The Most Overlooked Weapon Against Burnout (For Christian Men)

In a world where men often shoulder immense pressures, finding a moment of peace and learning to live a life from a place of calm, clear and consistent confidence can seem impossible.

In this video, we explore the profound benefits of meditation and how it can be a game-changer for those feeling overwhelmed and burned out.

Section 1: The Need for Meditation
We talk about the common struggles many men face, describing feelings of burnout and inconsistency in daily life.

Section 2: Five Key Benefits of Meditation
We talk about the 5 transformative benefits of meditation for men.

Section 3: A Simple Meditation Practice
We actually practice a simple, meditation technique that can be easily integrated into daily life.

Meditation (investing the time to rest and reflect) is a vital tool for men seeking to perform without the pressure, work without the work and have success without the stress!

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If you’ve been feeling stretched thin, emotionally exhausted, or like you’ve lost touch with who you really are — this is your invitation rest, recover and re-discover who you are and what matters to you!

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Men who are overworked but still showing up, overwhelmed but still pushing through.

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Transcript

Treveal C.W. Lynch (00:00)
what's going on my brothers? Listen man, I just wanted to create this free meditation resource to meet any brother where he is. ⁓ So many of us, man, we just, we hit brick walls, man. We burn out, we wear out, we become overwhelmed, we become inconsistent.

with just the way that we approach life and the way that we do life. And meditation is one of those things that I picked up probably about 10 or 15 years ago, man. And I'm like you, you know, at first it was like this whole meditation thing. What is it all about? How does it work? Does it align with my faith? Is God okay with it?

I went through all those different things. had all those questions that you may be having. And I just wanted you to know that from a biblical perspective, Jesus meditated, the early saints meditated. Maybe they didn't call it meditation, but they practiced time alone in prayer, in contemplation, thinking and processing. And there's all kinds of meditation practices. There's not just one.

But today I want to share with you one that has worked for me, one that has really helped me. Some of you guys know my story. I've been through so much in my own personal life in terms of my early childhood trauma, coming into the church, getting saved, as I like to say, saved, but still stuck, and going from one mask to wearing a new mask in church.

always becoming something that I wasn't, always being something that I wasn't, playing the game. And the game, it just wears you out at some point, man. You're just ripping and running, and a phrase that I learned not too long ago, we become men who bend so others don't break. So if that's you, man, you're just wore out.

You're tired, you're feeling stressed, overwhelmed. Meditation can certainly be something that if you include it in, not even your daily practice, if you just include it in your weekly practice, your weekly training, it can certainly help. It can certainly improve the quality of your life and just improve the way...

that you approach life and the way you see life and just the way that you feel overall. Because as men, sometimes we are carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. It seems like help is nowhere in sight. It seems like no one's trying to give you a hand. It seems like since those early years, you were taught that you have to do it. You got to do it all. You got to go out. You got to grind. You got to hustle.

And so it's really hard for men to open up. It's hard for us to be vulnerable. It's hard for us to share our true feelings about things. And over the last 25 years, man, I have done a lot of inner work, as we call it. I've done a lot of therapy, a lot of meditation, contemplation, a lot of self study. And I've learned and gained a great appreciation for our

ability to go within and meditation helps with going within and really unpacking what's in there, really dealing with those unaddressed issues, those unaddressed patterns. ⁓ And while this isn't to really dive deeply into those things, it certainly is directly connected because overall what we all want

is what they call emotional regulation. We all want to be regulated emotionally. It just means that we're at that baseline where we're stable, we're secure, we're solid emotionally. We're not too high, we're not too low, we're not agitated, we're not frustrated, we're not pissed off, we're not full of rage and anger, but we can take on the challenges of life.

in a mature level headed approach, right? Our worldview, the way we see others, the way we see ourselves, the way we see God, ⁓ it's a very mature, healthy perspective. These are things that we desire as men. And sometimes we don't know how to articulate that. We don't know how to say that. And so I'm gonna continue to create more and more resources, some free, some for fee.

