Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPSnacks: Say Om! Introduction To Meditation with Shiv | Mental Health

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Yap snacks, bite-sized pods of digestible and actionable content. My name is Shiv, and I'm the lead researcher and producer at Yap. Hala is dealing with a family emergency, and unfortunately she cannot join us today. Our wishes and our prayers are with her. Today we'll be diving into the topic of meditation. This episode is sponsored by Podcorn, a marketplace connecting podcast to amazing sponsorship opportunities. head over to potcon.com to learn more. Meditation has come up in a number of episodes in our show.

Starting point is 00:00:38 From David Allen and his Getting Things Done system that involves removing port loops to Emily Fletcher and her techniques of Ziva meditation. It seems like today almost every successful person does some form of meditative practice. So today we're going to explore what are some of the most practical day-to-day benefits of meditation and how we can get started.

Starting point is 00:01:01 All right, so let's dig in to what meditation is and why we should meditate. Meditation is essentially some form of training that could involve a number of different techniques that is usually done to serve one of two main purposes. Meditation can be used to reach peak performance states to energize yourself and bring out your best self. Or meditation can also be used to trigger deep relaxation, to calm, yourself and create a feeling of happiness and fulfillment. Now meditation is practiced by peak performers across the spectrum, ranging from Hollywood celebrities to hedge fund managers to star athletes. Let's look at some examples of people who practice

Starting point is 00:01:44 and swear by meditation. Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, George Lucas, Will Smith, the Beatles, Madonna, and the list just keeps going on and on and on. But why? Why do so many people, these top performers swear by meditation? Well, we talked about the two high-level benefits, bringing out your best self and stress reduction, getting into a calm state. But let's look at the benefits at a more granular level. Meditation can really help with stress reduction. There have been numerous studies on this, and in one study, nearly 1,300 adults all simultaneously

Starting point is 00:02:24 demonstrated that meditation may decrease. meditation can lead to enhanced self-awareness can help lead to a stronger understanding of ourselves and thus help us grow into our best selves meditation can also help increase our attention span focused attention meditation is kind of like weightlifting for your attention span it helps increase the strength and endurance of your attention

Starting point is 00:02:50 you can visit episode 34 to hear near ayal talk about some of those patterns. Meditation also leads to increased pain tolerance and control. Your perception of pain is connected deeply to your state of mind. And there have been numerous studies that have shown that meditation deeply helps alleviate various forms of pain. In fact, one thought I used to have when I was much younger was at the pinnacle of meditation. In an extreme form, when one is in such a deep state of calmness of mind, one reaches a place where whether one is being tortured to death, or one is having the most pleasurable experience of one's life, one's mental state is in the same calm, relaxed, happy state.

Starting point is 00:03:36 Meditation can also reduce blood pressure. A study of almost a thousand volunteers found that when they meditated by concentrating on a silent mantra, a repeated non-vocalized word, they reduced their blood pressure by over five points on average, and this has been reviewed and confirmed by several other studies. meditation can also improve sociability. We're going to have Mark Metri return on our show where he's going to talk about his social anxiety as a child.

Starting point is 00:04:05 And nervousness and anxiety in feeling down, feeling disoriented, can play a big role in us not wanting to hang out with people. Meditation helps us connect better with ourselves and in the process get out there and connect better with others. All right, so now that we've talked about some of the more granular benefits of meditation, let's look at how you can get started. You can start small, but consistency is best. It is much, much better to do five minutes of meditation every day

Starting point is 00:04:33 than to do 35 minutes once in a week. Start off by finding a quiet place and be easy on yourself when your mind wanders. That's part of the learning process. And don't get too caught up in the how, where to sit, what thoughts you should be thinking, whether you should be thinking, whether you should use an app,

Starting point is 00:04:51 whether you should do guided meditation, which technique of meditation you should use, how you should be breathing, etc. You know, don't get caught up in all those details. Just do it. Focus on your breaths, for example. Scan your body for any residual tension and relax. There are a number of excellent apps out there. Headspace and Calm are the two main ones that are most popular.

