Doing Meditation 15 Minutes Vs Having A Meditative Mind 24 by 7!
A book excerpt on how Skeletal Leap enables deep spirituality via energy healing, supported by science and psychology for mental health and self-improvement.
SKELETAL LEAP: THE MIND BODY EVOLUTION SERIES
Introduction:
In a fast-paced world, the concept of meditation has evolved from a spiritual practice to a wellness trend embraced by many.
In the 27th episode of Skeletal Leap, I invite you to explore the transformative power of skeletal meditation. The episode dives deep into how we can turn our daily actions into meditative experiences, emphasizing the importance of being present and engaged in every moment.
I highlight that traditional meditation often involves sitting quiet with eyes closed, focusing on specific thoughts or mantras.
However, I challenge this notion, suggesting that true meditation goes beyond these time-limited practices. Instead of merely sitting for an hour each day, I advocate for a lifestyle of continuous mindfulness—a state where every action, whether sipping wine or enjoying a meal, is approached with total awareness.
One of the key takeaways from the episode is the idea of “emptying the mind.” Here I explain that the mind is often cluttered with past experiences and emotional attachments, which can hinder our ability to fully engage in the present.
By learning to empty the mind, we can experience life more vividly, free from the distractions of our conditioned responses. This practice not only enhances our enjoyment of life but also promotes better health and wellness.
You are encouraged to experiment with your daily routines, such as eating your favorite dish slowly and mindfully. By doing so, you can rediscover the joy of each bite, experiencing it as if for the first time in life.
I emphasize that this practice can lead to a deeper connection with our actions, allowing us to live more passionately and joyfully.
As the episode progresses, I introduce the concept of skeletal re-posturing and breath control as methods to open our chakras and enhance our meditative experience.
By focusing on our breath and allowing it to flow naturally, we can infuse our lives with a sense of joy and spontaneity. This approach not only rejuvenates our nervous system but also helps maintain an empty mind, free from the burdens of past conditioning.
Ultimately, the message of this episode is clear: meditation is not just a practice to be done in isolation; it is a way of living here and now. By adopting a meditative mindset throughout our daily lives, we can achieve a state of joy and awareness that enriches our experiences.
Join me in this enlightening episode of Skeletal Leap and discover how to transform your life into a personal heaven through the art of being meditative 24 by 7.
🔑 Key Takeaways:
Why People Meditate: 76.2% of common people use meditation for general wellness or disease prevention.
How People Meditate: What exactly do we do when we sit in meditation with our eyes closed?
Meditating Vs Being Meditative: Once a truly meditative state is reached, we no more need to keep sitting for meditation everyday.
Turning Every Action into Meditation: How can we turn whatever we do into a meditation?
Emptying Mind And Then Keeping It Empty: through opening all the chakras via skeletal re-posturing and then addressing the extended exhalation of breath.
🎙️ Listen to the Journey:
📽️ Watch the Masterclass:
Transcript:
“How can we turn whatever we do into a meditation?
It is possible when we keep enjoying what we are doing every single moment of it.”
My name is Laadi Ojas. Welcome to “Skeletal Leap: A Living Adventure”. Skeletal Leap transforms one’s life into a personal heaven.
Today’s episode will tell you about skeletal meditation emptying the mind and then keeping it empty for kundalini awakening.
“Breathing is the highest form of meditation.” That is not me talking but a quote often attributed to different eminent authors or philosophers. In fact, meditation has been revered as a highly esteemed practice in human culture ever since human society took shape with sociocultural evolution. Lately, though, it has almost become a fashionable trend among the elite for their wellness concerns. On the other hand, people with a deep faith in religion follow it as a religious or spiritual practice. Thirdly, people with different kinds of lifestyle diseases are also advised to sit in meditation by none less than their own healthcare specialists.
The modus operandi of such meditations has mostly been to sit in an erect posture with eyes closed for a certain duration of time. During this period, the meditators are supposed to do something specific with their mind. What that something is widely varies depending on what they want it to achieve for them.
It looks like people have such great faith in meditation that they feel it can provide them with all kinds of things they seek.
Why People Meditate
A survey1 published by the National Institutes of Health in America on their National Library of Medicine practicing revealed that 76.2% of common people use meditation for general wellness or disease prevention, 60% to improve their energy and 50% to improve their memory or concentration.
Hence people’s priorities for what they expect out of meditation the most seem to be:
1. Health and wellness | 2. Energy | 3. Memory or concentration
How do we think meditation would be able to do what we want it to do for us? And, that too, just by doing it for an hour a day? For the remaining twenty-three hours, we are again going back to our unhealthy state of mind-body disposition.
Sitting for meditation for an hour or so has just become a fashion to satisfy ourselves of doing something good. It rather strengthens our ego further.
