The Broject Podcast
The Broject Podcast
Mastering Your Mind: How Meditation will scale your impact and income
This episode does more than just scratch the surface; it provides you with the very tools and techniques that have carved paths through my 15-year business journey and self-discovery.
From practical advice for embarking on your own meditation practice to the benefits of investing in yourself, I'm here to help demystify this space of meditation
So, adjust your headphones, find a comfortable seat, and join me as we dive into meditation and its boundless potential for growth in your personal and professional life.
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Come hang out on IG - https://instagram.com/mikele.k
Want to work together? Let's see if we are a good fit. https://form.jotform.com/212481465098461
What is meditation? Meditation is the tool that allows you to clear the slate of the mind, to be able to look at life objectively, to be able to understand yourself on the deepest of layers, to be able to take control back in every area of your life internally, which then will lead to external control of different areas. You're able to understand character traits in people more deeply and more objectively, so you can see both sides of the coin. You can see events play out before they happen. You're able to notice patterns and cycles in your life, in events in life and in other people. If that doesn't get you excited enough to be able to sit, put the phone down for 10-15 minutes a day. Maybe some of the stories I will share in today's episode will help you understand the power of meditation. So today I'm going to be explaining to you what even is meditation. I'm going to be explaining to you some crazy psychedelic stories. I've experienced in this that you might not even believe Dissolving childhood fears in one meditation practice. What of a Pusna meditation retreat is a 10-day retreat where you meditate for 100 hours a day and you probably eat around 400 calories a day, if not less. I'm going to be giving you a few examples of meditation practices you can do. I'm going to be linking down below a free guided meditation that I run all my clients through as a very, very easy framework to be able to step into meditation practices and start doing that more consistently, and I'm going to be explaining to you all the benefits that come along with a daily meditation practice, which you might already know, and some deeper, long-term ones, and how that translates to business relationships yourself, your stress, your performance, your focus and why everyone should be doing that. Everything on today's episode is my personal experience this is my opinion from sitting 400 hours of meditation in 40 days, from working with meditation experts that have sat with some of the top, top monks in the world and taught meditation around the world, to be in places of people that have devoted their entire life to meditation. I've taken a lot away from it and it might sound a bit crazy or it might sound a bit woo-woo or sci-fi, but this has just been my experience in diving deep into this practice and some of these, some of these revelations, have come from not even diving that deep into this practice and, if anyone is listening today, if this can encourage you, excite you, to just try to meditate for 30 days, seven days. Tomorrow, my job is done.
Speaker 1:What's up? My name is Mikkel Koo Ha and this is the project. These are the conversations I wish I was exposed to when I was younger. It's a chance for you to think differently. It's permission for you to chase the shit you love doing in life. So grab a cup of coffee, turn up the treadmill or down and, if you're in the office, put in those headphones and stop listening to your damn co-workers, because we're about to go in on another episode of the Project Podcast with your host, me, mikkel Koo Ha.
Speaker 1:What gives me the credentials to speak on meditation? Well, a few years ago, I was a part of a personal development startup that dove into spiritual practices very, very deep in many different ways, one of the main ones being meditation, and what we done was we sat for the Pustners in the space of three years or four years it was like three and a half years and for me, someone who has not meditated much in his life, to step into this was a very big deal. Now, what is a Vipustner? You may have heard of it before. A Vipustner is a meditative practice, a meditation course. I should say that goes for 10 days. It's actually more so 11, 12 because there's a check in and then there's a check out day, but the main course itself is over 10 days.
