Meditation & Mindfulness As A Way Of Living! - Ego Death!
Meditation is a simple way to increase mindfulness and compassion in everyday life. At this point, we’ve talked quite a lot about meditation. But what is it exactly? In essence, when you meditate, you sit comfortably and focus on your own breath. During this time, your mind will inevitably wander off to other things. That’s okay! When this happens, simply refocus your mind on your breathing without judgment.
The nice thing about meditation is that you don’t need anything to get started – anyone can meditate anywhere. So, meditation is easy. But what’s in it for you? Why should you bother? For starters, meditation increases mindfulness by teaching us to view the contents of our mind with nonjudgmental distance.
According to Buddhist teachings, we have three habitual responses to everything we experience:
• We want it. Think about that gut-level desire to eat a delicious cookie.
• We reject it. Imagine swatting at annoying mosquitos.
• We zone out. Have you ever listened to a flight attendant’s safety instructions all the way through? Yeah, right.
Mindfulness gives us a fourth option: we observe without judgment.
Your first experience with mindfulness during meditation often happens when you experience some sort of uncomfortable situation, like an itchy nose or sore legs. In these cases, you simply observe the pain with impartiality and without reacting or moving. In fact, recent scientific studies have shown that mindfulness and meditation can have profound effects on your mental and physical health, and thus your well-being.
Meditating can even make you more productive, regardless of how you live your life simply by helping you conquer your ego and manage your emotions.
Meditation does your body good, helping curb the effects of stress and even disease. It is not only good for the mind; it also can have profound positive effects on the body through mindfulness.
Meditation can also be beneficial in battling major depression, drug addiction, binge eating, and smoking. It can help cancer patients better handle stress and senior citizens avoid loneliness. Meditation can also stem from the effects of ADHD, asthma, psoriasis, and even irritable bowel syndrome.
Finally, meditation allows you to sculpt the one tool you have for perceiving and experiencing the world: your brain. Indeed, studies have shown that training your brain through meditation can improve your resilience, impulse control, and your overall level of well-being.
Conquering your ego is one of the keys to leading a happier life. If you fail to control/suppress your ego you will never be able to be satisfied & will never be truly happy. Controlling your ego does not mean that you have to lose your edge or stop being a productive member of society.
In fact, according to Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn, practicing mindfulness actually makes you more creative and more productive, as it clears your mind of unhelpful assumptions and routines, thus making space for new ideas and thoughts.
In this blog, you’ll discover:
• why being selfish isn’t such a bad thing;
• why you sometimes find yourself gazing into the fridge without being hungry; and
• how meditation might save you from suffering a heart attack.
The ego is your inner narrator or your sense of “I.” It’s the voice that tells you what to do.
We hear the word “ego” quite often. Your spouse might call you egotistical; your best friend is egocentric; and armchair philosophers invoke Freudian buzzwords, blaming personal shortcomings on the ego.
But the ego is far more nuanced than we give it credit. In our everyday interactions, we often refer to the ego as the source of pride, conceit and amour propre, or self-love.
To most, the ego is the source of behavior that is self-serving or unconcerned with the well-being of others. To Freud, the ego represents a psychological mechanism that mediates between our morality and our base desires.
But these definitions of ego still don’t get to the heart of the matter. We can talk about deep desire or fiery pride, but we still can’t explain what’s going on in our heads when we do strange things like open the fridge without actually being hungry.
A better way to think of your ego and certainly one that offers you the most insight into your behavior is as the voice in your head.
Your ego comments on your actions and behavior from the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you drift off to sleep at night, telling you what to do and what not to do.
This isn’t the kind of “voice in your head” that is attributed to psychosis. Rather, you can think of it as a voice that manifests through your thoughts.
For example, your ego is the voice that tells you “I’m way too tired for the gym” even when you know that you could really stand to break a sweat. It’s what makes you obsessively check your emails a thousand times per day, or gaze into the refrigerator even when you aren’t hungry.
As you’ll see, the ego is responsible for a great deal of what you do. Luckily, taking steps to rein your ego can make us happier and healthier.
Your ego’s ravenous hunger for more can never be satisfied. It will always push you further.
The ego is never satisfied. It will always want, it will never be content and it will never be perfectly happy.
By design, the ego will always want more than it already has. When the ego is “fed” a new thing, this simply resets the baseline for desire; and immediately, the ego begins reaching for something more.
It doesn’t matter how many material possessions you have, nor does it matter how much money you’ve spent acquiring them – even if you don’t need it, you still yearn for the newest sports car or that hot new gadget.
