7 Reasons to Meditate

I have meditated on and off and to varying degrees for over 10 years now. On average, I meditate once or twice per week, about 10-20 minutes per session. I don’t view myself as an expert on meditation, but I have had some interesting experiences from it that may help you or that could make you curious enough to try it.

These are 7 reasons to meditate, based on my experiences practicing it.

1.     Separate your Thoughts from Yourself

I have come to understand on a deeper level that I am not my thinking. In fact, through meditation, I have been able to separate myself from my thoughts. The thoughts are there, but I do not cling to them, and in practicing this, I no longer see the thoughts as my true self. I can reflect on the thoughts and interpret them if I wish, but sometimes I decide that they are not so important, and they are not me, so I do not need to focus on those particular thoughts.

2.     Be Relaxed and Mentally at Ease

Now, if someone gives me a list to remember, I can do it more easily because I am not experiencing thoughts like “don’t forget this, it’s important” and “sometimes you struggle to remember lists, maybe you should write it down” and “if you forget this, you’re going to make them mad – so you better not forget.” Strangely, I don’t “feel” more focused – I feel relaxed like it’s all okay. If I forget or misunderstand, it’s fine. In that relaxed mode, I can comprehend more without needing to verbalize and picture everything in my mind. The information is absorbed more readily.

3.     Remember More Dreams and Experience Them More Vividly

This is good and bad. I have had some dreams where loved ones died, and of course, this was troubling because I experienced it very vividly and realistically, and then later, I was able to remember the dream fully. However, I find it interesting to remember precisely what happens in my dreams - sometimes, I use this to reflect on my life path.

Ultimately, meditation has helped me to be mindful, present, and aware, and so it makes sense that by doing this in my dreams, I can experience them more vividly and remember them better. Rather than just dreams, I believe that my memory has improved in general through meditation. I believe this is because my mind is not considering all of the unimportant - and can focus fully on what is actually relevant at any given time.

4. Understand Your Dark Side

In meditation, if I am anxious or overly worried, sometimes dark thoughts or visualizations pop up, “interfering” with the meditation process. This used to worry me, but now I believe that rather than being an interference, it is a necessary part of meditation. Rather than dwelling on these dark thoughts or visualizations, I can see them and observe them without needing to fear, worry, or even react to them. I can see them without needing to allow them to affect me.

If this happens to you and you find it disturbing, you can always take a break from meditation or pursue an expert that can help you to work through this and benefit from the experience, rather than getting stuck at this point.

5.     Enter a Mode of “No-Thought.”

Many people may think this means thoughtlessness or mindlessness, but they are not the same. We tend to believe that those who think more are smarter or more capable somehow, but this isn’t necessarily the case. The more time I spend in no thought, the better I can accomplish my goals in life. The mind naturally runs wild and goes all over the place, thinking of things that are irrelevant or unhelpful or even harmful to us. I am more at peace in no thought, and I feel free not to be concerned with everything that the world focuses on. When I need to or choose to engage in thought, I can accomplish what I need to in a highly efficient way. Through meditations, I can produce the least amount of thoughts to meet my objectives – that seems to be the goal, anyway.

6.     Free Yourself from Negativity (or Negative Thinking Patterns)

Sometimes during meditation, I actually visualize or imagine that my neurons or neural networks are being freed from needing to create certain harmful or irrelevant pathways. For example, if I had a negative experience with someone in the past, does that mean my brain should forever associate that person with negative things? Perhaps it is better for my brain to literally rewire and stop needing to connect that person to certain negative ideas. I will imagine myself being released from these harmful patterns. And I think it works. I’m not sure if it works because I imagine it this way or if it works as an automatic feature of the meditation process. In time, I have spent very little energy thinking about things that I perceive as negative. I am aware of the negativity when it is there, but I do not create extra negativity in my mind by dwelling on it or cycling through it.

As a side benefit, I can often see through the negativity of daily life, and I find myself laughing at it - sometimes only mentally if it is inappropriate to actually laugh out loud. Many of us in this life get stuck in needing to react to the negativity around us. In doing so, we generate and spread our own negativity. Sometimes all you can do is laugh at the irony that people tend to react to negativity by spreading more of it. When your faucet is leaking, do you react to this by pouring extra water on top of it?

