(2017-11-27) Meditation The Day You Became A Better Person

The Day You Became A Better Person

Why meditation will change your life & how to get started

Studies have shown that during periods of intense concentration, a distraction, such as stopping to reply to a message, browse social media or answer a phone call, will take us on average 20 minutes to regain the level of focus we had before the distraction. After just two weeks of meditating, this catch-up time disappeared. If I lost my focus while working, I now regain it almost immediately.

For the past few years it’s taken me on average an hour to fall asleep. This has been the source of great frustration for me, as I see it as time wasted. Since I started meditating, I’ve been able to fall asleep within 10 minutes of getting into bed.

Two Simple Exercises

1. Just Note Gone

For every passing thought or memory, note that it has passed. When you hear a sound come and go, acknowledge that it has ended. Everything happening both inside and outside your head is ephemeral. At the end of every emotion — joy, sorrow or anger — just note that it is gone. After a few iterations of this technique, you might notice that by acknowledging the brevity of a thought, feeling or sound you regain a sense of the present.

2. Loving-Kindness technique

look around them, pick two people, and then think to themselves, ‘I wish for this person to be happy,’ and, ‘I wish for that person to be happy.’ He repeated this several times. As Meng says, it was just 10 seconds worth of thinking and yet everybody emerged from the exercise smiling.