Speaker 1:What that looks like from a very high level is you are meditating for 10 hours a day. Sometimes it's an hour sit, sometimes it's an hour and a half sit, and you start at 4.30 in the morning. You have a few meditation sits. You have a breakfast Very, very small, I must mention. Some of these centers will offer a more westernized option. The more old school, traditionalist ones won't. So we got sidetracked on food. So it's a 10 day meditation sit. You sit for 10 hours a day. Like I said, a few sits in the morning, breakfast, a few sits. You have lunch. When I say a few sits, I go to an hour or an hour and a half meditation sit. You might have a 20 minute break in between. Then you come back to the meditation hall and sit and then you have lunch and then you meditate throughout the rest of the day in the meditation hall and then at the end of the day you have a discourse which is a 45 minute video you're presented at the end of the day to really tap into, maybe, some possible experiences you've been going through and giving you a deeper understanding of the practice itself.
Speaker 1:Now, some of the big things in a Vipassana meditation retreat is there's no talking, there's no eye contact, there's no journaling, there's no reading books, there's no exercise. So the whole intention with this is to give you no distraction or nothing to avoid the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions coming up. So every time you sit down to sit, you're you're building this pressure internally and allowing yourself to have a little decompress or let the lid off. That that soda water bottle you're shaking up is just letting a bit of that pressure off. And with this pressure and this concentrated practice over these 10 days, some crazy shit will happen. We'll get into that in a moment.
Speaker 1:The meditation hall you sit in I've sat in Cliffside Resorts here in Iluwatu what a place called the Astana and then I've also sat in Sri Lanka. I've sat in Nepal, the birthplace of Buddha, and then I've also go sat, sat in Malaysia. Now these halls vary from six people all the way up to 100 plus people. What happens is you walk in and there'll be a cushion. There'll be just a cushion for you. The men are on one side, always the left, and the women are on the right hand side and there'll be a meditation teacher up the front. Now, there's not many, if any, instructions ever given from the teacher. Depending which way you go and sit, you'll be guided through prerecorded tracks from. For me it was Gwanker at the centers I went to, but there's different centers to have different tracks and that's that's essentially all you need to know. Like on the high level of what it is and what it looks like, be compounded.
Speaker 1:Practice in 10 days of doing this is very different to do in an hour a day for a few years, because you clear the slate of the mind so much that you're able to go through every area of your life objectively. You're able to access memories, thoughts, feelings and emotions from your entire life, and one of the things about this is the body is like a library. It remembers everything. I think there's a book out there called the body is like a library. The body remembers all, and it truly does. There will be memories and thoughts that will come through if you ever do go to one of these seats or if you just sit at home where you're like how did that even? How is that even there. That was when I was like five years old, that was when I was 12 years old. That was such an insignificant event in my life, but I can remember it so clearly.
Speaker 1:Which then brings up the question if our body remembers everything, then the stories and meanings we attach to these events, where do they live? And my answer to that is in our subconscious. There are things that have happened to you, experiences you've been a part of in life, and we wrap a story around them. An event happens, we put a story to it. Through that story, we give that meaning, that meaning, a easy belief. That belief will then shape our identity.
Speaker 1:And so many people like I don't need to repeat this, but so many philosophers in the space and philanthropy understand that the unconscious is 95%, the conscious mind is 5% of our cognitive ability to process, access information and operate and show up in the world. So if that's the case, 95% of everything we do we're not aware of which is interesting, because if we're not aware of 95% and these are the things running in the background, like I've got a computer here, I can only see the screen, see the screen of the computer as the conscious mind, everything, the code, the operating system. Everything happening in the background is your unconscious. So if you put it on that level, there's so many bits and pieces inside the computer doing their things the software, the hardware, all of that. So what meditation does? It allows us to go into the back end, where a software engineer couldn't ever see, see where the issues are in the code, change them, fix them, alter them to create a new screen or display or to create a new color or sound or whatever that is. And that's very much what's happening in life. And if we pull away from the pasta and just look at meditation as a whole, yes, the pasta is a concentrated practice to get you to that place and get you to that deeper understanding quick.