I am grateful that meditation helps me to avoid needing to repeat negative thinking cycles and negative behavioral patterns that I may have committed in my past. I can be free.

7.     Feel Interconnected with Everything

When I fall deeper into meditation, which is not always easy to achieve, I can reach a point where I do not sense my own body or mind. Rather, I may feel as if I am one with everything around me. This is not so easy to explain, but rather than being an active being with a goal or needs to accomplish something, I become just another point of awareness. I can still hear and feel, but I will manage to at least temporarily extinguish thought, the desire for thought, the desire to extinguish thought, and the desire to interpret thought.

This means that for any sensory experience I have, it seems as if it is important just for the sake of the experience itself, not because of how it relates to a self or a prior thought. I lose the sense of self, as I lose my ego. The experience may be or sound scary to some, but when you get there gradually through deeper meditations, it is a pleasant experience. If you reach this stage enough, some of the insights gained here will transfer to your daily life.

Final Thoughts

As a caveat, I cannot be certain that I have had all of these experiences due to meditation. However, sometimes I meditate to help me work through a problem, and the more I meditate, the more quickly I tend to work through those issues. I do not take any medicines regularly, so this has been my regular dose of healing in my life. Also, keep in mind that I generally practice mindfulness and work on improving my awareness. I view these as all related to meditation. To me, mindfulness is just about practicing meditation in your daily life and actions, rather than only practicing it alone and in silence (as traditionally expected).

Overall, I think meditation helps to have greater and deeper insights into life that cannot easily be put into words. You can read I. C. Robledo’s Thoughts (this site) and intellectually understand certain ideas. But some things need to be experienced directly to truly understand them on a level deeper than the intellect allows.

For example, how much does the intellect help you to understand love? How much does it help you to understand a beautiful sunset? How much does it help you to understand cruelty? Some things cannot be figured out intellectually and must be experienced to see it for what it truly is.

Meditation can provide some of those types of experiences. However, keep in mind that I have meditated for many years. If you need to see rewards immediately, then this may not be a useful path.

I believe we should all have some form of meditative experiences, but some people may prefer other routes – physical exercise, yoga, spending time in nature, mindfulness, or journaling. If meditation doesn’t work for you, try something else.

As a final note, if you are not familiar with the meditation process, countless books and sites explain it. There are many different types and ways to practice meditation. Since you can find this information easily anywhere, I have decided not to go through it here.

Who the Room Wants You to Be

I am on the introverted side, and I value the fact that I am my own person and not in need of being who someone else wants me to be. Nonetheless, it seems that we all feel societal pressure to be who or what the room wants us to be.

By “the room,” I mean whatever environment of people we happen to be around.

I once had a dream that left a great impact on me. In the dream, I was at a restaurant having a conversation with many physicists. My knowledge of physics is quite basic (in the dream and reality), but in the dream, I felt compelled to take on this role I was given. I didn’t understand that it was just a role, as I thought that I was a physicist and that it looked bad that I was somehow struggling to keep up with what my colleagues were telling me. Rather than admit that I was lost, I pressed forward and pretended as if I followed their words, and then I contributed my own thoughts in a vague way to try to carry on the illusion that I knew advanced concepts in physics.

The other physicists looked at me like I was crazy. Still, somehow I felt better in trying to carry on the illusion that I was a physicist, rather than admit that I was in a false role, which may have been admitting that my whole life was false (within the context of the dream).

This scenario with physicists faded into a blur, and I found myself somewhere else.

I was in prison. I quickly took on the attitude and role of prisoner then. I started to talk like them, feel like them, act like them. I knew in my heart that I was not the prisoner type, but something about waking up in this role demanded that I fill it. It was clear that acting as if I did not belong in prison would have done nothing to help me get out of there. I took on the role as if I were truly a prisoner. This meant that if a weaker-looking prisoner caused trouble with me, I felt the need to put him in his place. On the other hand, I respected the bigger or more senior prisoners. Basically, I became just another prisoner in the short course of this dream.

Then this scenario faded away, and I found myself in another one.

I was having a romantic dinner with someone. From being in this scenario for just a moment, I figured out that this was my fiancé (only in the dream world), but I didn’t actually recognize the person. I assumed something was wrong with me for not remembering my own fiancé, and I felt the need to fill this role properly. I needed to be the good loving fiancé, and I needed to successfully have this romantic dinner with this person, even if I could not recall why or how I had gotten there. This seemed to be a fancy, special dinner. I couldn’t face the idea of ruining this night for this other person who I didn’t even know but who appeared to know me so well.