this year to provide a library of resources for the Christian man, really for any man who desires to improve your overall quality of life and emotional states. All right. So I just wanted to lead in lead into this meditative practice. ⁓ Again, for the overworked, the overwhelmed, the overlooked, the inconsistent.

survival mode man, this is going to help you to begin your day and your week. And if you're watching this in a new year, it's going to help to start your new year off the right way. So enough of the intro. All right, let's get into this. And I promise you the actual meditation is not going to take you more than about 10 minutes a day. Okay. You can certainly extend that and make it longer if you desire, but I want to provide you something that's easy to do.

⁓ Won't take a lot of time because you're already overwhelmed, you're already stressed out, you already got a million things going on. So I'm not trying to pile on, but it's a very simple, basic baseline form of meditation. It doesn't get into the woo woo. It doesn't get too esoteric. It doesn't get too weird. It doesn't have to bring in anything that would take you off course. All right, especially for the men who

you're watching this and you subscribe to Christ, Jesus Christ. ⁓ I want to make sure that this doesn't throw you off because sometimes when we get into things that we're not familiar with, they can become a little weird initially or we've heard so much chatter about some of these Eastern culture ⁓ practices that we're kind of standoffish.

But I promise you as one who has practiced this, ⁓ as one who has studied this, this is therapeutic. This is ⁓ psychological. This is mental. This is emotional. This is human. Okay, this is human. God created us with a mind, a brain, a nervous system, emotions, breath. These are all things that God created.

this is a part of who you are and this is a part of your advantage, not only in Christ, but just in humanity. You can take time to breathe and to meditate. There's a reason that you're watching this. So I want to meet you. I want to meet you where you are and hopefully meet that need. Okay. So let's jump into this. I'm going to give you five benefits. I'm sure there's more. I'm sure there's more than five, but I'm going to give you five benefits that I've discovered in my own life.

Again, I don't do a lot of hearsay ⁓ theories and I just read books and then just try to regurgitate what other people say. I don't want to play those games with you. I take everything that I teach from my own life, my own practice. I want to practice integrity and character. And so if I'm sharing it with you, it's because I've lived it and I've done it consistently for an adequate period of time.

not just a few days, weeks, not even months, not even years. I've done it over at least five plus years if I'm sharing it with you on this level. So ⁓ the five benefits of meditation, and then I'm gonna get into the specific meditation that I'm going to practice with you. And then, well, actually I'm gonna give you the five benefits. I just kind of jotted things down.

Wanted to be as organic and as present as I possibly could didn't want to be superscripted But I'm gonna share the five benefits. I'm gonna share the three things that you need to do to get in the best possible position to really practice this and Then we're gonna go through the meditation itself. All right number one reset just like a PC, I don't know if you work in corporate America or you just have a

personal computer yourself. And I don't know if you've ever gotten to those situations where you click on something or you got too many windows open and it just freezes and you can't do anything with it. What do they do? Or what do they advise you to do if you were to call your IT department or if you were to look up something on your phone and say, how do I resolve this computer issue? The first thing they do is shut it down. Do a hard reset. Okay.

And so the first benefit to meditation is you get to reset. You get to reset your mind. You get to reset your life, your faith. You get to on a daily basis, reset, wipe it all away, clear the slate. Sometimes we just got too much going on and it's hard to see straight with so many things in the way. So the first thing is through meditation, you can experience a reset. All right.

