifting weights. I know exactly what muscle (or muscles) I’m trying to hit and grow and I do the same exercises every time.

Or you can say I have a focused intent or purpose driving my exercise choice.

I have the same intent with mediation. I use meditation to release tension and trauma from the body and to practice integration.

I have two forms of mediation I like to use to accomplish the previously mentioned goals of meditation. I pick one or the other (or both) depending on how I’m feeling. The two forms I use are:

1.Breathe Work

I have a designated number of breaths, similar to reps of an exercise at the gym. I often do 20 — sometimes more, sometimes less.

As I inhale, I’m scanning my body for tension and directing my breathe in designated spots, imagining my breath breaking the tension.

As I exhale, I figuratively and physically push the tension from my body.

As I inhale, I bring the palms of my hands up, no further than my sternum. As I exhale, I flip my hands around, palms facing away from my body, and push the tension out like a bench press.

2.Integration

I designate a specific period of time — usually 5–10 minutes.

During this time, I’m aware of any thought or feeling that I have and I tell myself “it’s OK. That thought, that feeling, is normal. Breath. Relax. Everything’s going to be OK.”

As I tell myself self-compassionate and kind words, I’m also breathing into any tension in my body and relaxing it (without the hand/palm movement from the previous form).

Final Thoughts

Life is short.

So, yes, you could scroll through your Instagram feed or watch the newest Netflix show instead of meditating.

The former will keep you entertained.

The latter will decrease stress, heal trauma, increase self-knowledge and attention span which will improve your professional and personal life.

But I digress.

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