Have you ever wondered what meditation is actually supposed to do, or even how to do it?
I've been asked about this a lot. And the way I view and use meditation is potentially very different than what someone new to the practice might expect.
Beyond Relaxation
I found that a lot of people who are newer to the practice have this perception that the main use case for meditation is relaxation and de-stressing.
While these can be valid use cases, in all 7 years since I began meditating consistently, I don't think I ever entered a meditation with the intention of simply relaxing.
The way I view meditation is similar to how a software developer might open the back end of their software to make changes to the code, so that it creates a shift in the program itself.
When you meditate, you retract your awareness from the physical character and begin traversing into higher planes of awareness. The higher the plane of awareness, the more access you have to the information and programs that are dictating your experience here in the physical.
Setting Intention
So the question is: What information do you want to look into?
All of these ideas are just some of the options available to you as intentions to set. Then we use the powerful tool of meditation to begin accessing this information and energy, so we can recode the programs in our mind.
The Highest Meditation
Perhaps the highest meditation, in my experience, is to meditate with a focus firmly fixed on the core of our being. That part of us that exists outside of space and time. The observer of all appearances.
If you can't immediately drop back from the physical mind into that pure awareness, which will likely be tricky at first, begin by meditating directly on your heart space.
The heart space contains the greatest concentration of and connection to the core frequency of your innate being. You could call it Soul connection.
Meditating on the heart space over time will allow you to tap into that frequency more and more, until such time that you realize the core of your being is all around. You are that. No inside, no outside. All that is, is you.
Practical Applications
Another example: you can discover and recode faulty programs.
Let's say you have some form of addictive habit you can't seem to shake. Addiction is typically a self-soothing mechanism used to distract or avoid uncomfortable feeling states that are still playing on a loop within the subconscious.
Meditation can be a powerful tool to break that circuit. You're essentially dropping into the level of awareness that gives you access to the origin of that information and energy, so you can unpack it and clear it out of the system.
What you'll notice is that eventually, whatever you were craving will lose its pull on you, until you can actively choose not to engage. And it may even vanish completely.
For a breakdown of what years of daily meditation actually produces, read I Meditated 1 Hour/Day for 5+ Years.
To trace specific patterns to their root, see The Golden Thread Technique.