With each of these, I want you to think about it and put it into your own context. Okay, let it mean what it needs to mean for you. And let me also say this, maybe not all five benefits are gonna be beneficial to you. Maybe only four, maybe only three, maybe only two. Maybe it might only be one, but that one benefit is life changing. right, number two, refresh, all right. ⁓

The refresh is the way I like to look at it is out with the old and with the new. Many times God is trying to do a new thing in and through our lives or maybe God's ⁓ dropped something in your heart, some new adventure, some new ⁓ business idea or a new product or a new ministry or just something that you need to take on that's new in your life. Well, the thing that I've learned in meditation is

because as men we're often so busy and so caught up and wrapped up and doing the next thing, worrying about what yesterday was, worrying about what tomorrow is going to look like, hard to be present. And when you're in that mode of always, you know, going back and forth, back and forth and just so mentally cluttered, it's hard for you to remember the newness of this season, the newness of what God is doing, the newness of what God has instructed you to do.

the things that you were excited about when you were in prayer a couple of weeks ago. And through meditation, you're able to slow things down and you get to be refreshed. Just like you're thirsty, right? I got my little coffee right here. Sometimes you're so thirsty, like you're walking through a desert and the mouth, right? Your spiritual mouth is parched and you just need a sip of water. You just need to be refreshed. You need to be

revived, right? And so through meditation, you can experience that refreshing. The next one is refuel. That's the easy one, man. Just like a car, man. Our cars only, our tanks, right? How many gallons you got? You can only go up to so many gallons. And if you don't refill, if you don't stop at the gas station at some point, what's going to happen? You're going to run out of gas. And if you know anything about running out of gas, because I've run out of gas.

maybe once or twice in my life when I was younger, ⁓ you never run out of gas in your driveway, right? You always run out of gas in the most inconvenient location. You're on the side of the road, you're on the freeway, you're in some weird neighborhood that you ain't never been in before, you don't really know the surroundings.

through meditation, we get to on purpose, refuel, recharge. We get to pour some gasoline in the tank. We get to refuel, man, so that we're not running on empty, so that our spiritual house, right, ⁓ our mental house, even our physical house is not puttering, right? You know how when you're just about running out of gas, you start to putter, right? You can start to feel

car kind of jerk and you kind of know something's happening, right? ⁓ Sometimes we feel that way in life. You just kind of feel that little jerk, ⁓ something's not right. And you look at the needle and it's on E as we say. Sometimes emotionally we're on E and through meditation we can refuel. right? Something else that I want to say about that.

is that the refueling, which actually leads me into my next one, which is refocusing. helps us to refocus. But the refueling and the refocusing are both around the concept of what matters. I've learned over the years, I've learned that the things that matter are usually not the things that wear us out. The things that are of the greatest value and worth, they're usually not the things that wear us out.

as men. It's usually all of the things that people have us doing that we don't have any business doing. All of the errands that we're running, all of the bending so others don't break activity that we're doing. The inability, like me, the inability to say no, I can't do that, I'm not available. And it's not because you've got something else on the calendar. It's because you are tuned in and you are attentive to your own emotional reservoir. You are

You are saying, I don't want to be tapped out. I don't want to be drained. I don't want to be empty. I want some reserves, right? I want my tank to have something left in it at the end of the day because something of great importance might show up or something that I desire to partake in. I want to have energy for that, right? That's that quality of life that I was talking about. And so many times, man, we just need to refocus on what matters, what matters.

A lot of things are important, but not everything is important to you. I'm say that one more time for the people in the back. A lot of things matter, but not everything has to matter to you. And everything doesn't truly matter to you, if you were honest. A lot of times we just have the inability to say no, where we don't know how to say no because it creates those awkward moments and those awkward... ⁓

know, conversations and we don't and we don't know how to really navigate those conversations. And ⁓ it just puts us in a position where it's safer emotionally for us to just say yes, to just conform and comply and say, yeah, I got that. Yeah, I'll do that. And for others like me again, our self image, our self concept was damaged so much as a child that as an adult,

we gain a sense of value and self-worth by being the energizer bunny for those in our lives. The more we do and the more they thank us, the more we do, the more they pat us on the back, we feel better about ourselves. But not understanding that in the long run, that can be an unhealthy method or approach to getting the validation that you desire.

