Build your Meditation Muscle

This lesson dives into what meditation is and how to start to build your meditation muscle.

Transcript

1. Build your meditation muscle
2. When we look at Google Search Trends queries over the last decade or so, we see that the number of interest in ‘Mindfulness’ has grown 10x compared with overall search volume. So is Mindfulness a new fad or craze that will soon be forgotten? Has Mindfulness always been this popular?
3. Absolutely not! Mindfulness is an ancient practice rooted in the Eastern philosophies of Buddhism and Hinduism, where the concept can be traced back to the oldest text known to man: The Vedas, believed to have been written over 4,000 years ago. The Vedas were also the starting point for Yoga, which followed a similar path to adoption in the west.
4. Mindfulness is really, really old <4,000 years old in fact! But it didn’t become popular in the West until the 1960s and ‘70s when Jon Kabat-Zin brought his teachings back to the US
5. Jon Kabat-Zin An American Professor who studied under several well-known Buddhist teachers He developed a program known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), designed at reducing stress, crucial in helping mindfulness gain popularity in the West.
6. So, people have been practising Mindfulness for thousands of years...
7. Which leads us to the question - How do we practice mindfulness?
8. Through Meditation Meditation is a family of mental training practices. It’s training for your brain! In ancient cultures, the words for meditation often had roots in words like “cultivation”, bringing to mind the idea that meditation is simply a way for us to cultivate or ‘prune’ our minds.
9. Just like we train our body, we can (and should!) train our brain
10. Think about doing a pull-up on a bar. The first time you try to do a pull up it’s probably going to be really challenging. You don’t have the muscles in your back and shoulders to support lifting the weight of your body. But if you keep trying maybe every other day, you are going to see tiny incremental steps of progress and eventually your body becomes used to the movement, it feels more familiar AND your muscles get bigger to support you. The same thing happens in meditation - AKA brain training
11. Time to train your brain