You are the Universe! - S1:E3 Meditation for People who Stink at Meditating

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

We all know the benefits of meditation and probably are shoulding all over ourselves because we don’t meditate enough or maybe not at all. I’m here to tell you there is a meditation style for everybody and it doesn’t have to be so freakin hard. Take a listen. Www.VictoriaHaffer.com

Welcome to you are the universe podcast and I'm your host, Victoria Hafer. And today's topic is meditation for people who suck at meditating. This is one of my most favorite topics of them all. Most people know how powerful a regular meditation practice is and could be. And yet we still should all over ourselves around meditating for the most part. Some people meditate not so frequently and others don't do it at all for a number of reasons thinking that you're just not good at it. There's no way you can empty your mind. Yeah, it's just you're too type A. You know, all the excuses go on and on and on and on and on. So I'm here to teach you. some extremely powerful tools and techniques that you can start to incorporate very quickly

into your day-to-day. They will actually give you the same benefits that you may achieve from a consistent meditation practice. So the first thing I'm going to ask you to do, if you are willing, is to delete, destroy, and uncreate everything that you think you know about meditation. So often we bring into the present moment, our past. beliefs, stories that we've bought, you know, stuff that we learned as young children or even young adults about what meditation looks like. And often in the in the Eastern world of

meditation, you know, we have, we've typically seen more of a masculine way of being in meditation. And that is the, the cultivating absolute stillness, no, movement and just sitting and breathing and then again, you know, doing your best not to allow for anything or any distractions to come into your space and place. And that, honestly, that's a, that's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people. And most people try to jump into that from going from, you know, the hamster wheel, going a million miles an hour and, you know, constantly moving and, you know, being sleep deprived and over-caffeinated and just constantly going and going and going, right? The list is just longer than, you know, your leg.

And so, and then, you know, to have the expectation that, okay, now you're going to sit in stillness without moving. And for 20 minutes, that's, it's just not realistic. So let's just, so again, let's just take a moment and say, you know, what if there is another way that you could approach your quote-unquote meditation practice? So why do we want to meditate? I mean, the benefits are very long. The long list of benefits are there. You know, reduction of stress, reduces blood pressure, boosts your immune system. It increases the happy chemicals in the brain, you know, dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin. And it also increases our creativity as well as our productivity.

So, yeah, lots of studies and research have showed that people who meditate on a regular basis are actually more efficient in their day-to-day tasks. So the good news is you do not have to meditate for hours to get the benefits of meditation. Really learning how to be present. And I actually did a podcast on that recently on the power of presence. So you might want to check that out if you haven't listened to it yet. So learning the art of being present in the moment and practicing what we call mindfulness are truly key in having a more fulfilled, happy, peaceful, kind of connected, intuitive life. So a couple of things that you want to think about.

If you are seriously wanting to start a meditation practice, and honestly, you do not need anything. You don't need any tools, any fancy, anything. But I'm just going to give you some recommendations of things that you may want to. I personally have an altar, actually in many locations in my house. And it's just a space. It could be a windowsill. It could be your nightstand next to your bed.

Maybe you have a room. a small room or even a very large closet that you can dedicate to your space of like this is where I go. Now maybe, and actually one of the best places for you to meditate is in nature. So maybe it's your backyard. Maybe it's your car, right? That's it. That's the only time and place that you might have that you have, you will not be interrupted. And you can have, you know, total peace and quiet.

So, you know, you could put little things like crystals or, and each, you know, Crystal, that would be another episode that I will chat about, but each crystal holds a very specific vibrational frequency. So depending on what is the essence in which you wanted to bring into your meditation practice, for example, let's say you were working on abundance, which truly we are all, we are abundance. It's just typically that our own critical minds block it. But let's just say abundance was the thing that you were looking for, and then you were to look up, You know, you could use the internet or, you know, a book on crystals and just say, crystal for whatever it is that you're looking for. Inner peace, attracting a partner, good health.

Maybe it's healing. Maybe you're dealing with a chronic condition, autoimmune or an injury. So any of those things, you could find a crystal. And then perhaps you take that crystal with you into your meditation. You could also, depending on if you are working with any spiritual dities or ascended masters, perhaps like Jesus or Buddha or the goddess, the dark goddess, anything, or maybe you're strongly connected to the animal kingdom, and you are working perhaps with a specific animal totem.