because it's hinged on your ability to show up and to be Superman or Batman or whatever your superhero is. ⁓ We take on that hero mentality, that hero role. And where that hero role got me was crashing and burning emotionally into my brick wall. And so, ⁓ yeah, man, that's no way to go. So meditation is gonna help you to refocus on what matters most to you. And then lastly,

my favorite, you get to return, you get to return home, home to you, not home to like your physical house, home to your spiritual house, your mental house, your emotional house, your house, who you really are. You get to return back. God gets the space and the place to communicate to you.

on a subconscious level, on a level in which hits your very core and allows the true self, the real you, to begin to emerge through the various levels, to come up from the bottom, where you've suppressed them, where you've suppressed him because you were trying to be someone that you weren't. You were trying to take on a role that wasn't your role. You were trying to take on responsibilities that weren't your responsibilities. A lot of this was in our childhood.

We learned to wear the mask. We learned to be fake and phony. We learned to pretend to be something that we weren't so that we could stay safe, so that we could survive the moment. But as we got older, no one sent us the memo and we continue to pretend. So some of us, we're just not even free. We're not even being who we really are. And I've discovered that through meditation, it gives me a moment each day where I can...

I can return home to me. What has God called me to? What's my sandbox, as I like to call it, right? It's the gifts, the talents, the things that God's put in your heart that you really enjoy doing. What is your sandbox? What is your playground? Where do you find true enjoyment, true excitement for your life? It's okay for you to be excited. It's okay for you to enjoy your life, right?

This experience should be, a part of it should be enjoying it and truly feeling it and living it and breathing it. And sometimes we lose track of that because we're so busy. We're always on the grind. And so through meditation, we can return home, man. We can return home to who we really are and we can get a true identity, a true concept, right? We can begin to get our voice back. We can begin to get,

⁓ the attributes and the characteristics and the personality traits, the persona of who we really are, all of that we can begin to return to so that we can actually be comfortable in our own skin. We can actually feel free as Christ has freed us, but now we can actually experience that liberation. Now I know you might be saying, wow, all of that through meditation. Yes, because this is the key to meditation. This is the key to getting all of that. You ready for it?

It's one word, four letters. Rest. Meditation allows you to rest. Some of you brothers are so emotionally exhausted. You are so tapped out. You are so tuned out to your family, your wife, your children, on the job. You're just checked out emotionally. You're just checked out mentally.

There's just not a lot left. And it's not because you're a bad dude. It's not because you don't love them. It's not because of any of those things. It's because you were never taught that rest was okay. You were never taught that, heck, taking a vacation was okay. You were never taught that not being on the grind was okay. And especially not being taught that and that not being okay as a child, it gets...

10 times worse as you become an adult and now social media and movies and the culture and society paints a picture for you as a man and says, picture, this portrait, you've got to fit this. You have to be a grinder. You got to be a hustler. You got to stay in beast mode. You got to stay in grind mode and hustle mode.

You have to have two or three jobs or you have to have a million dollars in the bank or you have to drive these kind of cars. You have to have this kind of woman. You your your body has to look like this. All of these prerequisites, all of these stipulations, all of these requirements just to be a man. That that would wear out anybody. And I'm able to speak to that because I know it. I know it. I've been there, man.

I've had the same feelings you had, the same emotions you had, the same struggles you had. That's why I know this to be true. All of these layers and all of this stuff that we got to do just to be a man. It's like this manhood code. We got to talk a certain way. If we say certain things, they hit us with all of these little cultural cliches and whatnot and make you feel even worse about yourself. It's like you have to toe the line.

As a man constantly, do I look like a man? Do I sound like a man? Am ⁓ I acting like a man? Do I got enough money? Am I driving something nice enough? Is my job good enough? Is my status up? Is my title good enough? Dude, that's exhausting. It wears you out. And I know, and I feel you. And one of the things that has helped me to get to where I am.

