Unlocking the Power of Meditation: Benefits, Techniques, and Practical Insights (Eric Solo) EP 7 S2

啟動冥想之力：好處、技巧和實用見解

Join Eric on the Taiwanica podcast in an enlightening episode that unveils the transformative potential of meditation. Delve into the essence of meditation practice, debunk myths, and explore the incredible array of physical, mental, and emotional benefits. Discover practical tips, such as ideal timings, places, and techniques, to integrate meditation seamlessly into your daily life. Eric shares invaluable insights on enhancing focus, creativity, and managing emotions through mindfulness. Embrace a journey toward inner peace and self-improvement through meditation.

加入台灣百科節目中的 Eric，探索一個啟發人心的集散地，揭示冥想的轉化潛力。深入了解冥想實踐的本質，揭開迷思，探索驚人的身心靈好處。發現實用的技巧，例如理想的時間、地點和技巧，將冥想無縫地融入您的日常生活。Eric分享了寶貴的見解，如何通過正念增強專注力、創造力，並管理情緒。通過冥想，踏上通往內在平靜和自我提升的旅程。

Here are some key points that Eric talks about:

1. Physical Benefits of Meditation:
   Regular meditation can heighten pain tolerance, effectively reducing discomfort in areas like stiff shoulders or knees. Eric's personal experience highlights how consistent meditation practice helps alleviate such pains, making them less noticeable or even disappearing. This physical benefit underscores meditation's potential to manage and alleviate common bodily discomforts.
2. Mental Clarity and Focus:
   Eric emphasizes that meditation enables individuals to quiet the mind's repetitive chatter, enhancing focus, creativity, and mental clarity. By reducing the need to constantly absorb information, meditation empowers individuals to turn down the volume on internal chatter, fostering relaxation and a more relaxed state of mind. This mental benefit allows for better decision-making and a more serene approach to daily scenarios.
3. Emotional Wellness and Conscious Presence:
   Through meditation, individuals can process emotions by being consciously present in the moment. Eric compares emotions to layers of glasses obstructing one's perception of reality. Meditation gradually removes these layers, allowing for clearer emotional processing and a more direct experience of the present. This emotional benefit highlights meditation's ability to foster emotional wellness and a deeper connection with one's inner state.

這裡是Eric談到的一些要點：

1. 冥想的身心益處:
   定期冥想能提高痛苦忍受力，有效減輕肩頸僵硬等不適。Eric 的個人經驗強調，持續冥想練習有助於緩解這些疼痛，使其變得不那麼明顯甚至消失。這種身體上的好處凸顯了冥想管理和緩解常見身體不適的潛力。
2. 心智清晰度和專注力:
   Eric 強調，冥想使個人能夠平靜內心的重複喋喋不休，提升專注力、創造力和心智清晰度。通過減少對不斷吸收信息的需求，冥想使個人能夠減少內部喋喋不休的聲音，培養放鬆和更寧靜的心態。這種心理上的好處讓人能夠做出更好的決策，並對日常情景更加從容。
3. 情緒健康與正念在當下:
   通過冥想，個人能夠在當下有意識地處理情緒。Eric 將情緒比喻為阻礙個人看清現實的眼鏡層層堆疊。冥想逐步移除這些層次，讓個人能夠更清晰地處理情緒，更直接地體驗當下。這種情緒上的好處凸顯了冥想促進情緒健康和更深層次與內在狀態連結的能力。

Transcript

Meditation episode

[00:00:00] This is episode seven, solo Eric on Taiwanica podcast. What's going on everybody? Eric here doing a episode for you about meditation. Today is question that I've been asked a lot by many people about my meditation practice and what are the benefits of doing meditation. So today I'm going to be giving you a clear descriptive analysis of what meditation is, how you can do it, what time you can do it, and all the other parts of meditation that usually confuse people about the process of doing it.

So I hope you're excited about this episode. Let's go ahead and dive on in to today's meditative practice. So first of all, I just want to Open the door to what meditation is. A lot of people think that meditation means that you have to go onto a top of [00:01:00] a mountain, shave off all of your hair, wear a robe, and sit silently doing nothing all day.

And even though that is a meditative practice, that is not what you have to do in order to meditate. Okay, everyone is capable of doing meditation. I do meditation every single day. And as if you're watching this on YouTube, you can tell I got a lot of hair. Besides that, you can definitely know that meditation is for everyone.

