Everyone talks about it, many people do it, and then there are the ones who teach it – meditation. For many, meditation has become a practice – something you do in the morning or in the evening. And for many, it is a practice they do for a reason. They want to have more clarity, better control over their thoughts, less anxiety, more awareness and so on. But have you ever considered that this approach is not meditation at all?

To understand this, let’s take an analogy. Let’s imagine a man who sins from Monday to Saturday, doing all sorts of things that are not aligned with Christian rules of conduct. Yet on Sunday, he’s sitting in the front row of his local church, doing his best to make a good impression of being a religious person. He even donates 100$ every week. Now let’s not be judgmental here and let the person be as they are. He still isn’t gonna reach his goal of reaching heaven in the afterlife, if he doesn’t give up his sinful lifestyle. 

Just like that, a person with a confused mind trying to get rid of the confusion by meditating 15 minutes in the morning or 15 minutes in the evening is merely taking a small break from their confusion – if at all. Of course, the benefits of strategies and techniques to calm the mind are acknowledged and proven. However, these only provide a break from the general state of the mind. Say your meditation practice of choice is to focus on your breath. Why do you need a set time in your day to focus on breathing? The human being breathes around 23000 times a day. More than enough opportunities to be aware of your breath. Additionally, practices and techniques make the mind more mechanical. If your practice of choice is to repeat a certain “mantra”, then it will put your mind in a rut. Techniques like these narrow the mind instead of broadening it. 

So, if you find yourself troubled by a stressful life, full of anxiety, without clarity and not knowing what to do, and you want to truly transform your life, don’t make meditation another problem in your life. You rather want to dive into why you are stressed, anxious, lacking clarity and direction. This might not be as appealing as sitting down and repeating a mantra you picked up on youtube or from some guru, and it might actually be somewhat scary to uncover and deal with what lies beyond your superficial life, but it will help to put your life in order. And you can observe the reasons for your confusion all day, every day.

Carl Jung famously said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate”. So that is the job of the confused mind – make the unconscious conscious and thus, end the confusion. Because everything born out of a confused mind will inevitably be confused.

If you want to go reveal the unconscious parts of your mind, here’s what you do. 

 

• • First, forget about meditation practices. Any practice will only be that of the confusion, therefore breed confusion. 

• • Then (and that’s pretty much all you ever need to do), start listening to yourself speak.

• • Don’t judge what you say, just listen.

Whatever you say is an expression of your mind. And when what you say is an instant reaction to a situation, then that is most likely an expression of your subconscious mind. Listening to yourself speak means listening to your subconscious. Of course, sometimes we take more time to reply – we actually think out the answers in our heads and then speak. But often enough – and even more so the more confused we are – we reply instantly without even thinking about what we’re saying. Do that consistently, not occasionally. Do it all day long, not only for 15 minutes in the morning. It will reveal the whole of your subconscious mind. And there will be no need for interferencing with it, because you will simply have a clearer and clearer idea of what it is that guides your life. This will bring about all the ideas, beliefs and conceptions you have about life. 

I remember talking to a person who had quite a problem in their life. And I repeated something back to them that they had told me previously about themselves and I suggested them to take action on that specific desire they had told me about. Their reply was “that’s too easy”. So they had the idea, that life – or certain aspects to it – has to be hard. And thus, their problem increased. Now, honestly I don’t know if my suggestion would have had any impact on their problem, but that’s not the point anyway. If the person had indeed listened to themselves talk, they could have known what the underlying issue is. My suggestion merely triggered their subconscious.

Once you integrated paying attention to what you speak (and it will most likely not happen 100% of the time), you can go inward. You can “listen” to yourself think. And again, you can pay close attention without analyzing. Neither what you say, nor what you think – for the analyzer is the analyzed. 

However, 90% of us do not really pay attention to what we say when we speak and usually take what we think as truth. Therefore, we wonder why our life is the way it is and try meditation as a means to change it.

Be the 10%.