And I'm going to be adding my before and my after ⁓ into this resource as well, just to give you some of that proof of where I was and where I am. ⁓ yeah, man, meditation has played a key ⁓ role in that. All right? So let's get to it to do it, man. Here's some things that I want you to do.

as we get into what the actual meditation is. Number one, I want you to prep the night before. All right. If you can do this, I want you to practice this meditation in the morning. First thing in the morning. As I always say, get to God before the world gets to you. Get up and get up early enough that the sun does not beat you up. And if you're not getting up or sorry, if the sun is not beating you up, chances are other people aren't beating you up. Okay.

So you're the first to rise before the sun, get to God before the world gets to you, before all of the distractions get to you, get up and get after it. So I try to do this in the morning. All right. In fact, I only do it in the morning, to be honest. ⁓ But what I'm saying to you is that if you can do it in the morning, that's probably going to be optimal because you get ahead of the day's challenges.

and you get to reap all those benefits, right? Before all the challenges start. Number two, let people know. If you live, you you got a wife, kids, whoever you live with, ⁓ you know, some of you may even live with your parents. Let them know that, hey, I'm gonna get up tomorrow at such and such time, I'm gonna need the house quiet. You know, and if you are okay with telling them what you're doing, that's fine too. But just let them know, I'm gonna need things quiet.

Right? If you hear me getting up and stumbling around or whatever, nevermind me, just stay in the bed, keep it quiet. Don't, don't, don't get in the way. All right. I'm up to something here. All right. And then lastly, set the alarm, set the alarm for about 20 minutes earlier than you normally get up. Again, if you, if you got a nine to five, and let's say that you get up at eight o'clock normally, then go ahead and set it for seven 40. Okay. Get up 20 minutes earlier.

Meditation itself, again, can range 10 minutes, start with five minutes, start with three minutes, doesn't matter, just start, okay? And then you can start to increase that as you go. ⁓ But preparing the night before, you wanna identify a location where you are comfortable, you can sit comfortably. If you wanna lay, that's cool, but some people, if it's that early, they just fall back to sleep, so.

You want to get into a nice comfortable chair somewhere where your feet can touch the floor. You can get grounded. ⁓ And really that's really the only rule. Just a place that you can sit comfortably that's quiet. Now, if you start really getting into this and you want to play some soft meditative music, dope, do that. You know what I'm saying? Set it off, light a candle, whatever. Make it whatever you want to make it. That's cool. And if you're still stuck on some of that manly stuff, I don't like candles. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

All right? Everything has its purpose. But right now, comfortable chair, quiet space. All right? So what I'm going to practice with you is something called a box meditation, a box breathing technique. OK? And the box breathing technique goes like this. You're going to take a deep, you're going to sit up straight so that the lungs and air passages can fully operate.

All right, let me get myself together. All right, so what you're do is you're gonna breathe deeply, inhale for four seconds. You're gonna hold it for four seconds. You're gonna exhale for four seconds. You're gonna hold it for four seconds. You're gonna inhale for four seconds. You're gonna hold it for four seconds. And so it's like a box, all right? Just like that. So the first line is,

Four seconds, that's your first line. You're breathe it in and then put an H over here and then you're gonna hold. I'm gonna make the box. So four, H, four, H, four, H. Looks like that, all right? Inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds. Okay, I don't know if you guys can see that. I was looking over here for some reason.

⁓ But yeah, that's how it looks. So four, hold it for four, exhale for four, hold it for four, inhale for four, hold it for four, exhale for four, hold it for four, inhale. And you're in your mind, you're making a box. That's what we call it, a box prayer, or sorry, a box meditation, a box breathing technique. Meditation is all about the breath.

You're slowing everything down through the breath. Life is in your breath. Let me share one quick ⁓ tidbit, if you want to call it that. ⁓ I thought it was pretty dope when God revealed it to me. In Genesis, when God formed man, the Bible says that that that God formed a man from the dust of the earth. He formed us, but we were not yet alive. God then

blew the breath of life into our nostrils and we became a living being. See how that works? We became a living being. We were formed, our physical was formed from the dust of the earth, the dirt, the soil. But life came through the breath of God. God is as close to you as your next breath.

