The Fear and Anxiety Solution (27 page)

Many people shy away from even attempting to meditate because they believe they don’t have enough time, it’s too difficult to learn, or they don’t know what form of meditation to choose. The truth is, meditating is not rocket science, and you can learn it in a short amount of time. Since meditation is such a powerful tool for helping you connect to your essence—as the upcoming exercise
will show you—I’d like to go over some of the most common questions and concerns students have asked during my meditation classes.

What is meditation?
Meditation isn’t a religion or magic; it’s a technology that facilitates the communication between your mind, body, and spirit. Through concentration and awareness, meditation creates the stillness and space that allows you to realign yourself with your core essence so that you gain a more centered and balanced perspective of yourself and your life.

There are countless forms of meditation. Mindfulness meditation, where you’re simply present and aware of your breath, your body, and your thoughts, is the form used the most in clinical studies. In transcendental meditation you concentrate silently on mantras, sacred sounds that often stem from Vedic or Tantric traditions. There is walking meditation, in which you focus on the experience of moving forward, one step at a time. During breathing meditations, you notice your breath or build up to inhaling for twenty seconds, holding your breath for twenty seconds, and exhaling for twenty seconds. You can practice writing meditations, such as free-form writing or asking a question about something you’re troubled over, struggling with, or just curious about and then letting the answers flow through your pen. Guided meditations and visualizations usually take you on an inner journey and, thus, focus your mind on a mental path to a destination, such as inner peace or confidence. There are even laughing meditations, where you imagine a funny situation, remember hilarious jokes, or simply think about how kooky it is to be laughing by yourself.

Do some research, try out those forms that sound appealing, and see what works best for you at specific points in time. Each form has its unique benefits, but all of them have the potential to bring clarity, balance, and harmony into your life.

When is the best time to meditate?
The ideal times to meditate are early in the morning or in the evening before you go to bed. I believe it’s more important to meditate once a day whenever you can, rather than only once a week when you can find a break in your schedule to meditate at the perfect time. You don’t have to spend hours in a contemplative space to reap the benefits of meditating. If you can commit to just ten to fifteen minutes per day, you’ll notice amazing changes within a few weeks. One study showed that eight weeks of meditation were more effective than cognitive-behavioral stress reduction for lowering stress and pain levels.
¹²
You can even meditate while you’re doing the dishes or sitting in a traffic jam (with your eyes open, of course).

Ultimately, the goal is to live your life as a continuous meditation. That doesn’t mean you’re constantly spacey or off in your own world; in fact, it means exactly the opposite. Your focus intensifies, and you increase your ability to be in the “now,” aware of your surroundings and at the same time centered within your mind, body, and essence.

Why does my mind start racing when i meditate?
Yogi Bhajan, who brought kundalini yoga to the West, called meditating “taking a mental shower” or “housecleaning for our subconscious mind.” Knowing this is how meditation works, doesn’t it make sense that when you start practicing, the mind races, thoughts fly in from seemingly nowhere, and repetitive thinking patterns become more apparent? Dust flies when you start cleaning up. In other words, it’s normal and OK to have your mind freak out a bit while you’re trying to find peace and harmony. When you realize that every thought that bubbles up is actually a thought that is on its way out of your subconscious (as long as you don’t hold onto it), you can begin to enjoy watching these thoughts surface and then float away.

Now, watching and releasing these thoughts as they arise from the subconscious doesn’t mean that from now on you should devalue or ignore the input from your subconscious mind. Continue to use the tools you’ve learned over the course of this book to communicate with and address your subconscious. However, while you’re meditating, make it your intention to realign yourself with your essence, your true self, and to detach from the potentially limiting ways your subconscious perceives you.

How can i stay focused during my meditation?
Some believe that meditating is about learning how to control your mind. I prefer to see meditating as creating the sacred space that allows your conscious, subconscious, and higher consciousness to come into balance. The challenge is for your conscious mind to set the course, stay present, and avoid getting distracted by or attached to whatever happens during the meditation. In my experience, gentle discipline is the most effective approach to keeping your mind focused and engaged. One of my meditation teachers once suggested thinking of the mind as a puppy that needs to be house-trained. You understand that your adorable puppy is learning and that it can’t do so without your guidance, so you don’t judge it for not understanding what to do right away. So if the puppy starts to relieve itself somewhere other than on the newspaper you’ve set out for that purpose, you patiently and gently bring it back to the paper.

You can do the same with your mind while you’re meditating. If it wanders, just bring it gently back to your breath, your inner focus, or to the sensations in your body in the present moment, without judgment. Every time you’re able to refocus your mind on the meditation, you add another piece to the foundation that you’re building through this practice. Soon this foundation will serve you very well, enabling you to stay calm and centered no matter what storms brew around you.

Throughout the process of learning to meditate, be consistent and kind with yourself. Discipline doesn’t mean punishing yourself; it means being your own disciple—a faithful servant for your greater good.

How should i meditate?
It is said that to master any specific meditation exercise, you should practice it for at least 120 consecutive days. However, I believe that if you can stick with meditation for forty consecutive days, you can feel quite proud of yourself. To successfully establish a daily meditation routine, I recommend making your practice as easy and as comfortable as possible. Although there are benefits to sitting in the traditional cross-legged position, if the discomfort of your knees or legs becomes a distracting obstacle, it defies the meditation’s purpose of finding inner peace and stillness.

Start with sitting in a chair, with your feet placed on the ground. Ideally your spine should be straight, but once again, if this position feels too difficult, don’t let this get in the way of your daily commitment to meditate. You can also lie down on your back. Just make sure you don’t find yourself falling asleep.