Speaker 1:But a meditative practice is allowing you to maybe look behind the screen, look into the computer and see what's actually going on in your life in a day to day, or even widen that on a year to year or a lifetime to lifetime, or even see events that have happened with interactions with other people and see that objectively. Now, what does objectively mean? Well, if you were to envision a fence and you have an argument with a friend, a girlfriend, a business partner, whatever that is, let's use an argument for a simple explanation. You have a fence. On one side of the fence is your right, you've done nothing wrong, it was the other person's fault. On the other side of the fence, they're sitting there saying no, it's all your fault, it's your wrong, you've done the wrong thing. And they're looking at you from their side of the fence. But the problem is the fence is so high they can't see over the fence, so that they have a story on their side of the garden, on their side of the fence, that they're projecting onto you and you're doing the same thing.
Speaker 1:What meditation allows you to do is take a bird's eye view of this, of this fence and this imaginary garden, and see their side, and see your side and not see your side for your points and your, your confirmation bias and what you truly think. It's able to see how you've truly shown up the reality of the situation, and that is what meditation, that is what a deep meditation practice can do for you. It allows you to see reality clearer for what it is, because I'm sure in life there've been times when you have got into an argument and as the emotions and as the emotions heighten, you can maybe see things a bit more distorted and you only realize that in hindsight or later on, or an event can happen in life. Let's use the example of partner cheating on you or you cheating on a partner and you can see that as a really bad event, which I'm not. Look, I'm not saying it's a good event, but you can look back in reflection in hindsight and be like, well, I'm thankful that that girl cheated on me when I was 15 because I saw the holes in how I was showing up that led her down that path, and not to say it's my fault or her fault. You know this is.
Speaker 1:There's so many nuances in relationships. When up this isn't a podcast for that you can look at that and be like, oh, I'm not going to show up that way anymore because it led down this path. Or if you are the one that cheated, you can see what you've done and how you reacted in that space and maybe you can see how much you hurt that person. So that is a deep lesson you learn to not do that again and how to show up in a relationship differently. That is where we can see the world objectively. We're able to view out and look at a bird's eye view on situations, events, thoughts, beliefs, and see them clearly for what it is, because a meditation teacher taught me this once and it's a really good analogy for looking at your life.
Speaker 1:Because our conscious mind like the screen on the computer. That is how you view the world, and when you change the back end operating system, you view the world differently. If you're watching this right now, whatever, whatever age you are, you do not view the world how you did when you were 10 years old, 12 years old, 15 years old. Well, why is that? Why is that that we don't view the world the same as we did a year ago, two years ago, three years ago? Well, a big reason for this is our perception of the world. If we were to envision a camera lens and we hold up this big, long camera lens and in this camera lens there are filters, and there's a filter stacked, stacked, stacked for every event that has happened in your life. And now what happens is you start to look at life through all these filters and that is your perspective of the world, that is your conscious view of how the world is and how you show up in the world. Because if you had different events and experiences that would turn into different beliefs and these would be different filters in your life. Meditation allows you to hold this lens and remove the filter, to look at it objectively and then choose the belief we want to take with that so we can remove the filter. We can see both sides. Maybe we're not ready to completely remove that filter yet, and then what we do is we go through areas of our life and we're pulling these filters away to allow us to see reality clearer.
Speaker 1:You might see this with children. You know a lot of the times children will ask questions which can be the deepest and most profound questions, but there's also a lot of times where they can be very optimistic about the future and you can see a lot of old people are very pessimistic. Well, this is because they've had so many experiences in life that have taught them or shut them down or they failed or their perception has been altered during a perceived negative event in life. That is now how they see the world. Now I do not have children but from my experience with children, most of the time they're optimistic. You ask someone who's 40 years old what they want to do for a job. They just want to get enough money to get paid to look after the house, look after kids where a child wants to be a firefighter, an astronaut, like all these amazing extravagant things. But when you ask someone older, it's very different. My opinion on that is that we go through life and we just stack these filters and then we start to see the world through a whole heap of lenses. Now I don't say all these lenses are bad, but there are quite a few in there that will distort your view on reality for a more positive, optimistic life or a more pessimistic view on life. Now I know you might be listening to this and go, michael.
