Meditation Techniques and Tips to Get Present and Take Control of Your Mind

All right, welcome back to the Daily Mastermind, George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. Listen, I want you to think about this for a minute. Let's face it. One of our biggest obstacles to our success is our minds. We talk about it a lot. Yesterday I talked about it, but do you ever feel like you're constantly having conversations with yourself about it? you know, inside your head? I definitely do. And sometimes these thoughts and conversations are pretty stressful, but I've learned that the minute you realize that you're not your mind, then you become empowered to make some changes in your life. You have to remember that you are not your mind. Your mind is simply a tool, but that tool left unmanaged can work against you as much as it can help you. There was a great quote. Let me see if I have it here. There was a great quote that was put out there by Eckhart Tolle. Okay, yeah. It says, thinking has become a disease. It's not so much that you use your mind wrongly. You usually don't use it at all. It uses you. That is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. And I love that quote because that is the problem that we have. You've got to stop believing you're your mind. Research has shown that we have up to 60,000 thoughts a day. And I can tell you from experience that most of these thoughts are unproductive and unmanaged. And more importantly, most of those thoughts are the same freaking thoughts you had yesterday. That's the reason that I started to meditate. And meditation, that's one of the number one ways, you know, outside of mindfulness, meditation is number the one, one of the number one ways that I have learned to manage my thoughts and become more productive with my life. Now, full disclosure, I'm definitely not an expert on meditation, and I struggle with it, but I would love to share some thoughts and tips and ideas with you in order to maybe help you benefit from meditation like I have and give you some place to start. Okay, so why should you? Why did I start meditating? Well, meditation has proven over time to create amazing changes for those that practice it. It's not just an ambiguous or hyped up idea of meditation, right? Here are some of the benefits that I kind of listed out that are proven ways that meditation can help you. Less stress and anxiety better quality of sleep better health and vitality increased productivity It helps you to do what I talked about yesterday which is focusing on the present moment It also helps increase your quality of life But, you know, look, bottom line, there are so many benefits. And that's why I highly recommend you get some type of meditation practice. I don't care if it's two minutes, four minutes, or whatever. So, well, let's stop for a minute. And I want to just talk to you about the difference between meditation and mindfulness. and like I said I'm not an expert full disclosure but I'll tell you what I've learned when I first started meditating I did a ton of research I you know I started to realize that there were so many different styles and techniques and training for meditation however one of the main distinctions I found was that there's a difference between mindfulness and meditation and they both serve a purpose okay mindfulness that's the practice of learning to focus on the present moment. And you can do this by focusing like on your breath or a stationary object and just simply noticing your senses. What are you smelling? What are you hearing? What are you seeing? These are the ways to kind of get grounded in the moment. By the way, this helps a lot if you're struggling with depression because your mind can't think of all kinds of negative things if you're focusing on other things. Mindfulness is also something that you could practice throughout the day and it'll definitely help you enjoy your life more. Meditation, that's the process of letting go. It involves learning to take your mind and body into a different state of consciousness where you and your mind and body can get super creative and productive and start healing, relaxing, producing results in areas of your life that you hadn't even thought of. And it can be described sort of as that fourth state of consciousness that's not waking or sleeping or dreaming, it's meditation. And, you know, just know the difference in these two things. And it helped me to know the difference, but I hope you'll sort of take some time and research it for yourself. I know that you'll see a lot of benefits by sort of understanding what works best for you. But here's the thing. Let me give you some tips and strategies in the time we have today, maybe some techniques that will help you. First of all, start with just a couple of minutes. and it sounds simple but staying consistent with a couple of minutes is far better than trying to go all in and then missing days and missing weeks just start with a couple of minutes and then I also recommend you do it first thing in the morning if you start your day with meditation you set yourself up for success and it like Marcus Aubrey says in his book you know you win the morning you win the day right And so another thing I would recommend is don worry about how you feel You don't have