It's something that we were all gifted to be able to do, similar to being able to run and walk. And so, what are we doing when we're meditating? Meditative practice is to help us re center ourselves. And re centering can mean a lot of things. But, to make it really simple for you to understand, centering yourself means to calm yourself down.

[00:02:00] By calming yourself down, You are able to gain what's called the creative intelligence. And creative intelligence is another word for being conscious. And conscious is another word for being in the present moment. And being in the present moment means you are here. You are now. Okay, so all of these words are things that have been thrown around in articles, newspapers, online, say, social media, even does it, but they all kind of get beat.

Used in these different ways to kind of confuse a lot of people of well, what is exactly going on? There seems to be a lot of vocabulary that look like words I know but they're being used in this way in that way and so it gets a little bit confusing Meditation is simply just the act of you calming down and focusing only on [00:03:00] yourself and the world around you through your senses.

So that can mean the sounds that you hear outside of your window. It could be a car driving by or a bird chirping. it Could even be a dog barking. And All you're doing is paying attention to that. Another side of meditation is focusing inward, inside of your body. What are the feelings that you're feeling?

What is your body sensations? Or what are the thoughts that you're having? All of this is interconnected with this exercise. And so a lot of people will start to ask, Well, I've heard before that when I do meditation, I should not be thinking. about anything. And so what they try to do is stop their thinking and My biggest recommendation that I've been told and I will tell you is stopping your thinking is only [00:04:00] gonna hurt It's gonna make give you a headache So trying to force yourself to not think is not meditative purpose.

Okay At one point, you're going to want to have space in between your thoughts. Have that space be silent, and that will be beneficial, but your goal is not to force yourself to stop thinking. So hopefully that makes a clear, distinctive difference between the two. Our goal is to separate ourselves from the thoughts that we're having, and separate ourselves from the feelings we're having inside our body.

And when we do this, a whole bucket full of benefits comes into our life, and I'll get more into that towards the end of this episode. So hang in to the end of the episode for you to know more about the benefits. For now, what I want to just share is a couple of [00:05:00] easy things that you can do today to implement meditation into your life.

So that it doesn't feel like a chore or a burden or even something that feels impossible for you to do. A lot of people tell me that they can't meditate. Why? The biggest reason they say is they fall asleep. And so when I hear this, I always have a little chuckle. Not at them, but at myself. Because I too, when I first started meditating, fell asleep many times.

And the reason for it was because I didn't know why I was meditating. And so, my brain, when it was closing its eyes and relaxing, what do I usually do when I close my eyes and relax? I go to sleep, right? So, it's just a natural process that your mind is telling you, Oh, yeah, my eyes are closed. Hey, body, it's time to go to sleep.

And so the body shuts [00:06:00] down. Right. But if you have a purpose or an intention, the word I prefer is intention then the process of doing meditation becomes more idealistic and something that you can potentially gain from. So we're going to talk about that now. Okay. So the first thing is meditation is very similar to an exercise.

And if you do meditation correctly and do it for a long period of time, you actually could consider meditation an exercise because it raises your heartbeat, you're going to be burning energy, you're going to be focusing a lot on yourself, and if you have some sort of watch or ring that helps you calculate your calories, you will actually see that your calorie count will go significantly up when you're meditating.

sitting, doing nothing, surprisingly. For example, for me, if I go through a one [00:07:00] hour meditative practice and I'm calculating my calories from it, it comes out to an equivalent to me doing a 20 minute swim. It's phenomenal. It's, it's amazing how many calories that you can burn by just sitting on the floor of meditating.

So, that's one purpose that I wanted to share with you today. Another purpose is going to be from the benefits section. And so, I will tell you the rest of the benefits towards the end. But next, what I'm going to tell you is about where meditation is best to do, time meditation is best to do, and Who you could do it with and who you should probably do it without.

So I'm gonna start that now. The first one is where. Okay, so ideally when you do meditation it can be in many places, but some of the best places that you could do it are going to be [00:08:00] Either in a enclosed room, so similar to your office or a your bedroom. As long as there's a door and there's some way to be by yourself in that room, even if you have pets, like the pet's gotta go out then if you are secluded or you're by yourself in this room, that will be the best place at home.

Now, the other place that you could do it is in nature. If you want to do walking meditation, that's another possibility of just walking in nature and absorbing the world around you is also considered meditation. So there are many different ways that you could do it, but the two most common ways is sitting down on the floor in a room by yourself, or walking through nature and just taking in the land around you.

