Ohm Your Way Through Life: The Benefits of Meditation

William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” In life, we are often taught, conditioned and sometimes forced to label events as “good” or “bad”, as “divine” or “evil”. We go on living our lives filtering events, sensations or perceptions through this dualistic view which in turn makes us reactive to what “life throws at us” by feeling either happy or sad about everything. Our existence becomes a series of good or bad feelings that turn into emotional states of joyfulness, exuberance, anxiety, depression, fear etc. as our minds accumulate them and make the decision that we should feel a certain way since there has been more good things or bad things in our life time. This can lead to extreme cases where someone who had tremendous achievements in their lives such as overcoming a disability, pursuing a dream job, founding a loving family, living comfortably and being able to help others, can choose to believe in a thought, an idea (just like in the movie Inception) that: “I am not happy hence I need to leave this life I built for myself and mine.” This is when thoughts are turned into beliefs and then into action; when a single thought, if believed in, can start a war.

What is meditation?

Meditation is a tool developed many thousands of years ago to help us be aware of the thinking that Shakespeare referred to and, with that, to allow us to distance ourselves from the habit of labelling our lives. In modern science, as in Kundalini Yoga and other spiritual realization paths such as Advaita Vedanta and Non-dualism, it is known that the mind produces several hundred thousand of thoughts a minute, most of them being undetected, while others “stick” and lead to thinking or overthinking. Thinking and overthinking are the process of drilling down into a specific thought which leads to more thoughts in what can become an incessant spiral of overthinking; or what we often call a “busy mind.” Just as we do not need to tell our hearts to beat three times every second, or as we do not need to tell our lungs to inhale and exhale, we do not have to tell our minds to produce a thought. It is an automatic process. Meditation allows us to be aware of this automatic presence of thoughts and to learn to be clear and decisive in the choice of whether to engage in thinking/overthinking or not. In the same way we can decide to take deep, long breaths when our breathing becomes erratic from a scary event or use breathing exercises (Pranayam) to appease our nervous system, meditation gives us the ability to control the mind to not engage in thinking/overthinking and the ability to stop a process of thinking that has already started.

The only physical requirement to meditate is to ensure that we are keeping a straight spine to allow the flow of energy from the earth to the heavens and vice versa through our spine. This flow of energy clears blockages we have kept in our body, mind and spirit. There are many types of meditation in Kundalini Yoga, which can be categorized into three basic forms: Suspension (receptive or mindful); Void (focused with concentration); and Anahat (use of unstruck sound). Suspension is usually a silent meditation, which allows our subconscious to dump things into our awareness. Silence makes us aware of many experiences in the mind, thoughts, feelings and patterns that are just below our consciousness. Silently watching the breath and what comes from our subconscious brings awareness, however, it does not remove the deepest blockages we have in our unconscious and subconscious minds. Void, also called Dhyana, is the process of meditating with a single point of concentration or focus. Concentrating on one specific object, thought or mantra allows us to only see it hence to not see or feel other thoughts. The use of mantras transforms the content of the subconsciousness. Anahat is the merger of rhythm and sound vibrations which changes the structure of consciousness itself.

The following is a list of the main benefits of meditation categorized in two key areas: (1) meditation develops our consciousness and clears our conscious, subconscious and unconscious behaviors or patterns; (2) meditation develops our Neutral Mind and connects us with Infinite Consciousness.

Meditation develops our consciousness

The mind does not need to be quiet as a condition for someone to meditate. In the contrary, when we meditate and observe the body, mind and spirit, we can become more and more aware of the busy mind or bodily sensations. By developing our awareness of these phenomena, meditation helps us realize that there is a space between our sensations, feelings and perceptions (facts) and the Self who is perceiving them. In other words, when we become aware that a sensation of pain in our legs comes and goes or that a feeling of fear comes and goes with certain events, we become conscious that we are not merely our body or our mind. If we were, we would come and go or appear and disappear as the sensations, feelings and perceptions come and go. Meditation develops our consciousness of the Self, which is the only constant that “Is” regardless of our state of mind, regardless of our body conditions. Modern science puts forward the assumption that it is our brain function that provides this sense of continuity between states of mind, but it does not provide proof that this assumption is correct. As a matter of fact, the state of deep sleep in which there is minimal to no bodily and mental activity is not explained by this assumption. How do you know, upon waking up, that you had a good or bad night sleep? What remains conscious that even the subtlest state of “no-thing” is perceived?