The best meals are not satisfying, even when prepared by the best chefs. Soon you’ll become hungry and yearn for a meal that is even tastier than the last. In essence, no matter how many times you try to satisfy your ego’s desires, your ego will only want more.
The ego is obsessed with the past and the future, and in its obsession, neglects the present, thus keeping you from fully living in the now.
The ego loves to dwell in the past and thrives on the drama by keeping old wounds open. It’s the reason that you complain to your spouse about a work problem at dinner, and it’s what causes you to lament being jilted by your first love at 17, despite being happily married today.
Your ego constantly assesses your worth against the appearance, wealth, and social status of others, but will always find you failing. No matter how smart, beautiful, or wealthy you may be, according to your ego, there’s always someone smarter, more beautiful, or wealthier.
Thus, your ego will spur you to continually strive to become that “better” person.
But after achieving what your ego wants, will you be happy?
No. The ego is never happy. Just think of all the rich, famous, or fortunate people who have committed suicide, become addicted to drugs, or otherwise ruined their lives.
Control your ego by practicing mindfulness and becoming more compassionate toward others. This allows you to separate your emotions from your ego & control your ego.
There are some proactive ways of dealing with negative emotions. According to Brach’s teachings, there are four stages of accepting these feelings.
You must recognize the emotion, then allow it to exist, investigate its effects, and finally separate yourself from it through the practice of non-identification.
The author practiced this when he was concerned about a promotion. First, he recognized that he was worried. Next, he convinced himself that it was okay to be worried. Then he investigated how his body was handling the worry; he felt a buzzing in his chest.
And finally, he practiced non-identification, telling himself that he is bigger than his momentary concerns and that the moment would pass.
By recognizing that his fears over a promotion would not turn him into a habitually worried person, the author was able to separate himself from his emotions and conquer his ego.
When we practice meditation, we learn a valuable skill called mindfulness.
Mindfulness is the ability to respond – and not react – to our surroundings as well as our impulses.
Meditation increases our mindfulness by instructing us to immerse ourselves fully in the present moment, and not to be overwhelmed with life’s stressors.
For instance, when a colleague told the author that he would never become a big-time anchorman, he used his newfound mindfulness to respond rather than react. He didn’t let his ego and anger control him, but instead calmly asked his boss how he could improve his work.
Mindfulness doesn’t just improve our decision making; it also quite literally changes our mind. A university study observed that people who had taken an eight-week mindfulness course through meditation had developed thicker gray matter in the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion. Likewise, mindfulness training appeared to shrink the regions in the brain associated with stress.
Practicing mindfulness increases compassionate behavior, which is the practice of, practicing concern for your own well-being and the well-being of others, which is not something to be overlooked.
Demonstrating compassion toward yourself improves your decision making by allowing you to forgive yourself for mistakes and accept your flaws. In fact, studies have demonstrated that people trained in self-compassion meditation are more likely to demonstrate healthy behavior, such as quitting smoking or eating healthier. Likewise, being compassionate toward others actually helps you to become a more fulfilled person.
One study asked participants for a few days to wear tape recorders which would record their conversations. The recordings verified that participants who practiced meditation were more empathic, spent more time with other people, laughed more, and used the word “I” less. Indeed, we can use compassion for others to our own advantage. As the Dalai Lama put it: “Be wise selfish rather than foolish selfish.” When given a choice of activities to do with your free time, you might not think meditation sounds all that exciting. However, while it may not have the same reputation as mountain climbing or windsurfing, meditation is a way to live your life to the fullest.
So, is there a difference between meditation and mindfulness? There is! You should think of mindfulness as one form of meditation, and one that is best used in moderation.
Whereas many forms of meditation involve focusing the mind on one thing, be it a mantra or a candle, mindfulness is about opening yourself up to all sensations while allowing them to pass and not fixating on any one thing.
Mindfulness is certainly beneficial, but it’s also easy to become obsessed with it. So, keep in mind that it’s one method of self-improvement and that you needn’t spend every waking minute actively pursuing it.
Meditation shouldn’t be used as a strategy for avoiding life, despite the fact that many people have fallen into the trap of using the practice as a way to escape from life’s problems.
Certainly, it can be tempting to sit down, close your eyes, and calmly focus on your breathing rather than focusing on difficult problems like finding a job or dealing with a troublesome relationship. Nevertheless, meditation isn’t a way to build up walls that keep your obligations at bay. It’s a way of learning how to be present and in the moment – whether that moment is a difficult dispute with your partner or a wondrous view from the peak of a picturesque mountaintop. Meditation provides you with the skills to be fully present in the experience.
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