These were all deeply uncomfortable dreams for me, but I found comfort in pretending to be the role that I appeared to be, rather than acknowledging that my role was false and my life was false.

Why did this series of dreams leave such an impact on me?

It made me realize how powerful the room is that guides us into being who we are. My mind is always monitoring what it feels I am expected to be, and sometimes this can impede me from actually being who I am.

In any given situation, I may think: I’m supposed to laugh here, I’m supposed to compliment here, I’m supposed to thank this person here, I’m supposed to feel uncomfortable here, I’m supposed to get scared now, I’m supposed to be disgusted, I’m supposed to want to be friends with this person, I’m supposed to apologize, I’m supposed to feel grateful, or I’m supposed to want to be here, and so on.

I’m not a robot, so I have feelings, emotions, and more human ways of thinking. But I also always seem to have this overactive thinking mode that focuses on what I am supposed to be, do, or feel, rather than what I actually am or what I actually feel. The thinking mode seems to interfere with the being mode.

My mind is always reading the room, judging what the room wants from me. And I get the sense that if I am not giving it what it wants, I am not properly filling my role. Or I may feel that I am somehow failing to be what I was supposed to be. If I am not what others expect of me, then who am I? Is it good enough to be what I expect me to be?

And then we have to ask, is my role in my life one that I am just playing out? Could I just as easily have been in any other life situation or scenario? With one wrong turn in my life, could I have been put in prison? And if I were put in prison, wouldn’t I just become another prisoner? Another face in the crowd, doing what he is expected to do based on the circumstance.

For anyone I see in the streets, or at work, or even at home, are these just people filling a role at a certain point in time, or is this actually who they are? Is the Mom just filling the Mom role, or is she being the Mom? What about the police officer? What about the teacher? The clerk at the grocery store?

Are the roles actually minor aspects of who we truly are, but they somehow end up taking over our lives? When we see the role someone is playing, it isn’t easy to see them as anything else. In some ways, the humanity may be stripped away, and we see the role, not the person.

As humans, we can know what people in the room want from us and then attempt to appease them. And it’s difficult to resist the urge to appease those around us because it feels rewarding when they like us, or want to be around us, or congratulate us for being what they wanted us to be.

We can say that “I am not being controlled by any room – I am my own person,” but that is not quite my point. Of course, anyone can choose to go against what the room wants. My point is that we all have this benchmark understanding of what the room wants from us. And so it feels like anything we do is a reaction to that. Imagine that someone suddenly throws a ball at your face. Whether you try to get out of the way or catch it, or even if you get hit by it, you cannot deny that the ball is coming toward you and that you must do something. What the room wants from us is just as powerful as the ball coming at your face – it demands that you respond somehow.

Sometimes I come across people who, when they interact with me, are reacting to what they expect me to want them to do or reacting to what they expect me to be thinking. Much of the time, they are wrong. I clear my throat sometimes, and people sometimes think I am trying to rush them. Actually, I’m just clearing my throat – it’s something I do more than most people, and I’m not sure why, but I don’t do it to try to rush anyone. Once they have identified me clearing my throat as something people do to rush other people, it’s difficult for them to get away from that thought. They feel forced into reacting to that thought. Sometimes they apologize for inconveniencing me, even though that was not even on my mind.

Other times, I have asked for help with something, and the person has gotten very angry with me. Apparently, they were overwhelmed with their own life, and they got angry that I would dare to “impose” extra work on them and “expect” them to do it for free. However, I wasn’t expecting anything – I had simply been asking a question to see if they were in the position to help. They were reacting to what they thought I would be thinking or expecting.

So interestingly, many of us are reacting to this room, and the room is a mirage. What we think the room wants often isn’t even what it wants. But we react to it somehow. We can go along with what it wants or against it, but we are reacting to it either way. Once we have a benchmark in mind for what the room wants, it’s difficult to escape this “reality bubble” we have created. It’s a reality bubble because it is a true perception of reality in some respects and false in others. When you realize its falseness, it pops, and another reality bubble replaces it. This can happen over and over. We tend to think that our current reality bubble represents the true reality, but of course, it never actually does.