How People Meditate
Also, what exactly do we do when we sit in meditation with our eyes closed? Here are a few things that people are guided to do in the name of meditation:
Chanting mantras or affirmations | Counting beads | Counting breaths | Concentrating on a thought | Imagining a sequence
The above kinds of practices just numb the mind, sending it to a kind of stupor. It makes one feel as if one has become relaxed. But that is not what relaxation means. A lethargic mind is not a relaxed mind.
Mindfulness meditation, at least at face value, seems to be a better alternative for relaxing the mind. Mindfulness means focusing the mind on being an aware witness to whatever comes to it from moment to moment. People sit down in a cross-legged posture and start making all kinds of efforts to become aware of their minds’ dynamic content.
But mind, as such, is a fidgety child! It doesn’t pay much heed to our efforts. In fact, it loves to keep jumping from one casual thought, thing or action to another, like a monkey.
We try to witness it in its movement with our total awareness. It doesn’t say no. But then, it stealthily slips away from under our attentive control to some of its other unaware, casual concerns. We always need to keep bringing our awareness back on track.
But the problem is it gets bored over there in its pursuit of awareness. The very nature of the mind is to keep jumping from one concern to another, unaware. And the reason is that it is full of concerns, not only consciously but unconsciously as well. It tends to keep scanning everything within its consciousness and even underneath it, unconsciously.
It is this point alone that mindfulness, at its best, can take us to. We need to continuously keep exerting the pressure of our determination on the mind to tame it into being aware the way we want it to.
But then, who is this ‘we’ who is making all this Herculean effort to tame our mind? Isn’t it a part of our mind alone?
Anyway, even if we are able to relax the mind for an hour or so, it is not of much use. We are again going to fall back into the same unhealthy disposition. How do we expect it to do permanent good to us?
On top of it, the very idea of relaxing the mind is contradictory in itself. Mind in itself is the name of an entity full of contradictions, thereby fragmenting itself, and hence, fragmenting our ‘self’. As we already saw in Episode 20, those fragmented parts keep fighting with one another, making a noise. That is what is called a chattering mind. The techniques listed above try to merely calm it down by turning it numb or exerting pressure on it.
But the only rational way to stop its chattering is emptying its content. That is what we call emptying the mind. We have already discussed it in its operative details in the Episode 26. And that is what meditation must do if it is to do any real good to us.
At the same time, any such ‘real good’ should preferably not be limited to any specific duration of time. It should happen twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred and sixty-five days a year.
That simply means we should try to replace sitting for meditation with being meditative all day long. And that can only be done by making it our first nature.
Meditating Vs Being Meditative
Once a truly meditative state is reached, we no more need to keep sitting for meditation everyday. We simply need to live in a meditative state all day long. Once we have learnt how to do this, we need to say goodbye to the idea of ‘sitting in meditation’.
We need to empty our mind with every single breath exhaled while our chakras are open. This will mean that we can be meditative even while talking to someone, smoking a cigarette, sipping our wine or while making love, for that matter.
Turning Every Action into Meditation
How can we turn whatever we do into a meditation?
It is possible when we keep enjoying what we are doing every single moment of it. It makes us fully involved into the action with total awareness as opposed to getting indulged into it habitually.
Let us suppose that we are doing something that we like doing a lot. There is every risk of getting indulged into its action by emotionally getting attached to it. Let’s take an example of eating our most favorite dish. Even before we start tasting it, we have already conditioned our taste glands to taste something familiar that we like. And when we taste it, we don’t really taste it right now, we just taste our past perception of it. We live our mental past while chronologically being in the present. That is how the mind affects the brain’s perception by falsely limiting it to a perception of the past.
Now let us play a game. In the same scenario, let us pretend we have lost our memory. We no more remember that it is our favorite dish nor its taste. It depends on how good an actor we are, being our own audience at the same time. Let us start eating it now. We would effectively be tasting it for the first time in our life.
If we are unable to feign loss of memory, let us take our first bite very slowly, tasting it in its totality. This, too, will effectively result in the feeling that we are tasting it for the first time in our life.
Do you see a parallel between the two actions, i.e, pretending to have lost one’s memory and performing an action slowly in its totality? The result is the same in both scenarios. When we do something slow enough to do it in its totality, we have already kept our emotional mind aside which is akin to keeping our emotional memory aside.
And we taste the dish like we are tasting it for the first time in our life. This amounts to tasting it in the present moment. Liking or not liking it is no more relevant. What matters is tasting it afresh with all its passion and joy or even pain (if so ever).
Let’s repeat the same experiment, this time with a dish that we dislike the most. As we slowly taste it afresh in its totality, disliking it is not relevant anymore. What matters is tasting it afresh with all its passion and pain or even joy (if so ever).