And so maybe you could have a statue or a picture of something like that on your altar. You can also work with the elements, which I really love to do that, and that's really simple to bring in. And you know, you don't have to have the physicality of this thing to bring it into your meditation. You just have to call in the essence of it. So the elements being, you know, air and water and earth and fire. So, for example, for fire, that would be a candle, simple for the element of water. And fire could be about if you're looking for transmutation, transformation, burning on. letting things go. That's what the fire represents.

Well, the water element has to do with your emotions and, you know, going with the flow and connected to the second chakra. So you could have a nice little glass on your altar and just place some water in that. The earth element, again, the grounding connection, the growth and, you know, really drawing those roots down. And that could be anything. It could be a rock. It could be a pine cone. It could just anything to do, a tree branch, right? Any of that by bringing in to the aspect of that element

to your practice. And then you could also have a feather for air or wind. So those would be really simple things that you could kind of get together and put on your altar to represent all the elements to increase the, and amplify the power of your meditation. So when you're setting up the space for your practice,

you do want, you know, just make sure that you're, you're not gonna be disturbed. If you are using your phone, a lot of times people will use an app off the phone. Just make sure you put it on airplane mode so that nobody's calling in or texting you. Preferably, if you're not using your phone, don't have your phone,

or at least shut it off completely and kind of move it away. from you if possible. That would be the best thing to do. So once you get into that space or place of you choosing to do some your meditation, your seat, if you are going to do this, lots of different ways to meditate. I'll talk to you a little bit about the different styles and traditions in just a moment. So seated is a very common way of meditating. And if you choose to do that, If you can comfortably sit on the floor with your legs crossed, that's fine. But that's not practical for a lot of people.

So a chair is great. If you have a nice supported chair that you can sit up nice and tall, uncross your legs and keep your feet connected to the floor. If you have really short legs, you could place a yoga block under each foot to keep you connected. and or if you do want to sit on the ground, then placing a meditation, a cushion, or maybe like a wool blanket folded up, directly under your sitting bones, will help to keep you nice and aligned.

And the reason for that is we really want to open up the central access channel known as your spine or in yoga, we call it the Shishuma, so that your energy, your chi, your prana, your mana can flow freely from root all the way up to the crown. So really opening up those energy centers to sit up nice and tall. Now, of course, there are other ways of meditating. You could do a walking meditation out in nature. So then again, you'd still want to keep yourself nice and tall with your head over your heart, over your pelvis in that situation. So once you get into the

space and let's just say you are going to do more of a focused mantra, whether it be your breath, you could focus on your breath, you could focus on a mantra, you could focus on a visual, on the candle flame, meaning you're not doing a guided meditation, then just you may want to set the timer because I know a lot of times new beginner yogis, meditators were sort of like, okay, how long has it been, checking the clock. So it's okay if you do want to. They actually have different little very inexpensive timers that you could get as opposed to using your phone. You can definitely use your phone if you want, but I have one that when the timer goes off, it's kind of like a little chime, so it's not so disruptive to you. So starting out with

reasonably five minutes at least and then just begin to focus on your breath. your life force, right? In through the nose and out through the mouth. You can do in through the nose and out through the nose or in through the nose and out through the mouth, which is what I prefer. You could do like a falling out breath. You can even make a little sound if you like. We call that it's just kind of like a little, a little heavy exhale on the way out. And then just count your breath. Simplest form and way of starting to begin a meditation practice. Just count your breath. I'm inhaling for one. I'm exhaling for one. I'm inhaling for two. I'm exhaling for three. I'm exhaling for three, right? So there's lots of different ways. You could actually count down from

the numbers if you want. And, you know, so start from a number, let's say, 22, and then bring it back. backwards and every time you kind of lose track of the number, you start over again. And that will help for you to train your brain. So remember, just like the physical body and muscles, if you go to the gym or you, you know, you work out or you do, you know, you do cardio, you train marathons, do whatever that is that you're doing, in order to get stronger in your physical, in your physical body, right, training the physical body, training the muscles, training the, training the, myofascial system, the cardiovascular system and the lungs, you have to consistently move your body and train your body and push it just a little bit beyond so that in between your workouts,

your body's actually adapting and getting stronger. So just like the physical body needs training, so does your mind. So think of your mind as a muscle. Nobody is easily meditates. I shouldn't say nobody. I'm sure there's some people out there that can check out pretty quickly and then, you know, think they're meditating. But for most of us, it's a process, and that's why we call it a practice. So committing to sitting with yourself in stillness, in quiet, consistently every single day, can be a very, very powerful. It can bring really powerful. It can bring really powerful. results from that. Remember, you have to create a new habit, right? They say that it takes, you know, a minimal for only 30 to 40 days before we start to cultivate a habit and truly 90 days