The classic meditation hand position, or
mudra,
asks for the thumb and forefinger on each hand to join, while the rest of the fingers are extended. The hands are placed palms-down on the thighs. Alternatively, you can keep your hands relaxed by your side, fold them in your lap, or place the palms together in front of your chest as you would to pray. Experiment and find out what feels most comfortable and doable for you.

There are only two other guidelines I would suggest that you follow: First, keep your eyes closed during the meditation, so that the focus is turned inward. Second, to avoid having to peek at your watch, use some sort of timer, which will signal when the time you set aside to mediate is up.

In
chapter 11
, I introduce two basic breathing exercises, which I highly recommend practicing for forty days. However, at this point in your journey to break through fear and anxiety, I would like you to delve into the following guided meditation.

This guided meditation will help you to align yourself with your essence and build a strong foundation for your new, empowered identity on a conscious, subconscious, and cellular level. But how, you may wonder, can you reach your cells through meditation or visualization?

As I mentioned in
chapter 4
, our subconscious oversees and regulates all the functions of our body, including the processes on a cellular level. One way our subconscious communicates with us is through metaphoric dreams, which need to be interpreted to understand their deeper meaning. The reverse is also true: we can use metaphors to communicate consciously with our subconscious and, by extension, our cells. Bernie Siegel, MD, pioneered the use of metaphors and visualizations to activate the mind-body connection to support the healing of chronic illnesses. For example, he teaches his patients to visualize sheep, fish, or vacuum cleaners removing and destroying cancer cells in their bodies. Although the precise processes involved are unclear, the successes Siegel has reported show that somehow these images are deciphered and translated to the cellular level, causing cancers to shrink and patients to heal faster. (For more information on Siegel’s work, see his books
Peace, Love, and Healing
and
Love, Medicine, and Miracles.
)

When one of my friends and colleagues was diagnosed with breast cancer, she spent the two weeks before her surgery, visualizing little fish chewing away the tumor every day. She wasn’t very surprised when, after the operation, the surgeon reported that the tumor had shrunk by 50 percent between the time the cancer was originally diagnosed and the time it was removed.

The following guided meditation makes use of healing metaphors to consciously communicate to your subconscious and to your cells that you are now creating a new foundation of self, which replaces your old, anxiety-based, self-limiting identity.

As with previous processes, you can either memorize the steps of this meditation or record your own or someone else’s voice reading the description. A recording of an abbreviated version of this process is also available to stream online.
¹³

For this meditation you can sit in a chair, lie on your bed, or float in a bathtub—any position works, as long as you’re comfortable.

•••

Close your eyes and take five or six deep breaths. At the same time, allow your mind to slow down and your body to relax and unwind. Focus on your eyelids, and let them become so relaxed and heavy that it would take a great effort to try to open them. So don’t even try. Instead, let the relaxation of your eyelids spread across your face and, from there, all across your body. Then focus on your intention to connect to and realign your mind and body with your essence at the core of your being, to become more grounded and in harmony with yourself, and to access your untapped potential.

Now turn your focus inward to your heart, and for a few minutes, tune in to its faithful, life-sustaining beat. Draw your attention closer to your heart, and zoom in on its lower tip, the apex. Move in closer, and notice one particular cell—let’s call it the
master cell.
As each breath brings you closer to it, increasingly appreciate this cell’s beauty, complexity, and perfection.

Soon you reach the cell membrane with its layers, channels, and gateways shuttling nourishment and information in and out of the cell. The complexity and perfection of this magnificent cell is awe inspiring. Within the layers of its membrane float thousands of receptors, all eager and ready to listen to and communicate with neighboring cells and their environment. You now understand that your cells are actively listening to you. It is through these receptors that your thoughts and feelings are able to communicate with and affect the workings of the cell. You can see how your mind and body are intricately connected with each other.

Continue your journey by floating easily through one of the gateways of the membrane and into the cell plasma. Here you’re surrounded by countless organelles, ribosomes, vesicles, and the life-force-generating mitochondria. It gives you great comfort to know that you have such an abundance of energy, vitality, and vibrant life residing within your cells.

Yet your journey takes you deeper, all the way into the center of the cell, into the nucleus, the sphere-shaped storage place for your genetic coding, your DNA. Inside the nucleus, you marvel at the sheer, unlimited amount of information your DNA holds. Someone once said that if every piece of information in your DNA were a star, you’d hold an entire galaxy of knowledge. You are in the halls of your inner library, where all the wisdom of life is preserved. Here, all questions can be answered, all problems solved.

However, your journey to your essence guides you further, beyond the molecules of the DNA down to the level of the atoms. As you approach a single atom with its solid core of neutrons and protons and a number of small electrons circling in distinct orbits around it, it strikes you that this configuration looks just like our solar system. The saying, “As above, so below, and as below, so above,” takes on a new dimension and meaning for you. You are a reflection of the universe, and the universe mirrors your unlimited nature back to you.

Now float down into the atomic nucleus to the level of the subatomic particles, the smallest elements of your being. What you find there truly astonishes you. All there seems to be at the deepest level of your existence is an infinite amount of energy. The tiny subatomic particles are almost undetectable within the vastness of this powerful energy field. You clearly understand now that you consist predominantly of this energy and not the small amounts of matter you’re accustomed to identifying yourself with. So change, healing, and growth are, at their core, nothing but changes in your energy field. This realization gives you a great sense of empowerment, because you know that your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings can shift your energy—and therefore your entire being.