Speaker 1:I have tried meditating. My mind wanders, I'm uncomfortable, my back hurts, my mind wanders and my mind wanders. So that's one of the most common things I hear from people is that I just keep thinking about things and thoughts will keep coming up and that is completely normal. Like if I asked you to go into the gym and start bench pressing 60 kilo, 80 kilo, 100 kilo you probably couldn't. Or if I were to ask you to go and run a mile or run a kilometer, you couldn't maintain a pace, or maybe you couldn't even consistently run for that time. But over time you get better at it and you adapt and you can run for longer and you can move more weight. That's essentially what you're doing with meditation. You're training the mind and if we think of the mind as a muscle, where progressively this is to Jim bro we're progressively overloading that muscle and I guarantee you the reason why some people can be so successful in business is because they can singularly focus on a task. Like in a world of information overload and our phone already is ringing and distractions, your ability to maintain singularly focused on a task will be the difference between someone who is successful in the world or someone who isn't.
Speaker 1:Imagine someone who sits down to build a website out and every five minutes their phone goes off or they're scrolling or they're getting distracted. You look at that 40 hour week like. If you look at your screen time, you'll be able to see how distracted you are and the difference between a concentrated hour or two of work compared to an eight hour workday for, maybe, an employer where you've spent an hour or so on the toilet, you've spent an hour or two at lunch, you've been chatting to people in between, you've been scrolling on your phone like how much effective work have you done and you might find there'll be times in life when you do step into a task and you lose yourself in it and two, three hours go past. You're like, well, I've done a week's worth of work in these two to three hours.
Speaker 1:Meditation gives us this skill. It gives us this skill to focus on one thing for a long period of time to be as effective as we can. That is why I truly believe meditation is like a superpower when it comes to building a business, and if you can implement something that will allow you to focus better, for longer and deeper, you will just have more results, or you will learn a lot quicker to become the person you need to to get those results in business and life. Also, it helped to manage stress levels I mentioned on the last episode. If you listen to that, I use the example of if you're looking at the world through a camera and when you're not stressed, you're able to zoom out and see everything, all the bits and pieces moving and going on in your mind, in the reality around you, in current projects. But if you're stressed, you narrow down on that one thing, like if you've ever been in a street fight or an altercation or a road rage, you'll realize that you don't see anything else Like. There'll be times when people if they get it into a fight, and people who get into the ring and actually box and do these things you'll realize when you're hitting pads you're just so focused on that one thing. But when this and this is just a high content, a very concentrated, stressful state, if you need to all of a sudden fight someone or your emotions are so heightened, you can only think of that one topic, that one subject, that one argument, that one thing. Meditation allows you to widen the viewpoint and this is why we can see reality clearer. Once we widen this lens, we're able to see everything, see things objectively, piece everything back together and then come out the other side with a completed thought process.
Speaker 1:Another thing I always hear is people don't have enough time. Well, what if I told you, for sitting 15 minutes a day, you'd actually gain back an hour a day. But we don't look at it like this. We just look at the tangibles of like it's of the ROI on this, because when you go out into the world, you'll be more effective, you'll be less distracted and you'll be more decisive with your decisions because you're coming from a clearer, calmer state. You're not stressed out, going from thing to thing to thing, scrolling the phone. Scrolling the phone, going from thing to thing, because when you try to do 100 things at once you don't get much done when you can focus on that one task. See it the whole way through and make sure you put your best quality into that, whether it's a negotiation, a conversation, a creative piece, your work at work, to be able to shut off that area of your life and then move on to the next thing.
Speaker 1:Meditation allows you to do all of this. It improves sleep, it improves blood pressure. For me personally, it improves food cravings, because I'm not as reactive in the world when I calm myself down. I'm not as reactive because I'm more aware of my thoughts. I'm more conscious about my thoughts and the things I'm processing, like when I came out of the back of a 10-day vipassana retreat.