Why is it that when we were conceived, the first thing that the doctor needed to see was a heartbeat? Yeah, that's called a breath. When we are given birth through the canal of the mother and we come out, what's the first concern? Let's smack that baby on the butt if necessary. And we want them lungs to scream like an opera, right? Why? Because we want to ensure life.

We want that baby to breathe. As soon as he starts breathing, he or she starts breathing, life is established, let's get it. And what do they say when we die? We take our last breath. Life ends in the breath, at least life on this side of eternity. So the breath is so important. It's so powerful. Everything that you want to live, it's in your breath.

Think of this as breathing in these five benefits and breathing these benefits out into your life. You're breathing them in, you're taking them in from the presence and the source of God. For this is God's will for your life to live an emotionally regulated and stable existence. And then you're gonna breathe these things out into your life. That's as far as I'll take it. I don't wanna spook you out, all right? But again,

Here's a pattern, four, hold, four, hold, four, hold, four, hold, four, and hold. All right, so let's get it. All right, let me just repeat real quick our five benefits, and then I'm literally gonna do this with you for a couple of moments. I don't have a timer around me, but I just wanna practice it with you so that you can get used to it. Number one, you're gonna reset. Number two, you're gonna refresh. Number three, you're gonna refuel, or if you like the word, recharge.

Number four, you're going to refocus and number five, you're going to return home back to you, my brother. All right? So let's go, man. Let's get it. You're up in the morning. You've gotten to your comfy chair. You haven't accessed media, no TV, no cell phones, nothing around you. You're sitting down and you are about to breathe.

the best breath you've ever breathed because this breath is now giving you life in abundance. You've got the normal life. You're like you're alive. But this life, this breath is going to give you true life. It's going to help you to come alive. Like my favorite quote says, don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.

because what the world needs are people who have come alive. All right, that's Howard Thurman, Christian mystic. All right, so let's breathe. Here we go. Four in.

Hold.

Four out.

Hold.

Four in.

Hold. Four out.

⁓

Four in.

Four out.

Forend.

Four out.

Four in.

Four out.

Four in.

Four out.

Now, one thing that I want to share with you about this breath is that if you really want to get technical, there's something called a belly breath. Okay. ⁓ It's basically taking your stomach and when you're breathing in, you're fully expanding your stomach. So the breath in comes from as deep in your belly as you possibly can and your belly should be

extending. So as you breathe in

belly is extending. You're holding and when you exhale, you're gonna pull that belly button towards your spine and you're gonna squeeze out and just fully exhale. Like the movie, Waiting to Exhale. Some of us, brothers, we've never exhaled. We've been in survival mode, fight and flight ⁓ mode for years. We've never actually

See how my shoulders are kind of up? We've never relaxed. Our shoulders are tense. Our lives are tense. And we've never felt what it feels like to fully exhale. There's a lot you could read into that. As we like to say, like that a preach, to fully exhale. But I want you to practice that as we take our breaths.

A full breath in, expand the belly, hold it for four seconds, and then.

Get everything you can out. Hold it there.

expand as you breathe in. What this is going to do, it taps into what they call the sympathetic nerve. It's a part of your nervous system. And what it does is it helps to regulate. It helps to slow down the heart rate, the heartbeat. It helps to slow things down. The more you can rest in the presence of God, because sometimes our prayer life is so noisy. We're just

whooping out commands at God, or we're begging and pleading for God to do something, or we're physically crying and we're just, our prayer just wears us out. So by the time we're done praying, we're more wore out than we were before we even started praying. So you can keep whatever your prayer life is. I'm not saying don't pray to God. What I'm saying is that when you're meditating, you are...

releasing these things, you're getting the clutter out, you're releasing these things. Let me go back to my five benefits. As you're getting, because I want you to understand the psychology of this, as you're resetting, you're thinking about, hey, I'm resetting. Allow God to reset you. You can even say it within, know, God.

reset me.

As you're breathing in, God, refresh me.