Okay?[00:09:00] Those are the two easiest ones for you to start today if you really wanted to add this to your life. Now, what time is good? So, if you do nature obviously, morning and afternoon will be better. Night time, not so idealistic because there's, it's a little bit dangerous, so, don't recommend night time meditation walking.

On the other hand, with meditation at home, when you're sitting in your private room, the best times are usually when it is night outside, and that could be In the early morning when it's dark or when it's actually night time before you go to bed. So, my preferred times are right when I wake up and right when I go to bed.

And there are many scientific reasons for that and I'll save that for a future episode. But the main reasons why I do that is because it's the easiest time to focus and have the least amount of [00:10:00] interruptions. As much as everyone would love to meditate all day we all have our priorities that we need to take care of, such as our work, our friends, our family.

But fortunately for us, most of that kind of comes at a pause at the nighttime and continues to be a pause until the early morning. And so, these are the best times to do your meditative practice. Of course, you can do it in the afternoon. If that is the only time that you have available, that is still, potentially, a great time to do it.

Most of the time, people ask me, what is a good time in the afternoon to do it? I always recommend around noon. And the reason for that is, on a spiritual level, that is when our energy is at its highest. So, if you really can't do it in the morning or at night, then the best third option would be at noon, around lunchtime, and preferably before you eat anything, because eating can [00:11:00] cause you to feel sleepy.

And so, always try to meditate with an empty stomach and an empty bladder, so try not to drink any liquids beforehand, too, because you might feel the urge to go to the bathroom in the middle of your meditation, and that can cause problems, too. Okay, so that's what time and where. Now, who do you want to do meditation with?

And who would it be a good idea not to do meditation with? Okay, so my recommendation with people, if you feel like you don't want to do this by yourself keep in mind meditation is totally acceptable to do alone. It's something that you are doing for the purpose of improving yourself. So, to need other people is not the truth.

You can and totally could do meditation alone. I do it every single day, alone. And it's a wonderful experience for me. However, if you do want to do it with people, okay, it's a wonderful experience as well, [00:12:00] because when two people or more are doing the same meditative practice together, somehow energy around you and in your mental state of meditation is enhanced.

If you think about it like a battery, okay when one battery is being used in a toy it usually can function, no problem. However, if the toy has three or four slots available for more batteries, then guess what will happen? Oh, the, toy will function even better. It will have more energy to function.

It will move faster. It will, have a much more benefit if it has all four batteries installed. So if we take that idea and put it into meditation, the more people meditating at the same time around the same idea. So for example, if they want to have more love in their life and they want to focus on loving meditation.

[00:13:00] And all four people or more, you know, there's people who could be hundreds or thousands. But the idea here is that if you have a few people doing the same meditation at the same time, that frequency of energy that's flowing like a battery is going to be heightened. Okay, so if you want to do it with more people, feel free.

so The people who you should do it with are going to be people who are in the same mindset as you. Okay, so if they all want to do loving meditation because their goal is to be more loving, then those are the right people to do it with. However, if you have someone in your life that you want to do meditation with, but their goal is not to be more loving, for example, their goal is completely different from yours, then perhaps you two doing meditation in different rooms would be the better focus.

Because here, if you're having these Two energies that are contracting each other, this could actually cause [00:14:00] some frequency to be disturbed. Okay, so the idea is to have a similar mindset, a similar goal in your meditation. And usually meditation is for a greater purpose, right? So, to become a better person.

And that's where the benefits come in. So when we are doing mindful meditation, so mindful here is just meaning to have an intention or to have a goal or to have a desire to come true, okay? With this mindful meditation, we can all work together to achieve something. Okay, and that's why people do meditation on a daily basis, thinking that, oh, if I want to have more success in my life, they can sit down, do a meditation that focuses on success.

Okay, on the other hand, if you have something about love, since we brought that up earlier, if you want to feel more love in your heart, [00:15:00] and you do a loving meditation. You can generate this energy just similar to if we were cultivating plants in a greenhouse, okay? If we have these seeds that we plant in soil in a greenhouse over time, these plants will start to grow out of the soil and start becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.

So the same idea with meditation here, but through an energy point of view. We don't have plants that we can actually see, but we can have plants that give us feelings, okay? So that's what we're doing here with this loving meditation example and say I want to Really bring a lot of love into my life. I want to be a more loving father I want to be a more loving husband.