Speaker 1:I cannot express to you how sensitive you are to the world, like when you've had no sense of stimulation. You're so entuned with yourself and you're so calm that just looking at a phone screen when you first come out is overwhelming. The notification right in the text message all of that is like it hits you like a wall. So to think that is what we're like without stimulation, and then we had this overload of stimulation every single day. Well, wouldn't it be best in your best interest to think, to implement something to reduce that stress, that internal stress? And I'm not talking about like when someone cuts you off in traffic. I'm talking about that little lump in your throat, that little tension in your chest, the shortness of breathing you carry with yourself throughout the day when you get a text message of a thing you forgot to do and now you need to do it. Like these little stressful events, these micro-stresses every single day, and these stresses a lot of times just can come from a place of not feeling like you're in control, like so many variables sent to you. But if you're in a grounded, calm, centered state when things arise, you just manage them, you deal with them and you move on, instead of heightening your stress even more and then being more over the place.
Speaker 1:And the reason I keep talking about the stress thing is because I am someone where stress is. It's almost like my default emotion. When things come up, like I get stressed and overwhelmed, not that I rip off doors and punch holes in the wall, but it's like an internal stressor and it doesn't allow me to think clearly. So, recording this episode right now and thinking to myself like I need to start meditating more again, because everything I'm speaking to I know, but there's a big difference between knowing and doing, and I will be repeating this in every single episode take one thing that I've spoken on each time and apply it into your life. So I'm thinking right now. I'm like I need to be applying this more.
Speaker 1:Hearing all this is great, michele, it's great to listen to you. I appreciate your view on that, but I'm gonna go back to doing what I'm doing. Cool, you can do that as well. Just invite you, give it a shot, because you don't even know what can change until you try it, which gets me into like you probably won't feel like you're good at it at first. You probably won't feel like you know where to start. So I wanna give you a couple of reasons on how to start and why you should continue going.
Speaker 1:How to start is very, very simple. It's a matter of if you can sit cross-legged. For me, I have very tight hips, so I'll sit on a pillow, so you just raise your butt up a little bit allows you to cross your legs easier. Don't be afraid to use three, four, five pillows, and if you can't do that, you can sit in a chair. If you can't do that, you can sit with your back on the couch, on your bed, with your legs. Straight Seated is usually best. It allows you to drop a bit more into this meditative state. So don't do it lying down, because you're just full of sleep and what the first step is is just to quiet the mind, and it can be very difficult, especially if you haven't done it much. And that's the hardest point is that initial starting point. So what I like to do is just really focus on my breath. So I'll close my mouth, I'll breathe in and out through my nostrils and I'll just breathe slowly and I'll start to bring awareness to the breath.
Speaker 1:What we do in this space now is we use the breath as an anchor in our practice. In our practice, our mind will wander. You will think about what the to-do list. You will have that great idea that you've been thinking about for weeks. You'll think about the best thing to say back to that person. You'll relive memories. The mind wants to wander. So as your mind wanders, you need to bring it back to the breath.
Speaker 1:And analogy I got from a meditation teacher I worked with for years was if you were to take your new puppy to the park and you want to walk along the path and every time that puppy goes off the path, that is like your mind wandering and at first it's going to need you to really pull the dog back, to pull the mind back and bring it back to the path. The anchor that is the breath and you'll notice as you go on the dog will want to go on the path again and you pull back. But, just like as the dog learns, you'll be building this muscle of the mind to train yourself to stay on the path for longer. And you'll notice, the more and more you do this and the deeper you get into practices, that tug on the lead becomes less and less and less, to the point where you just need to think about bringing the dog back and it already knows and it comes back on the path. With the time you devote to this, you will get to this place, you will get better at this, you will have tough days, you will have better days at meditation, but this is the muscle we're training to bring it back centered on the path to narrow your awareness, to narrow your focus to the breath, and this skill you'll be able to take out into the world and be so much more effective, so much more present, so much more concise and decisive in everything in life. So the things that feel like they're overwhelming with a lack of overwhelmed from indecision and the task left undone, you will not have these because you'll have this superpower. You'll have this ability to be singularly focused, without distraction, on a task.