The practice of regular meditation provides the answers to these questions by the mastery and awareness of not only gross phenomena but also subtle phenomena. Gross phenomena represent everything that is material, physical, dense and tangible but also everything that is subtle but that has a physical reaction. For instance, continued periods of stress and anxiety may affect our physical bodies through illness, depression or chronic diseases. Or, the thoughts of being over or underweight can lead to someone to be anorexic or bulimic thus affecting their physical reality. Subtle phenomena represent immaterial, abstract and intangible things such as thoughts and intuition. Meditation allows us to cleanse our minds so that we are not dumping negative thoughts into our subconscious mind, which are bound to resurface one day or another. Yogi Bhajan describes meditation as a process that allows us to observe our bad and ugly thoughts without being engaged in them through overthinking or action as well as a process that allows us to not be bothered by these thoughts once we have had the practice of observing them without indulging in them. This is what is called having a Still Mind. It is not a mind with no thoughts but a mind that is not bothered by the flow of thoughts that it itself generates.

In summary, by increasing our awareness of the sensations, feelings and perceptions that characterize our daily lives, meditation also allows us to develop our consciousness further by being able to identify patterns and habits that our minds create from these perceptions and their impact on our behavior and bodies. It is only once that we are conscious of these patterns, positive or negative, that are we able to decide whether to change, end, replace or not engage with them. And once a decision or choice has been made, meditation also allows us to replace these patterns with new ones or to break negative habits. According to Yogi Bhajan, it takes 40 days to change a habit, 90 days to establish a new habit in your conscious and subconscious minds, 120 days to confirm the new habit and 1,000 days to master the new habit.

Meditation develops our Neutral Mind and connection to Infinite Consciousness

In our modern society, we spend enormous amounts of time and money on improving and maintaining our bodies and intellect to a certain standard. Yet, very little attention is given to knowing and controlling our minds in a way that it can truly better serve us and others. Meditation is a practice that helps us better know and control our minds, and by doing so, mediation also helps us achieve mental clarity and inner peace.

Kundalini Yoga teaches us that there are three functional aspects of the mind and that each thought is filtered through them: The Negative Mind; the Positive Mind; and the Neutral Mind. The Negative (or Protective) Mind is focused on survival, and as such, it pushes us to be reactive, protective, fearful and constantly searching for potential danger. The Positive (or Expansive) Mind is focused on pleasure and fulfilment, and as such, it pushes us to be constructive, creative, risk taking and active. The Neutral (or Meditative) Mind is focused on our higher Self, and as such, it observes and assesses the perceptions of both the Negative and Positive Minds without attachment or reaction. It is the mind that makes us aware of the distance created between facts and how they are perceived by the self as well as of the distance between perceiving and the totality in which perceiving happens. The Neutral Mind is the place of inner wisdom and inner peace. Meditation helps us perceive and act from this place of inner wisdom so that our actions are pure, compassionate and in line with our higher purpose, our soul. If our Neutral Mind is weak, we may have a hard time making decisions and may have the habit of feeling victimized by life since we find it hard to integrate our life experiences and find meaning to them in the great cosmic scheme of things. By developing our Neutral Mind, meditation helps us understand the greater play of life.

Just as the Chaos Theory teaches us through the Butterfly Effect that the vibrations of a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico at the right time and space can cause a hurricane in China, our minds have the potential to understand that changes to initial conditions and to the interactions between seemingly unrelated events can impact on our lives and on the universe at large. Many thousands of years ago, sages defined this phenomenon as Pratyahar, which is one of the Eight Limbs of Yoga as developed by Patanjali. Pratyahar means contract or to synchronize. It is the ability to see the link between everything and Infinite Consciousness, God. In one of Yogi Bhajan’s lectures, he described Pratyahar as follows: “Under any time, space and circumstance, under any pressure, depression or oppression, you do not forget that Infinite One;” and “The science of Pratyahar is an analytical, standardized, mental state of consciousness in which you analytically understand that the very depth and source of any existence coming towards you or going away from you -the cause of all causes- is Infinity.”

Yogi Bhajan recommends the use of mantras in meditation as they have the capacity to cut through our negative thoughts and turn their energy to positive. Mantras are not just any sound or thought, their vibrations have focus and contain seeds which provide a template for higher experience. Repeating a mantra restructures the patterns in the mind that filter experience. Mantras can also be used even if not meditating, at any moment when we are in tune with life and perceive the need to repeat a mantra or when our connection with the Infinite Consciousness brings awareness of a specific mantra.

As we can see, meditation goes beyond the mental and physical aspects of our reality to create a union between our individual reality and the Infinite Consciousness. As described in the Kundalini Yoga manual: “Meditation is the process of controlling and transcending the waves of the mind, allowing the flow of radiance from the soul.” The regular practice of Anahat meditation allows us to move from a finite (individualistic) perception of reality to an infinite (universal) perception of reality. Meditation develops our Neutral Mind so that we can perceive from our inner wisdom which is a place that is not tainted by our unconscious, subconscious and conditioned minds. Perceiving from the Neutral Mind allows us to impartially observe life as it is and to become conscious that all things are inter-connected and come from the same source: Infinite Consciousness, God.