I want to be a more loving friend Whatever it is All I need to do is focus on love in my heart when I'm sitting down doing my [00:16:00] meditation. And there are techniques that I will be happy to share with you on how you can do that. I'll share one with you right now. And you can take this into your meditative practice.

So, one that I just recently learned that I am now going to put into my practice is four phrases that you do. And you do one phrase for every inhale. Okay, so that means there will be two phrases for inhales and there will be two phrases for exhales. Okay, so it's all around the idea of the words you're trying to accumulate more in your life.

So I'm going to just keep the love example going because that's what we're talking about in today's episode. So the first one that we're going to do, I'm going to pull out my notes for this, is this. I choose love, is what we say on the inhale, and on the exhale we [00:17:00] would say, I feel love. And then on the inhale one more time, I know love.

And on the exhale we would say, I am love. And you just repeat these four phrases over and over again. By doing so, you will start to accumulate the feeling of love. And at first when you start doing meditation and it's very new to you, this kind of practice might feel a little bit bizarre and strange and you want to question it.

And this is a natural process because you haven't done this for either a very long time or ever. And so your mind is going to do its job and ask lots of questions like why are we doing this, this seems weird, I don't want to do this, this is odd, and it's going to go crazy with the questions and [00:18:00] the point of views.

If this happens to you, don't feel less excited, try your best to not take in all of the opinions that your mind is giving you because The mind is designed for what has happened in the past, and so it can compare to that to help you right now, okay? And if your past doesn't have meditation in it, it's gonna feel really weird.

Let me give you another really good example of what that might be like. Okay, if you are someone who speaks a foreign language, okay so for me, I speak, I speak four languages and so when I first started learning Chinese, for example, my mind never had Chinese before when I was first starting, and I started when I was about 27 years old, okay, so when I started, my brain was like, Eric, you know, we know Japanese, so [00:19:00] let's just say Japanese instead.

And I was like, no, I'm learning Chinese now. And so I kept on trying to learn Chinese, but every time I would say a new Chinese word, somehow the next word right after it would be a Japanese word. It was, it was very funny and frustrating. And every time I was speaking Chinese, I had a Japanese accent. My mind had a really hard time letting go.

And it kept resisting my desire to speak Chinese. So this is very normal for any kind of situation. Whether you're learning a new skill, or starting a new job, or moving to a new country, your mind is going to do this. Meditation is no exception. This is exactly what's going to happen. And it's okay!

Because after you keep doing it, and keep trying, sooner or later your mind will go quiet. It will go silent, and it will start to feel more focused. Here are the [00:20:00] benefits of meditation. One of them is what I just said. Your focus will be absolutely clear when you start meditating on a continuous basis.

Okay? Work will become playful. You'll feel creative all the time. Problems won't feel like problems. Problems will start to feel like opportunities. And every time you have a new opportunity, you'll start to get excited about The new thing that you can create instead of struggling with the problem that's in front of you.

Another great benefit on a physical level is you will start to sleep better. And who doesn't want to sleep better, right? Especially if you do meditation right before you go to bed. I highly recommend it if you have sleeping problems. If you wake up in the middle of the night or you have a lot of dreams and you wish you could sleep deeper.

Meditation before bed is always a great solution for that. Another one, if you have blood pressure issues, good news for you, it lowers blood pressure. So, you can have a more [00:21:00] restful heart, in other words. Okay, those are the majority of the big benefits that you can easily see on a physical level. But some that people don't realize is that mental issues can also be alleviated or helped or healed through meditation.

I can't forget one physical benefit. That benefit is your pain tolerance is heightened. So, when you have a pain, a common pain, like for me, I have a stiff left shoulder and a stiff left knee. And every time, if I don't do meditation for a long period of time, The, the pain starts to become apparent or something I can notice again very easily.

However, when I do meditation, that pain seems to just disappear. Okay, so now mental. Some of the mental benefits besides focus and creativity is, [00:22:00] a lot of people these days are always absorbing more information. Okay, and that's great. We live in a society where information is A very important part of success.

Okay, but that's not necessarily the thing that we need to do at every single moment of our day. Okay, we have families we want to talk to, we have friends we want to meet, we have our own bedtime, we have our free time. We don't want to absorb information in every single scenario. And so, when you do meditation It becomes easier for you to turn off the switch of needing to absorb information or to remind yourself of information or to listen to the little voice in your head telling you things that you already know on repeat, right?