Speaker 1:What happens here is when we use the breath as an anchor. Whenever we notice our mind wander, we use the breath and we pull it back. You can do one big breath in and out through the nostrils to bring back the sensation, the feeling to the upper lip and the nostrils. Or you can just come back and notice your breath and, as you get better at this, you will go five seconds at a time, 10 seconds at a time, 30 seconds at a time, a minute, two minutes, all up until the point where you slip into that conscious, unconscious being, where I've slipped into this for an hour and a half at a time and time just disappears. That'll be a state that, when you achieve it now and now.
Speaker 1:It's not a to-do list, it's not a goal to get there. The whole goal just to quiet the mind, focus on the breath, without trying to push for an hour and a half, two hours sits. We're not like. This isn't a competition for all my competitive brothers and sisters out there. Trust me, I've been competitive in every area of my life and this is something I tried to be competitive with others and at first it takes away from the whole practice. The other thing you need to do is just to let go of the expectation. It's a good meditation, it's a bad meditation. I felt good, I didn't feel good. It's bringing awareness to how your being currently is and you'll be different on every single day. So learn to be okay with. Some days we're gonna feel a bit down, some days we're gonna feel more up.
Speaker 1:And if you're having trouble starting, I'll attach a link to a guided meditation practice that I can run you through very, very basic, very, very simple. But I'm not here to say to do one style of meditation. There is mantra meditation, there is guided meditation. There is a thousand and one different meditative practices. The one thing I would say to you is find one that you really like. Insight Timer is an app that has so many guided meditations and they're different peoples with different sounding voices. Some has binarial beats.
Speaker 1:I started with white noise meditation, which is just shh. That almost sounds like this is just a constant of rain in the background. That was really awesome to me to help quiet the mind. I didn't watch how to meditate. I didn't use a guided meditation, I just wanted to start meditating because I heard it was good for me. When I started doing this, I was meditating for maybe two weeks at a time not that long, 15 minutes a day and this is when I had one of the most profound experiences of my life, and I wasn't even the intention to experience that. It's just something that came up and I've shared this story on quite a few podcasts before, but it's just, it's true, testament to the power of being able to quiet the mind and access your internal being to see what is truly in there. I started meditating at home for about 10, 15 minutes at a time. My legs would get really sore, so that was like the extent also I could concentrate, for Over time I built this up to a lot longer practice, but like I was, I was. I may have meditated 20 times in my life.
Speaker 1:What happened was I was sitting in my bed a little pre-frame before this. This was, I was about 24, 25 years old and, for me, my whole life I was scared of the dark up until 25 years old, which is like a very vulnerable thing to share. I'm cool to share it now because I'm a little over it, but when I'm a 25 year old man living with my friends in a big house, like I don't want to tell anyone that shit because I say, what do you mean? You're an adult Like you shouldn't be scared of the dark. You might experience this as well if you've been scared of the dark before, probably if you're a kid, but maybe not if you're 25.
Speaker 1:I would leave my bedroom and I would go down this like we had this really high ceiling, like four meter ceilings, and I'd have to walk down all the way down 10 meters or so to get to this big open kitchen to get a glass of water. And throughout the night when I would go out there, I would envision like someone jumping out and grabbing me from out the window or behind the door, or I'd think I'd see a ghost in the corner, Like my mind would go crazy, my heart rate would race up and I couldn't wait to get back in my bed. And even when I was a kid, I had this really crazy experience where and I was sleep proud, so something where I woke up and I heard a little girl laughing in the corner and to this day I still don't know if I was awake or not. And I was sitting there and I could hear her laughing. I hear her laughing and I was like hello, hello. And she just kept laughing and for me, I was so scared. I was like there's no way I'm getting out of the bed, I'm going under the covers because for some reason, if a demon or a ghost or something comes in the room, I'm going to be safe in a thin bit of cotton sheet. I don't know, but I went back to sleep and I just I'd never heard it again. It was just a one-off thing. Maybe it was a dream, maybe it wasn't, but it's definitely something that stayed with me for a very long time. So this was part of the whole scare of the duck.