Whatever that looks like, God, refuel me. Or you could say it in the present tense. I am resetting. I am refreshing. I am refueling. I am refocusing. I am returning. That can be an internal dialogue. You don't have to say it audibly.

You can just be thinking it with every inhale. I am refocusing.

Release everything that causes you not to be focused. I am resetting, releasing out on the breath, everything that keeps you froze up like that computer that I talked about earlier. You're releasing that. I just wanted to give you some visuals and some internal cues because one thing I know about meditation, when you first get started, you can defeat yourself with, I doing it right? Am I hitting my marks?

especially for our perfectionist brothers, that's me, over thinkers, that's me. So I know some of the stumbling blocks to meditation. Am I doing it right? Am I sitting right? Am I up straight enough? Man, don't worry about all that, bro. Just breathe. Just breathe. Even if you can't do the four seconds up, four seconds hold, four seconds out, because four seconds don't sound like a lot, but

you know, four seconds if you've never done this before will feel like a lot. Because I've even gotten up to ⁓ seven seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds. It can, you know, like it's a lot. ⁓ A lot because you've not done it. A lot because you're psyching yourself out. Not a lot because it's a lot. It's very beneficial. It's a lot because it's new. And so wean yourself into it. Start slow. Build up.

Don't let this be one more thing that is a to-do list or a chore or a mountain that you have to climb or something that you have to check off on your ego list. Like don't turn this into that. This is meant to be the moment that you give yourself grace, that you give yourself time to rest and to return and to relax and to be still and know that he's God.

This is the time for you to put away all of the to-do lists and all of the got to do's. This is your moment to reconnect, man, on a different level with the source of life, with the life giver, with your creator and with yourself, right? This is truly tapping in. We talk about tapping in this meditation. This is truly tapping in, all right? So let's do a couple of more breaths and then.

That's it, man. I just wanted to lay the foundation and give you something to refer to and, you know, just bless you with the practice. OK, so let's do a couple more, man. Remember, full extension as best you can from the belly. When you're breathing out, squeeze that belly, pull that spine, pull that belly button to the spine and fully get out that that that total breath. All right. Here we go.

Four up, hold.

4 out.

Hold.

And then as you're finishing up with a couple of rounds of those super deep breaths, then you can just breathe normally.

and just think to yourself.

setting.

Pre-focusing.

And then you want to move into just no thoughts at all, letting God whisper in your spirit, letting God download things to you, letting the revelation flow, letting the encouragement from God flow.

When I was first taught this, I was taught to have this little smile on my face, just like you're just enjoying something very pleasant.

And with each breath, you're just getting more and more relaxed, more and more relaxed. Letting your shoulders relax. Letting your chest relax the tension.

Self care isn't just for women. ⁓ This is a form of self care for us. And you're just breathing normally.

If you have a standalone alarm, you can set it for five minutes and just breathe normally. Or if you have a phone, you can set the alarm and just breathe normally.

nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to please.

No one to satisfy, no tasks to complete.

No load to carry, no burdens to bear.

No words to speak, no prayers to pray.

No secret codes that you have to tap into to get God to do anything.

You're not worried about yesterday. It's gone. It's history.

You're not obsessed with tomorrow. It hasn't gotten here. It's a mystery.

All right, my brothers, again, can't stress this enough. The stigmas in our society for brothers, for men.

I want you to consider something. Two things. Number one, if you've been trying to keep up with the stereotypes and the stigmas of manhood, how is that working for you? Be your own witness. You give your own testimony. If it's working for you, then maybe none of this matters. If you got it all together and you're good to go, then none of this, you don't need any of it.

But if you've watched this video, especially up until this moment, it's safe to say that it's not working for you. I want you to remember that. Because as you start to do this, almost guaranteed,

your boy gonna say something or you're gonna see something on social media or you're gonna see something on TV and it's gonna be anti-rest, anti-meditation, anti-slowdown. It's gonna be something that's gonna say, nah, I shouldn't be trying to meditate. I shouldn't be trying to rest. Rest is when I die or I gotta get back on my hustle. All of that stuff, man, that wears us out and keeps us exhausted.