Starting point is 00:05:15 YouTube 2 has a ton of amazing guided meditations. Yeah, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate,

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Starting point is 00:06:14 Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash profiting. Just go to Indeed.com profiting right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash profiting. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. Now, I want to talk a little bit more about what meditation is and the way I've looked at it. The mind is like a stormy ocean barraged with thoughts. There's always deep calm below those surface level thoughts, just like below those choppy waves, there's always deep calm at the deeper depths of the ocean. However, those calming depths are not easy to access.

Starting point is 00:07:00 And there are many techniques in meditation that help get us closer to that calm by focusing on something, such as focusing on the breath, the present moment, the sound, senses, or a feeling such as love. So the idea is that from being barraged by hundreds, thousands of thoughts, we get to a place where we're focused on one single thought. And then the ultimate state that we want to reach is a state called no mind, where we are literally living right completely in the present, moment to moment. The moment you try and grasp or think or try to control reality, you have left the present moment and are living in the past or the future,

Starting point is 00:07:43 which is the source of all stress, all anxiety, all worry, and all misery. So let's look at some types of meditation now. One of the simplest forms of meditation is mindfulness meditation, where you just try and live completely in the present moment, you pay attention to your thoughts, and you don't judge them or become involved with them, or even try and control them, you just pay attention to them and observe them silently and dispassionately.

Starting point is 00:08:10 In the episode with Emily Fletcher, we dig deeper into the difference between mindfulness and meditation. It's actually a very interesting and instructive distinction, and I encourage you to listen to that episode if you haven't already to dig deeper into that topic. Then we have Zen meditation where you focus completely on the present moment. It's usually practiced seated on a floor or on a cushion where you focus on your breath, count from 1 to 10 and then back from 10 to 1. The essence of Zen is really summed up very nicely in a quote that says,

Starting point is 00:08:45 real wisdom is not thinking about spirituality when you're peeling the potatoes. Real wisdom is simply peeling the potatoes. Transcendental or mantra meditation involves repeating a mantra, which could be words like affirmations, or even just a sound, the classic example being Ome, which some schools of thought believe is a fundamental vibration of the universe or of our being. And a lot of celebrities that we mentioned earlier are big fans of this transcendental meditation. Reason being is that it's great form, but it was also popular. popularized very well in the West by a man named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Starting point is 00:09:24 Pranayama is a yogic practice of breath control. Again, there's a focus on a single element of breath. And the different forms of praniam and breath exercises, some to get us energized, some to balance us, you know, the left and right sides of our brain, and some to just get us in a calm, relaxed, easygoing state. Yoga nidra is another amazing yogic technique. which is essentially that lingering state of consciousness between waking and sleeping,

Starting point is 00:09:55 which is typically induced by a guided meditation. Now there is a lot of scientific evidence that Yogan Idra helps to relieve some serious stress, and it's even been applied by the U.S. Army to assist soldiers to recover from PTSD. Sense meditation can involve deep concentration on any of our five senses. So just imagine being at a restaurant and really enjoying the food and being completely immersed in the food. That is essentially a form of sense meditation. Movement meditation involves things such as walking through the words, gardening, running, again, just being completely and deeply focused on what you're doing in the moment. Golf is a very similar activity where you're

Starting point is 00:10:36 completely focused on making an excellent connection with that ball, hitting it and getting it to go where you want. And that's why golf is addicting in some ways. It's that complete state of focus on that one action that was what gives us great joy and pleasure. And finally, there's meta meditation, which is essentially a form of loving kindness meditation where you try and get out of yourself and you develop a feeling of happiness and well-being for all. I'm reminded of a quote I read once, which went something like this. Whenever you're having a bad day and you're feeling down and depressed and irritable, just remember that the world is a very big place, there's tons of beings out there. And even though you may be having a bad day, if you can get out of yourself and identify

Starting point is 00:11:24 with the bigger reality that's out there, somebody out there at that very moment that you're feeling really bad, somebody out there has Eastern exam, somebody out there has gotten to the college of their choice, somebody out there is having their first kiss, somebody out there has just had their first kid, somebody out there has just got a promotion, somebody out there has just got a job, somebody out there has just built or bought their dream house and somebody out there is rolling on their floor laughing their butt off this has been yab snacks bite-sized pods of digestible and actionable content

Starting point is 00:11:58 I'm shiv and if you don't meditate I hope we've convinced you at least to give meditation of shock and see the benefits of it until next time

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPSnacks: Say Om! Introduction To Meditation with Shiv | Mental Health

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