Speaker 1:And what happened was I started meditating for a couple of weeks. Maybe, like I said before, maybe I'd meditated 20 times in my life, right, and I've gone into my bedroom and the bedroom was it had a king-size bed in the middle and it was a brand new house, so everything was flush finishes. It wasn't like there was anything in the room. There's a bed right in the middle. I just had my two bedside tables and the room was about like five meters by five meters. It was very, very big and I was sitting there and as I was meditating, I could feel my heart rate just increasing a bit. Even before that, I could feel like my body getting hot and it was warming up and it was warming up and I felt like there was something in the room with me. I could feel over at the door, that there was something happening at the door and as I'm sitting here in the bed if you've seen, harry Potter is what envisioned what came up in my mind was like this Dementor-like being was coming up through the door and as that was happening, I'm sitting there in the bed and I'm feeling smaller and smaller and smaller, all the way to the point where I feel like I'm a 12, 13 year old boy sitting on this giant bed and this thing is coming in under the door and my heart rate is picking up.
Speaker 1:I'm getting hotter, I feel like I'm literally about to sweat, or even sweating already, and this thing is coming up and up and up and up and it's getting bigger and bigger and I'm feeling smaller as long and my heart rate is just pounding out of my chest right now and internally, my voice, my voice, is saying Michael, michael, open your eyes, open your eyes, open your eyes, open your fucking eyes right now. And I'm almost starting to panic like I'm freaking out, and this thing is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and over me. And then, all of a sudden, I hear this voice, and it's my voice inside and it says you're okay, you're safe, keep your eyes closed. At the same time, I hear that voice as clear as day. The other voice is still yelling open your eyes, open your eyes, open your eyes, open your eyes, open your fucking eyes right now. And I chose to pick the quieter, calmer voice, as I did. The room cleared, there was silence, there was nothing, and I felt the heat on my body, I felt the sweatiness under my armpits and my heart rate just started to lower. I started to feel it less and less in my chest and I wanted to open my eyes there. I said, no, I'm just going to sit here for another five, 10 minutes and see. So I sat there for another five, 10 minutes, open my eyes no monsters in the room.
Speaker 1:I wasn't 12 years old. That experience shifted everything for me. I didn't understand the depth of meditation and what it can do for you. I didn't understand that traumas and things that have happened in our life had let imprints on our, on our, on our we're carrying around for years None of that. I had no idea what had just happened. I was a bit I actually want to tell anyone because I thought it was a bit crazy. And then a couple of nights later, I need to get a glass of water at 10, 11 o'clock at night and I just walk out to the kitchen, get the water and come back to the bedroom and I'm like I wasn't scared of the dark. Then, okay, it was a good night. And then I realized from that day forward, I was never scaring. I was never scared of the dark again.
Speaker 1:After that one meditation, what I've come to learn and believe later on in my life and dive into these practices and work in with some, some expert meditation teachers. It was the fact that I was holding a traumatic response from maybe something I'd experienced which created my fear of the dark. And what happened is this story. This trauma came up and it was a. It was a chance for me to let go of it. It created so much heat and energy that was stored in my body and that voice I chose allowed me to let go of it, dissolve it and work through it. This has happened to me in the personal retreats as well, where I've had I might share this on some other episodes where. Drop me a message if you want to, if you want to Hear these stories, but I've got quite a few where I literally saw bushes float and move away from me.