When we perform an action slowly enough to be able to do it in its totality, we are no more governed by our mind. It is our nervous system that takes over. And our nervous system is way more intelligent than our mind. It does things with passion and joy or even pain. All emotional strings attached to the past experiences of liking or disliking simply vanish into thin air. And the nervous system then performs actions without ever emotionally liking or disliking them at all.
I don’t mean to say that slowness of an action is the only thing that leads to its totality. At times, it is just the opposite that works. For example, running to save a child from being overrun by a speeding car works in its totality only when done miraculously fast.
However, these same types of slow or fast actions, when non-meditative, are either lethargic or impulsive, performing those actions either extra-slow or extra-fast. That is when we call them mental lethargy or mental hurry. The key difference is that when the brain is in charge in an independent capacity, which is what I’m calling the truly meditative state, the speed of the action turns optimum; it is neither extra-slow nor extra-fast. The same happens to the quality of the action as well.
Mental lethargy and mental hurry as anti-meditative symptoms were never as serious as they have become today. The two are solely responsible for human actions being non-meditative.
It doesn’t have to be that way because, as we just saw above, being meditative all through the day, in whatever we do, is no rocket science.
And when we enter that meditative state, we no longer need to ‘sit’ in time-limited meditation. The very things we do become meditative. The mind no longer controls the brain and is restricted to play the role that it has been designed to perform. When the brain performs an action in its totality, it does register it in its memory cells.
But that memory is not accessible to the mind.
That is how the mind gets trained to remain empty and keep doing its job of comprehending reality quietly.
A meditative action full of joy performed in its totality with passion leaves no desire for recreating it in the future. Similarly, a meditative action, even if loaded with pain, performed in its totality with passion leaves no anxiety of avoiding it in the future, regardless of whether that need to avoid pain is based on the brain’s objective memory rather than the mind’s emotional memory.
When similar situations ever arise in the future, they become entirely new actions performed afresh right then. In both cases, no conditioning of the mind occurs, thus always keeping it empty. We are only left with an objective memory of the joy or the pain which our brain remembers along with all the other details of the said actions spontaneously.
But old habits die hard.
Our already conditioned minds pose a tough challenge to being emptied out in the beginning. For example, when we go out in the scorching sun in a hot climate, our mind contracts our facial muscles. That is how it may turn into an attack of tension headache for a certain duration of time. The same happens in a snowy blizzard in a cold climate. All these are conditioned reactions of a conditioned mind.
Let’s take another example to address this problem. Suppose we got an attack of tension headache. When it occurs, we generally tend to avoid it. But it keeps forcing its pain not only in our head but also on our psyche.
That is how trying to avoid it doubles its uneasiness on our system.
The meditative way to deal with it is to stop trying to avoid it. Let us rather accept it by sensing it in its totality. That is what people never do in general.
What happens next?
As soon as the mind is sidelined by such emotional acceptance, the brain takes the charge. We are left with sensing the said action in its totality with passion and pain.
The nervous system swiftly assesses something wrong in the system. It also recognizes the source of the pain in the muscles of the head being pulled down and tucked in. As soon as the neural signals direct the contracted muscles to relax, pain vanishes leaving our senses with passion and joy instead of passion and pain.
The mind remains empty until it gets afflicted by another habitual pattern of its conditionings.
This way, through being meditative all along, we can go on emptying our mind of its conditionings one by one.
Emptying Mind And Then Keeping It Empty
But as we have seen earlier, there is a much better way out. That way is through opening all the chakras via skeletal re-posturing and then addressing the extended exhalation of breath. The said impeccable procedure infuses every single moment with passion and joy, with action or without it. That is because breathing becomes an effortless action turning all other actions meditative as well, as and when they take place.
The procedure of Skeletal Leap rewards us with a surge of inexplicable joy with every single breath.
Every single extended exhalation rejuvenates the entire nervous system by keeping the mind emptied for its duration.
Skeletal Leap has the power to enable us, the Homo sapiens, for our next evolutionary leap.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Skeletal Leap: A Living Adventure! In the next episode, I will tell you about human achievements vs losses through homo sapiens bipedal evolution.
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🔗 Series Bridge:
This masterclass is a 19-week journey through my book, The Mind-Body Connection. If you missed the foundation, start here: The 16-Part Prequel: 14 Core Principles.
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Reference
Cramer, H., Hall, H., Leach, M., Frawley, J., Zhang, Y., Leung, B., Adams, J., & Lauche, R. (2016, November 10). Prevalence, patterns, and predictors of meditation use among us adults: A nationally representative survey. Scientific reports. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5103185/