of doing something pretty much on a daily basis for us for it to become set in there where it just becomes automatic and the body actually will feel like it's missed something if you don't sit with yourself and be in that silence, you know, space. on a regular basis. So I'm going to invite you to step away from attachment to an outcome, like completely clearing your thoughts or, you know, meditating once or twice and thinking that your whole life is supposed to change just because you're doing that.

Really what meditation is one aspect of us, beginning to incorporate the art of presence and mindfulness into our daily, daily, daily, daily, not just five minutes a day, not just 20 minutes a day. It's so that you actually take these tools and techniques and you bring them in, right, to the present moment as often as possible. And of course, you know, you're in and out. You're in and out. It's all good.

But just, you know, cut yourself a little slack. You're only human. You will have thoughts and your mind will wander and that's okay. So just notice. The big aspect is about not attaching to your thoughts and reminding yourself that you are not your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. And so meditation is a powerful tool that helps to teach us sort of how to get into that

space and notice when, you know, what are your thoughts? What are your consistent thoughts? They say that we think on average 50,000 thoughts a day. The majority of them are not positive. And the majority of them are the same thoughts that we think every single day. So it's like, okay, we have to slow down our own system in order to become aware of the talk. And if it's negative self-talk, to become aware of what that negative self-talk is so that we can start to get to the root of it, whether it be ancestral, whether it be from trauma, micro or macro trauma from this lifetime or past

lifetimes so that we can begin to delete, destroy and uncreate those belief systems in a loving, compassionate way. Your meditation can't be something that you just check off on your list. Like, yeah, I did, you know, that you post on social media. Yeah, I meditated today. it's really about opening your receiving channels and receiving from source, from the divine, from your higher self, that part of you that is all knowing, all loving, and non-judging. That's how you fill your empty cup up.

It's not from shopping or eating, binge eating, or mindlessly watching TV shows or anything like that. It's not from drugs. It's not from alcohol. It's not from gambling or sex or any of those things. You know, just ask yourself, just right in this moment, maybe you're not addicted to something or maybe you are. Right. So think about how often are you practicing escapism or avoidism when there are things that if you were doing them, they could change your entire life for the better. So how often are you shitting all over yourself? Stop that. I should meditate more. I should eat better. I should exercise more. I should. I should. I should. How about I get to? How about I choose to? So it's really about really flipping the switch there. So there are a number of different types of meditation practices, which I will talk about in further episodes. But I'll just give you a little background here on some of them. So, as we mentioned, being mindful, being mindful on a regular basis. If you were to just take that practice every morning you woke up and you were to set the intention to be more mindful with everyone, with everything that you did, you know, maybe you set a reminder

on your phone or your computer so that it pops up every hour and saying, you know, I am present. I am mindful. Another type of meditation practice is using a mantra, choosing a word, a phrase, or a sound of a high vibration, and repeating it over and over and over again. This is something like a Malabit practice that some people will use. One of my favorite styles of meditation is a guided meditation, and there's so many options out there. I will be doing some guided meditations on my podcast. There's plenty out there. YouTube, all over the place that you can find.

You know, find the voice that you like, find the style that you like, and then just sit back, do your best not to fall asleep, and, you know, be present in that space. Conscious moving is another style or tradition of meditation, mindful walking, even things like Tai Chi, dance yoga, or Qi Gong can also be very meditative, mindful practices. So maybe explore that and see if that's something. that might work for you. So on a review of what we just covered, there is a lot of information there just to review again, remember what you thought meditation was doesn't have to be what meditation is for you. Think of the thing that when you do it, time stands still, nothing matters,

including your phone, and you are truly at peace. So it may be singing, or dancing or coloring or, but I wanted to be something that is only you because you might say, oh, I love spending time with my grandkids or even with your dogs. All those things are wonderful and great and keep doing them. However, the point of the meditation practice is about kind of going deep within and having that being able to powerfully self-reflect and look at how you're showing up in time and space and what's serving you and what's not serving you. So really quieting the monkey mind, quieting the ego aspect of ourselves so that we can be directly connected to source, right,

information. So again, if it's maybe it's pain.