to be in the mood to meditate. You don't have to be perfect with it. You know, it's like working out. You're meditating for the benefits, not because you need it in that moment overall, right? Just like going to the gym. So also find a quiet place. You know, when you start, I think it's super important to find a quiet place just to minimize distractions. It helps you to focus a little more. I mean, it's tough enough trying to focus and get grounded when you're struggling with distractions. But start by breathing or counting your breaths. This is a great way to get grounded in the moment. You can simply close your eyes, focus on counting the number of breaths in and the number of breaths out. Maybe do a body scan. A lot of meditation apps will have you do that where you just close your eyes and notice and relax and notice each part of your body starting from your toes and working your way all the way up to the top of your head. That's a great way to do a body scan. But notice your senses. You know, your mind cannot normally focus on too many things. So like I said before, if you're stressed, depressed, a lot of times I'll just close my eyes and start to notice my five senses and that will distract my mind. Try that one. I really encourage that. Also, don't worry about your technique. Don't worry about, you know, your style or like you're sitting on a yoga pillow or all those kind of things. Don't worry about all that to get started. But do notice your distractions and simply just refocus yourself in the moment. If you're trying to meditate, you're going to get distracted. You've trained your mind your whole life to follow distractions. It's going to be difficult, but just be patient with yourself. And sometimes it helps to use a guided meditation. I've done that because if you have a hard time focusing, that guided mantra or that guided meditation will help you to do that. I also recommend maybe taking a course. You know, I've actually taken a course before on meditation. I've taken a transcendental meditation course. I've read books. But take a course. And most importantly, I think the strategy or tip I would really recommend the most is make a commitment to do it. Don't, you know, this isn't one of those try it if you like it kind of things. This is a commitment to the benefit not the practice Be committed to the benefit not just the practice And those are some ideas and tips and things that you have Let me give you some additional meditation resources that I would I would highly recommend You know you can use stuff like the Calm or the Headspace mobile app I use the Calm app because it got everything from you know sleep stories to music to meditation timeouts and things like that. But there's a lot of different ways. They even have a free seven-day introductory course. I mean, I think I might pay 90 bucks a year or something for that app, but it's worth every penny. But there is a free version, so go get that. Also, Wayne Dyer is a great source. I love Wayne's approach to meditation. He's done a ton of audios and books. They're all stuff I guarantee you can get for free online. And then there's a couple of sites like zenhabits.net. This website blog is really useful. It's a great source I use once in a while for the podcast or zivameditation.com. That's z-i-v-a meditation.com. Emily Fletcher is an expert in meditation. Super, super easy to listen to, makes really clear distinctions between mindfulness, meditation, and manifestation, and I've really benefited from her courses as well. And then, you know, if you have a chance to check out a transcendental meditation, this is probably the most popular form of meditation, and a lot of experts, celebrities, people that, you know, that you probably know have endorsed this type of meditation, but it's a type of meditation where you clear your mind and you focus on a mantra and repeating that mantra over time. So check that out as well. But anyway, those are my basic thoughts and ideas. I wanted to, you know, after yesterday's podcast on being grounded in the present moment, if you haven't heard that go back, I really wanted to talk to you about just ideas and tips. Sometimes we don't know where to start and we could get started down the wrong direction. So I hope this is an overall good, you know, value for you. If you felt value, if you feel like you've gotten value out of this podcast, please share it. It would mean the world to me. I know there are people out there looking for this type of information. So please share the podcast. Hit me up on the Daily Mastermind on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, wherever we're at. Tag me so I can see what you're doing and comment on your post. Throw a shout out and just see what you're doing. But that's my message for today. We're going to go on tomorrow and I'm going to talk to you about some additional techniques, but we've got some business strategies, a few money principles. I'm really looking forward to it because as you know, with the Daily Mastermind, we're always covering that mind, body, money, business, and lifestyle because it's never too late to start creating the life that you were meant to live. So do everything you can in your power to start taking action today. I will talk with you soon. Have an amazing day.