How You See What’s On Your Mind and In Your Heart

Using meditation to help you get the answers you seek

If you survived your childhood (and if you are reading this, most likely you did), you may have come through with some unskillful coping strategies for managing life’s challenges. This includes managing stressful situations, your own feelings, and even how you see yourself. You may be full of beliefs that you hold as true that aren’t actually true. If you’ve ever suffered from perfectionism, people pleasing, or the like, chances are you have.

Beliefs like:

• I’m too much. I need to stay quiet and small for people to like/love me.
• I’m not good enough, smart enough, thin enough, worthy enough…
• If I am perfect, I will be worthy of love and belonging.
• If I make sure everyone else is okay, then I will be okay.

You get the picture.

What is actually true is that you are doing the best that you can with the tools that you have. We all are. We only know what we know when we know it (I think Maya Angelou said something to that effect). Until that point, all you have “running the show” are your beliefs.

Getting to the truth

How do you know what is true and what is a belief? First you have to know what your beliefs are. This can be found through therapy, or my favorites, journaling and meditation. Meditation allows you to slow down enough to listen to your heart. After a few minutes of stillness (with practice), the mind gets quieter (notice I didn’t say quiet, but quieter), and you are less disturbed by your thoughts. It’s in that stillness that deeper thoughts and beliefs surface.

Imagine a pond. If you drop a bunch of pebbles into the pond, the surface ripples and it’s impossible to see to the bottom. The pebbles are your thoughts and the ripples are your reactions to your thoughts. When your body is still, you may find fewer pebbles dropping. When you let go of your reactions but simply notice the pebbles, the water begins to clear. As the pond clears, you can see to the bottom where your internal wisdom lives. That is when the wisdom can rise to the surface like a bubble.

I have often found that during meditation sessions, I discover the answers I didn’t know I needed. I am not searching for answers necessarily. I may have had a problem in my life, perhaps an argument or a frustration with someone, and the solution to the problem comes to me during that period of stillness.

Meditation clears the “clutter”

Friday morning while teaching mediation, I discussed “clearing the clutter” in your mind, which is letting go of your attachment to the pebbles. The pebbles may fall, but if you accept that they exist, they may not fall with the same intensity and disruption. Acknowledging that they are part of the present moment makes them less bothersome and you can relax. In that still and relaxed place, you can hear your heart more clearly.

Listening to your heart takes practice and understanding that you have answers inside of you. Your childhood conditioning may tell you that you can’t be trusted, that you need to seek answers outside of yourself. If you aren’t “smart enough,” what could you possibly know? I would ask, “smart enough for whom?” You are the one who knows yourself best, you’ve been living with yourself your whole life.

When you start to pay attention to the thoughts in your head, you may find that they are actually someone else’s thoughts and beliefs about you, and that they are not actually true. Do you ever hear your parents words coming out of your mouth? I hate when that happens. Thankfully that doesn’t happen to me anymore because I have worked through a lot of my childhood conditioning. But it’s those words that rule your life until you hear them and decide for yourself if they actually serve you. If they don’t, you are allowed to let them go.

Meditation for getting to know yourself

Like journaling and therapy, meditation is a practice to help you get to know yourself. For much of my life I have used “busy” as a numbing technique. If I just stay busy and keep moving, I don’t have to feel or look inward. “I don’t have time” kept me separate from myself, and disconnected from my feelings, beliefs, and knowing my needs.

Meditation was the first practice that forced me to stop moving. At first it was uncomfortable, because although my body was still, my brain kept whirring. Then I would scold myself for having thoughts because I wasn’t “supposed to” during meditation. That didn’t help me relax…

When I learned that I didn’t need to stop my thoughts, but instead I could notice my thoughts, things changed. Creating space between my awareness and my thoughts created space inside. This helped me soften my grip, and for the first time, notice my beliefs about myself. When I listened to what was whirring in my head, rather than trying to ignore or suppress it, I gained power over myself.

I could decide whether to believe my thoughts or not.

I could let go of the thoughts that didn’t serve me, and grow the thoughts that did.

This changed my relationship with myself for the better.

Practicing meditation

In an ideal world, we’d practice meditation every day. I don’t know about you, but I don’t live in an ideal world. What I do know is that I never regret sitting for meditation. Someday I might practice daily, who knows. But when I do practice, even for a few minutes, it completely changes how I feel. Even if my mind doesn’t stop, I stop. The benefit comes from the attempt, not the “success.” A successful meditation is when you put down your phone, set aside your “to-dos,” and you sit in stillness for a few minutes.

Even 3 minutes can make a difference in your nervous system. You won’t find the answers to all of life’s problems in 3 minutes, or maybe you will, but it’s a starting point. With practice, it becomes easier to “drop” into meditation, and from the moment you sit, you can find that inner stillness.

If you are curious about meditation but think you “can’t” for a million different reasons, I invite you to click the link to get the free eBook “3 Myths About Meditation and Why It’s Easier Than You Think.” When you understand what meditation is and isn’t, it’s easier to practice.

Watch this 14 minute meditation video that is both guided and silent to help you find that quiet space within you for wisdom to arise. This was originally recorded as part of the class “Vinyasa Yoga and Meditation” that I teach every Friday online. This is just the meditation portion.