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Welcome to the Eastwesticism podcast where our host Todd Perelmuter shares the lessons he's learned spending eight years living with gurus, monks, lamas, and shamans across 35 countries and five continents. Join in the journey as he brings the best scientifically proven methods for living your best life from the east and the west, straight to you. The path to peace, love, health, and happiness starts here.

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Hello, and welcome to path to peace with Todd Perelmuter. I'm your host, Todd Perelmuter, thank you so much for joining. And today, we're going to talk about what's the difference between the thinking mind and the meditative mind?

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This is such a interesting question, because sometimes when we're meditating, all we're doing is thinking, so is there even a difference? The answer is 100%. Yes, here's the difference between the thinking mind and the meditative mind. 

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When we are thinking, we have what we consider monkey mind, which is your mind is jumping from thought to thought, randomly chaotically grabbing on to anything that it can think of. And this is our natural state of being in our meditative mind. 

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We catch ourselves in the monkey mind, and then we refocus our mind on our mantra or our breath. And every time we do this, maybe it's only 10 times in your meditation. Maybe it's 100 times. But every time we do this is a profound break in that monkey mind train of thought, where we're just lost in thought, and we become present and aware of our thoughts instead of being lost in thoughts. 

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Most of our lives, we spend totally distracted, because we're always somewhere else, we're in our phones, or we're in the movie or show or watching or we're in that conversation with someone else. And so meditation is really that opportunity to turn off all the distractions, tune out all the noise, and to really practice focus.

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We all tell kids, you know, focus, but we never tell them how to focus. We never spent any time practicing focus. And so through meditation, we get to practice this focus. And that's really the difference is the meditative mind is the focused mind. 

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And when we are not bombarded by heightened mental stimulation from flashy, special effects in a movie, or constant, endless, tick tock scrolling, when we're able to focus on something as subtle and quiet as our breath or a mantra, we are really heightening our ability to focus. So I would say that a meditative mind is alert, focused and present. Where as the thinking mind is chaotic, constant chattering, almost like a static in the background. 

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And whenever they've actually studied this when the power goes out in a neighborhood and it suddenly becomes super quiet, everyone has an as a sigh of relief, because even though they didn't notice the refrigerator buzzing and the air conditioned humming, that release of some of that static background noise is so refreshing and relaxing. And that is what meditation can do. 

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Thank you so much for tuning in today to path to peace with Todd Perelmuter, and we'll see you next time.

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You were listening to the Eastwesticism podcast. Be sure to visit us at EastWesticism.org to join the conversation and receive enlightening emails. Until next time,