I have known about meditation (and the benefits which were unanimous for those practicing it regularly) for a long long time. But it was only around in the mid of 2015 that I finally decided to give it a shot.
Though I am still to reach that stage when I can say I have mastered (if at all it’s possible) this valuable skill or routine or whatever you want to call it, I can say with full conviction that I wish I had started it earlier and now after sticking on to it with discipline, it has more or less become a habit. Times when I am unable to do it for whatever reason, I certainly feel that something is missing from the day.
So without further ado, let me state 3 reasons why meditation is something you should seriously take up in your life.
To make it more convincing I will share some analogy from a professional life, but its equally applicable to entrepreneurs (if you are one or thinking of becoming one).
- It teaches you the difference between signal and noise:
When one starts meditation, for a long time you would be distracted, you will have thousands of thoughts in your mind, thoughts which are of the past, thoughts which are far away in the future, trivial thoughts and so on. Slowly you will start to filter the noise and get closer to the signals within you. These signals can transform your life.
Analogy — During our work day, we come across many things which are nothing but noise. Things like office gossip, who joined, who left..endless discussions on salary, promotions, whats happening in other teams, other projects, performance management systems, these are pure noise as in the moment they are insignificant. Sure its good to be aware but it surely doesn’t need the endless hours we devote to it. Why I have also mentioned performance management system is that we spent a lot of time first planning what all we did, then equal number of time discussing with our managers, when we both know we have our own views and at times its really impossible to convince the other person on everything. And yet we continue to do it to prove our point.
An ideal system is one where-in our daily log of work should give a clear picture of what we did or the absence of it. Of-course performance systems are much more than that, but still I am confident that there is a better and more simpler way that what we have experienced and continue to experience.
Meditation helps you to be the moment and helps you to give everything you have. If you have your priorities set (keeping in mind the bigger picture), it would align with the organizational objective and that’s what matters in the end largely.
2. Meditation helps you in embracing doing nothing and be helpless. It helps you to let go.
Everyone of us is constantly trying to squeeze out 48 hours out of 24 hours by packing in insane amount of things to do. We are sacrificing everything to excel at work, to win the rat race, to climb the ladder in any which way. If some one says to do nothing for even 15 minutes, I can challenge you it won’t be easy. We are used to running around all the time, whether physically or mentally. We want to be in control and at all times, no matter how impossible this actually is.
Analogy — There will be times in your professional life, when you will feel helpless and its not easy to go through that time. Sometimes after all you do your customers will still feel angry, your team won’t value you, your manager won’t value you, no matter what you do it would feel its always below expectations and things like that. It wills like an endless downwards spiral.
Meditation will help to embrace this time and help you to come out of it. It will teach you to let go and how liberating it actually can be.
3. Meditation will help you to find you.
Through life we get conditioned by our environment a lot and with passing time, we tend to disconnect with what we really are and what we really want from our life. It’s the society which has a set a path of school-college-job-marriage-children-house-car and so on. And if this is what you want, great. After all there is visibly no harm in following this path, but then how will breakthrough happen, how will change happen, how will new ideas happen. If Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had not dropped out of their IVY Colleges there would have been no Microsoft and Apple respectively.
And most importantly you will loose yourself and sooner or later the status quo will be questioned. There are in numerous stories where star professionals quit everything and decided to do something of their own in a totally different field. Its like in a flash they lost meaning of it all. Whereas in a flash their real self just surfaced and it took them out of their illusionary life into their real self.
Let’s say you and your best friend go into a carnival where there are millions of people and it’s full of chaos. What are the chances you both will lose each other? I had say pretty high. The best friend is the real you and the carnival is life. The chaos is what happens to us on a day to day basis. Society pressures it into chasing things which we may or may not want and somewhere down the line, we stop questioning and blindly follow what it asks us to do. At the end of it all, you question whether this is what you wanted and whether it was all worth it? And then this leads to regret. This regret may happen at your deathbed when you really can’t do much or it may happen at varied intervals of your life, when you still have the chance.
Find your friend before it’s too late.
Meditation will take you deep down on a path of introspection and show you things which were always there but somehow never got your attention. It will uncover layers to reveal what actually exist. And it’s an experience which has the potential to change your life, for the better.
Find yourself, find your purpose…it’s very valuable and worthy of an endeavor.
Resources to help you get started —
- YouTube — search for 5 mins meditations and millions of videos would surface
- Apps (paid, available on both App Store and Google Play) — Calm, Headspace
- There are also plenty of books on Mindfulness (enjoying the present and being in the moment fully) which is not really Meditation but both are very related. Meditation helps in Mindfulness.