For example you know, you just learned something new about your business or at your job and your mind is constantly repeating it in your head over and over again and you're like, I already know. What it is and your mind [00:23:00] says that's nice and then they keep on doing it again and again I'm sure a lot of people can agree with me that they've had moments like this before Meditation helps you turn that sound down to the point where you can identify That oh, that's just a sound in my head, but that's not the loudest sound in my head Okay, that's I am able to listen to other things like what I actually want to do today or what I want to focus on So by turning down the volume on that voice of repetition and chatter.

That's what we call it is chatter. It helps you be able to focus better and be more relaxed in most of your scenarios. Okay. The next one is impulsive reaction. Okay. So when we meditate, impulsive reactions in our thoughts. tend to be easier to control and stay distant from. So, let's say, for example, you're in a fight with somebody.

Okay, someone close to you. A husband, a wife, a friend. Doesn't matter [00:24:00] who. But sometimes when you get in a fight with that person, it's usually because it's easy to remember the things that they did that caused you to feel upset before. Okay, and so when that happens, you're starting to think about, oh, how can I respond based on how I responded previously?

In other words, an impulsive reaction, okay? When we do this, impulsive reaction, we're actually not focusing on right now, we're focusing on the past, and this is why we repeat problems that we did before. So, when we meditate, it actually gives us an opportunity to change, to choose a different option, even though our mind will say, hey, you did this option before, let's use it again.

You're thinking, I don't want to use that because I know it caused me pain last time. And to avoid the pain, you can, you choose a different option. And see how that goes instead. [00:25:00] Opportunity instead of problems. That's another great benefit. So that's just physical and mental. There's also emotional benefits of meditation.

One of those is to be conscious. Or, like I said previously, what is conscious? Presence and what is presence being here in the now. Okay, so here you can be here in the now with your emotions Okay, and by doing this by being in them now With your emotions it will help them Process. Okay, the another word for emotion that comes from Latin Is disturbance.

Okay? So when we have an emotion, it's actually disturbing our presence, our now. Okay? So if we're angry, angry is adding a layer or a a pair of glasses, sunglasses above our view of [00:26:00] right now, I'm seeing now in an angry way, right? I'm wearing angry sunglasses. That's because. of the emotion. And this emotion is our disturbance.

It's disturbing our now. So, when we sit down and meditate and focus on these emotions, we're taking off one layer of glasses at a time. Okay? And each time we take off more and more of those glasses, we're getting closer and closer to the now. The present moment. And when we do that, that's where all of those benefits I just previously mentioned come in into your life.

So, as you can see, there are lots of great things to earn by just sitting down and meditating. Now, the last thing people ask me is, how long should I meditate? It really just comes down to your intention, or your goal, and how willing you're [00:27:00] going to be to make this goal a reality in your life. Okay, so I always recommend start small and work your way up.

So, some of my clients will start as little as 5 minutes a day, and they work it up. Over a year time, they get from 5 minutes to 30 minutes a day. That's great. As I previously mentioned, I do an hour in the morning, and I also do about 20 minutes to about 30 minutes at night. That's because I've been doing it for quite a long time.

But I know people who start meditation and immediately get to the same amount of time as I'm doing. That's because their intention is high. They have a big goal that they want to achieve, whether it's to have clear mentality or less physical pain, or to be free of all the emotions that they've built up in their life.

Okay? They have big goals, and so big goals come with lots of meditation practice and at some point. You get to your meditation practice [00:28:00] where you have achieved your goal and then you can think about how much time do I want to put in now. So it's not something that you need to consistently stay at forever at some sort of level.

Like you see monks in the mountains meditating for hours and hours and hours. That's because they have really, really big goals. For some of them it's to reach enlightenment and that's a big goal for some people. So it all depends on you. That's the answer to that question. And with that question, I'm going to stop here.

I hope you found this video interesting, or this podcast episode if you're listening on your podcast channel. Thank you for listening to all this episode. If you liked it, please let me know. You can like it or subscribe to the YouTube channel. Please leave a review if you're on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

It helps other people find this information. And finally, as a last note I have been writing articles [00:29:00] about meditation and mindfulness on a website called Medium. I will put the link in the description down below. They are free for everyone to look at, so definitely feel free to check them out. They explain more details and more meditations.

that you can do help this process move forward. I hope that you have a wonderful meditative journey and feel free to ask me questions on Instagram about it. Be more than happy to help you get through this together. Thank you again and I hope you have a wonderful day. This is Eric, see you next time.