Daily Dose of English 133
Meditation
Daily Dose of English 133
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about meditation. which is something that I don't actually know that much about, but I thought it would be sort of fun to talk about here and what I think about it and that sort of thing because meditation is something that I would like to improve at in the future and get better at and to do more often. So meditation is when you basically just sit and you meditate on something, right? That's using the word to define the word, so that doesn't work, but it generally has to do with trying to do as little as possible and just existing. Oh, excuse me. There's plenty of different ways to do it, but the most common way is to try to rid your mind of all thoughts and try to just be in your body. And there's many reasons that people say that it's a good thing to do. It helps with your mindfulness, it helps with your stress, it helps with your energy levels, it helps with your anything and everything, people might say. But in general, people see it as a good thing. That's, I guess, the agreed upon consensus, you might say, is that generally, people that talk about meditation see it as either a good thing or a neutral thing. Nobody is really out there saying that you shouldn't meditate, it will hurt you. There's people that say, it's not for me, or I don't wanna do it, or whatever, that's fine, but there's really nobody out there saying it's bad for you, it's unhealthy, or something like that. And the reason that I wanted to talk about it is because I've been thinking about meditation a little bit and I've tried it in the past, but it didn't really work for me. And because what I would do is I would sit down on a chair and I would find that I couldn't not think, if that makes sense. I was always thinking about something, even if I like, I don't know, lost, or tried to not think, it would just, my brain would start thinking again, if that makes sense. And so I was like, okay, I can't not think, this isn't right, I just, this isn't, I'm not doing it right, I can't do this. I was using a guide at that point, like an app that was sort of telling you what to do and doing a guided meditation, and it just wasn't helping. I'd also done like some other guided meditation stuff that people in real life know. Yeah, I guess in real life or live, like a real person would sort of say that in the room and try to meditate. There's a couple of different methods that I'll go through in a second. But specifically, I remember one of them, which is where you are supposed to think or like picture an image of a beach. And on the beach, there's a, like the waves crashing over the beach and drawing it, like there's a letter, number one, and then the waves wash it away. And then there's a number two, waves wash it, like, and then you go up and up and up until you can, you're sort of not thinking about anything. You're just seeing the waves. And when I tried that, I realized that I couldn't see things. I couldn't think of images in my mind. And that was one of the first memories that I have of realizing that I can't see things in my mind. There's something called aphantasia, which I'll actually talk about in another episode. That sounds fun. But basically I can't do that. I do not see things in my mind, which is weird for some people, but for me, it's normal. And so that didn't work. I was like, okay, I guess I just can't meditate. And so I'd kind of given up for a long time. And recently, I think I, I don't even know where I heard it or read it or something, but somebody or something said that it's like, it's a skill that you have to build up. You're not like at the beginning, your mind is going to wander and you're not, your thoughts are always going to be going wild. And what you have to do is slowly train your mind by just reconnecting it to your breath. or refocusing on your breath again and again and again and again. Oh, excuse me, I have the burps right now. And so over time, as you get better at that, your mind stops to wander off, right? You train your mind to just focus on essentially nothing, on your breath, on whatever it is. And realizing that helped me a lot to understand the purpose and what meditation is. It's essentially to train your mind to not do that excess thinking. And that's a really helpful way for me to think about it because I didn't really get what the end goal was. So the goal was to get a certain time amount, I guess, but what is that doing? But this realizing it in this different way, it's like, oh, I see. The goal is to train your mind to not do anything and then not do anything for whatever, 10, 15, 20 minutes. And that is where the helpful stuff comes in. Your mind has this time to relax, right? It's almost like if you're trying to not move your body or something to relax it and to rest, You have to train your body not to twitch or to move or to stand up and then just lay there, right? And that's sort of what you're doing with this meditation. It's different than sleeping. It's different than resting. It's this active, nothing essentially, which is sort of a cool way for me to think about it and it helps a lot. So now I actually understand what the purpose is or like the goal that I'm doing it. And so I don't feel bad when I can't do it yet. When my mind wanders, I realize, oh yeah, that's fine. That's just me learning how to meditate. And then at a certain point when I can maintain that focus, that focus on nothing basically, that's when I've started to learn how to do it. And so right now I'm not doing super regular meditation, but I'm trying to do it in little blocks and just build up that muscle of focus on nothing. And my goal is to be able to meditate easily for 10 minutes a day. That's all that I'm aiming for right now. And I don't know when, I'm just gonna do it slowly a little bit every day to try to build up that muscle and we'll see how far I get. Maybe I'll do a part two on this a little bit later when I've I guess, practiced a bit more, if that makes sense, and gotten a little bit further in my journey, but yeah. Oh, and then, now, to finish out, I wanna talk about a couple of different ways to do meditation, because there's a couple of common recommendations for how to do it, because I'm not a huge fan of the audio guides. I think those are, they're fine. If you want that, that's fine, but I think that finding a very simple, thing to do is and then just doing that and practice having your mind not wander away from it is better for most people because it's easier, it's all within you, you control it and you can make it match your personal style or your life or whatever it is. Plus you don't need to pay for some service that's just going to be audio files. So the first I think the most common way is on your breath to just breathe into your nose and out through your mouth Maybe take take a breath with me right now do it breathe in through your nose And out through your mouth That's called a deep breath, and that's a little bit more than you would do during a meditation. Your meditation breaths are a little bit lighter that you kind of breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, some pace more like that. And that's it. Your entire focus is on that breath, on that in and out process. And as soon as you realize that you're thinking of something random, you go, nope, nope, nope, back on the breath. And then you'll think about something random again. No, no, no, no, no. Back on your breath. And you're slowly training up your mind to not jump to random things. I know that I think about totally random stuff all the time in my meditation or when I'm just sitting down. And so it will happen, but you can get better at it. The next common way is what is often called a full body scan. And so what you do there is you start at the top of your head and you just imagine the top of your head and the feeling there and you try to focus your energy at the top of your head and then on your forehead, then on your eyebrows, then on your temples, then on your eyes. Then on your ears and you slowly go down your entire body all the way down to the tips of your toes and the tips of your fingers. and you slowly just sort of just try to push your energy and your thinking into those specific locations and then you go back to the top and maybe do it again or even three times. And that can be a really helpful calming exercise as well for some people if you have anxiety or other sort of issues like that. A lot of people say that it helps a lot to just do a full body scan to sort of reset and not think about anything else for a couple minutes. And the last, I think, maybe more famous method is like a chant, where you have some kind of either just sound that you make or a phrase that you say just again and again and again. I don't do this and I've never actually seen anybody do it. On like TV shows, you might hear somebody say, om. Om. And it's a very similar thing to like the breath, except that instead of just breathing out, you're humming out. Something like that, whatever it might be. And that's the last common way that you'll see. I'm sure there's dozens of other ways to meditate. It's not like it's a solved thing that you can just read one book on and figure out. But yeah, that's all the time that I have for today. I hope that this episode was kind of useful for you and that you enjoyed listening to my perspective on meditation. And I'm curious to know your thoughts. Let me know down in the comments. Do you meditate? Are you going to try? But that's all for today. See you tomorrow.
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