So I want you to ask yourself, how is that working for you? All of those manhood prerequisites, okay? And then number two, I want you to remember, especially if you are a man of faith and your faith is in the Christ.

Jesus pulled away from the crowd often. And Jesus, the Christ, that is the blueprint for humanity. That's the blueprint for manhood. That's the blueprint for being a human, fully human. Christ showed us how to be fully man, like.

how to truly experience this thing called life. And all through scripture, Christ pulled away from the crowd, went to a solitary place.

where it was just him. And it's my belief, and you can find it even in context, that it doesn't necessarily say that he was offering up a million word prayer. But there were times where the Christ just set.

and contemplated and meditated. Think about the stress that Christ could have been under, the pressure, the demand Christ needed. Some things aren't just black and white in scripture, some things you have to read into, some things you have to like put yourself there and like allow the culture, the moment, the context to infuse.

you of things that are not just written word for word. And the life that Christ lived informs me that to sustain that ministry, to make it to the cross, he needed desperately moments of the very benefits that I talked about. Christ needed to reset. Christ needed to refuel. Christ needed to refresh. Christ needed to refocus. Christ needed to return to himself.

so that he could complete the mission. Now that's to Christ.

Come on. If Christ needed it, we need it.

His contemplation, his meditation led to his regulation so that he could resolve within himself to complete the work. And I believe that we're called to the same thing. All right? ⁓ Yeah, man, really, I really, really, wish you the best. I'm praying for you. As I always say, I love you guys. I'm praying for you guys. I believe in you guys.

As I always say, the better we can relate to ourselves, the better we can create for ourselves and most importantly, those around us. And I say that because we are in and of ourselves a contribution to the betterment of society. But it's through meditation that we learn how to best be our contribution. learn what our contribution truly is and then the best way to go about

contributing ourselves, not in a way that wears us out, that leads to burnout, that leads to quiet quitting, that leads to hitting the brick wall emotionally, that leads to broken and damaged relationships and regret and all of this. No, the contribution that we were created to make is one that is regulated, one that is not only prayed up, but one that is

that is rested and at the ready because we've taken the time to get to God before the chaos and the confusion of this world gets to us. I hope and pray that that all makes sense. hope and pray that this resource has been a blessing to you. ⁓ Thank you, man, for joining me in this moment. Thank you. Thank you so much, man. I love you.

appreciate you, I celebrate you, I salute you, and ⁓ that's it. If I say anymore, I'm just rattling on, man. I'm just adding on for the sake of adding on. So I said what I needed to say, I've showed you what I needed to show you, and ⁓ lastly, I mean, obviously, if you are someone who says to yourself,

Love the resource, love the meditation, love the insights, but I'm gonna need some help. I'm gonna need some one-on-one. I'm gonna need some handholding, so to speak. I'm gonna need some accountability. I'm gonna need some partnership. I'm gonna need some coaching. I'm gonna need someone to be in my corner to hold me up or someone that I can talk to or I can share more with or I can learn.

more from. I provide one-on-one and group coaching depending on who you are. You might be a part of an organization or a church and you might want to bring me in for facilitating breath work or meditation or any of these things as a group or you might be interested in working with me through a one-on-one coaching approach.

and you might not be aware that I offer that. So I do offer coaching one-on-one and for groups, either one that may be applicable to you. If you're interested in it, then go ahead and click the link below

and you can set up a free connection call with me. We can talk for a few minutes, make sure that we're a good fit for one another, because I'm not for everybody. I'm for some people, but I'm not for everybody. My approach after you talk to me might not be something that you're interested in, but...

that connection call is free of charge. We can just go on a call, have a quick conversation and see if we're a good fit and see what we can do from there. All right, just wanted to make sure that you knew that that was available. So that's it.