Every day we’re held back from things we really want to try, say, do or pursue by our fear— fear of failure, of being humiliated, and of disappointing ourselves. When you meditate, you become super aware that this life is finite, and not in a scary way. Meditation helps you see just how silly some fears are. When you’re meditating, it’s hard to find a reason not to do something, so long as it won’t literally kill you.
You may not have even realized that you walked around in fear. You may have never quite understood that the feeling you have around a certain subject, place, person or situation is in fact fear. And since you didn’t realize you were experiencing fear, you didn’t try to change your feelings. Instead, you continued to go up against a wall. Once you realize how fear operates in many areas in your life, meditation helps you to eliminate it and function more freely in those areas.
Nobody wants to think of his or her life as painful. It’s much easier to attribute other traits to difficult events like “eye-opening,” “educational” and “strengthening.” And while an event might have been all of those things (and it’s good you see that), that doesn’t eliminate the pain around it. Meditation has a way of making you recognize very precise times of your life that you associate with pain — maybe your childhood, or a particular event during young adulthood — and once you recognize that pain, you can start to work it out.
When you deal with other people, you may feel that they are very different and distant from you. When you meditate you can suddenly lose feelings of safety, or inadequacy, or pride or shame you may have attached to your job, your home, your appearance and your physical life overall. You shed yourself of all of those and what’s left is sometimes the feeling that everyone is connected. If you meditate regularly, you can learn not to place too much value on physical things or people. When you do that, you can suddenly feel an immense amount of confidence around just about anyone.
If you’ve always struggled with your weight, or had an unhealthy relationship with food, meditation stands a chance of “fixing” you. When you get into a deep state of meditation, you lose a sense of your body. You may walk around most days feeling heavy (or maybe skinny!) or sluggish. Either way, you’re ultra aware of your body. When you meditate, you realize how you can feel about yourself without concerns about your body. Many people who meditate want to perpetuate the feeling of forgetting their body and try not to put themselves in situations that make them too aware of their bodies — like overeating, or leaving themselves hungry. Some, through meditation, develop a balanced, healthy relationship with food, seeing it as just a way to satisfy the body.
You know with your head that you cannot predict the future, but do you really know it in your gut? Do you operate on the idea you have no control over the future? Probably not. You may constantly act on your over-analysis of situations, and your predictions of the future. When you meditate, you become so in the moment that you become totally clear on the fact that the moment is all that exists. You may stop finding reasons to apply energy to figuring out the future. During meditation, there is no future.
For many, meditation has the power to help recall dreams. Because they’re sometimes painful or emotionally uncomfortable, our dreams can be forced into our subconscious. But it feels safe to return to them during meditation, and you can learn a lot about your feelings and thoughts from your dreams.
When you meditate, you start to shed emotions connected to your physical life, and when this happens, you feel energy. When you become aware of yourself as energy, you can usually pick up on what types of energy others are. Maybe you could never quite understand how you felt about a certain person because you were trying to decipher them with your head. But when you learn to experience yourself as energy, you learn to identify other energies you want — or don’t want — around you.
Have you ever felt drawn to a person, or an opportunity, or a job, and not known why? Perhaps another one seemed to make “more sense,” but your intuition guided you towards this one job or person. That is your deeper understanding of your job here. Are you here to help people? Are you here to heal people? Are you here to guide people? When you meditate, the answer comes clear to you: you have a job here. And it’s a specific job. You’ll start making decisions a little less with your head because you won’t be concerned with that day’s or even that year’s goal: you’ll begin making decisions based on your intuition or your “higher self” because that is who has your job on this planet in mind.
If you haven’t figured it out yet from this list, there are many things that, through meditation, you realize are not real, or serve absolutely no purpose. When you meditate, you get in touch with your real energy, your real job on this planet, and you see a rather linear path between the two.
