Today I'm going to talk about why I no longer meditate and some of the reasons why I think meditation, is not necessarily the best thing, for people to be doing. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but I think after a while it can lead you to just be looping and not really make any real progress.

in your development of your consciousness So I had been meditating probably on and off for the past 10 years, maybe a little less, but probably 10 years. sometimes I was a little more consistent. Other times I had not been as consistent, but it's something that,

I've done over the past, like I said, 10 years I've definitely seen benefits from doing it.

But at the same time, when I look back it hasn't really led me to as much expansion as I would have thought. I think meditation can be a good. way to maybe take a break from the chaos of the world Definitely has its benefits But a lot of times The way you're taught to meditate or how you meditate, you end up just looping in your thoughts or just going down a bunch of different thought streams and never truly quieting your mind or having your mind be still and being. Present in your body and bringing your mind into your body.

Which is a really hard thing to do. something that I've, over the last couple months, have just started to practice and work on. Through this school and program that I joined with The Higher Ideal. It was run by a guy named Brian and the program that I first started was called Immortal Mind, which teaches you a sitting practice which is what I do now.

I do a sitting practice, not a meditation. and the sitting practice. You are learning to really sharpen and focus your attention and your mind to go into your body and absorb into your body to not feed your mind with thoughts.

So you're. Doing exercise to learn how your mind creates thoughts and be able to catch yourself when your mind starts to populate these thought forms so you don't take these thought forms and go down into thought streams which for example, you have a thought and then you start thinking about it and then five minutes later.

You realize you've been lost in this thought for the last five minutes. Not realizing you've been lost in this thought. And then you finally catch yourself and you're like, Oh my God, I've been thinking about this for five minutes. And then another thought comes up and then you get lost in that thought and then that thought.

So this sitting practice is to train yourself to just focus on what you are doing in the moment for a moment to moment. So if you're sitting, all you're focusing on is sitting and bringing your body, Bringing your mind in to your body, not to a localized point, learn to expand your mind throughout your body.

And there's different practices where you learn to expand it. You start as localizing and then working and expanding it through your whole body. But it starts with When you have a thought, you just say to yourself, I don't need to think about this, all I'm doing is while this is training your mind to not engage in other thoughts, and eventually you drop that, and you can start to feel this fluidity in your mind and body of when thoughts are starting to populate, and you can redirect your focus attention to just sitting. it is a simple concept, but it is very difficult to do.

And, it's basically like building a muscle, so the more you practice it, the better you get. I don't think meditation, or most meditations, are teaching people how to do this. Or even how people meditate, they're not doing this, they're just like, I'm just going to sit, close my eyes and just drift off into space and let my mind go where my mind's going to go.

Which again is not necessarily a bad thing, but you're not going to develop the skills to harness that clear and concise focus and attention to allow your consciousness to expand in a way. where you can

grow and make your life in ways easier.

for me, some things that I have noticed since I've started doing this practice and things I've started implementing is, for example, like when I'd be doing stuff for work, I'd always have to find a podcast to listen to or some music to listen to, which is just another way for my mind to feed and distract itself.

From fully being focused on the task at hand. So now when I'm doing work, I don't put on a podcast. I don't listen to music. I sit down and I do the work that I need to do, and I get it done so much quicker and so much more efficiently most of the time, because I'm not diverting part of my focus. on some other thing.

my focus is most of the time entirely on the work that I'm doing. So that's one thing that I've noticed. Um, Also you can start to use this in your everyday life with conversations that you have with people and use it to develop your listening skills. Cause when you have a sharper focus on attention, you can listen better.

And when you can listen better, you can bring in more information and have better communication with the people that you're interacting with. there's just tons of benefits to developing this practice and this skill set that you necessarily will not get from meditation. It took me, I don't know if I ever would have found this if I didn't find these teachings I really have noticed positive changes in my life from stopping doing the normal meditations and developing the sitting practice.

And again, I'm not saying meditation is bad, but I think developing this sort of sitting practice, you'll see more benefits because meditation, for most people, you're getting lost in your thoughts and very much outside of yourself, looking back at yourself through these thought streams and thought forms that are developing as you just drift off or even sometimes fall asleep.

Which is not developing a focus. It is quite the opposite of that. and some other things that I want to maybe touch on that happens in these, holistic wellness, spiritual communities is people also like to practice breath-work, or... to me... I've done that stuff a couple of times, but I've never fully got it in to it. I just, I don't know, never really was my thing. And I don't think it's truly helping people be embodied.

it's stressing your body out and then releasing the stress and kind of this fake sense of calm, calmness. So you feel good because you created all this energy. And then all this energy gets released, so once that energy is released, it feels good. You think something's happening, but all it really did was hype up your nervous system and then let it relax. So it's creating this sense of reality of what's actually happening. And then you get people that kind of get addicted to it they keep just going back going nowhere.

I really think you're just creating more noise. And when you have more noise, your mind becomes more chaotic. And when you have a chaotic mind, your attention and focus is not going to be as sharp and precise as it has the ability to be. Your energy is all over the place. You're not grounded, and to really get grounded and have a more stable and balanced energy within yourself, you need to have a practice of stillness

and I think that's where having a sitting practice really comes in, Either way, I hope that was helpful and I'm gonna keep making more of these videos If you have, any questions or want to learn more about this, feel free to message me and I'd be happy to share more information on this.