Speaker 1:Another story I will share is my fiance, selena, had a needed a full shoulder rebuild. She was doing a tough, mudder or strong Viking in Germany and if you know them, it's like a, it's like a hut, it's like 20 kilometers, but then during this 20 kilometers, you need to do all these crazy obstacles crawl through ice, cold, muddy water, go out the barbed wire, climb over walls, fences, monkey bars, and as she ran up and jumped, she grabbed one of the things she needed to get over and her whole arm just popped out. So it was a full shoulder dislocation and I'm not just like rebuild and she's got meddling there now as well. And what happened is that she, after the surgery and operation, she had to be in a machine that would move her arm up and down. That's how bad her shoulder was and she spoke to many physios. She's worked with many personal trainers to build her shoulder up and everything, but she couldn't really take it past. How am I going to show you this? She couldn't really take it past here for a good part of her life and I was helping her in the gym with this and everything, and it wasn't until we went to and she had a lot of fear around it. You know, anytime we do anything, she's like my shoulder, my shoulder, my shoulder, and I get it like when you've had such a traumatic experience with a part of the body, you always refer to it as your bad knee or your bad shoulder or your weak one, and it can come up for you a lot of times, so you step on it differently and you're a bit more cautious.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we went to this meditation retreat in Nepal and and During her practice. Halfway through she was sitting. She got really, really angry and she was frustrated and she was sick, she was over the meditation, she didn't want to be in there anymore and she stormed out of the hall and one of the other teachers came out and just that. They never speak to you, they're very polite, they just kind of ask you back in and they need to be there for times like this when you just done, you're done and they're there to kindly Annoyingly kindly invite you back in to continue sitting. She came back in, she sat down, went through a very, very intense meditation practice of just heat, anger, all these emotions. After the sit she laid back and Layed down and put her, put her arm up just to stretch out and for the first time since this operation she was able to move her shoulder the whole way back and touch the floor from a meditation practice. She said during this practice she felt a hot ball like in her shoulder, immense pain, dissolve and move out of her shoulder.
Speaker 1:If you ever bought a car, like sometimes cars have speed limiters or Rev limiters so they can't go over a certain speed or they can't go over a certain amount of Um red line when you're, when you're revving them. Now the nervous system acts like that in our body and if we have a deep traumatic experience we're holding on to, and Nervous system might be the thing limiting us from that. Or if we look at a deeper level, of more of a Wu Wu spiritual understanding that Beliefs that that belief we're holding on to can be the thing limiting us. That traumatic event can be the thing, that Trauma can be stored in the body and it could be limiting that movement. I'm only sharing you guys, with you guys, my experience, my fiance's experience, which is some pretty crazy things. I've got Dozens of more stories from other people.
Speaker 1:I know you know, if this is the extent of our body remembering things and we have the ability, we have the tool to dissolve them and move through them, imagine what is limiting you right now and laugh and and imagine what could be possible on the other side of meditation and guess what? It's not even like. I'm not even asking you to sacrifice a few years of your life to potentially get to a point where you dissolve this amazing trauma and life gets better. No, guess what along the way. You will get benefits along the way. You will be rewarded along the way. Life will get better if you concentrate on this practice. In summary, my invitation to you is To try to lean in and to experiment what works for you. I'm not here to say Meditation is the be all of end all of everything in life, but I'm telling you it is an amazing piece of kit to add to your tool belt to navigate the world and get the absolute best out of your experience in this lifetime.
Speaker 1:If you want to plug into a guided meditation practice, I've got a link below. If you want to explore around a bit and see what's out there inside, timer is a great app. It's free. You can just use the timer to do your own guided meditations. You can plug into recordings. You can do so much in there. All of it's in there.
Speaker 1:So, with that said, if I can leave you with anything today is I invite you to Sit this week. 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Go into a sit with no intention Other than to just quiet the mind and bring stillness and awareness To your breath and your mind. It will be hard, it will be challenging and it can be difficult, but just like when you're a baby and you decided you wanted to start walking. It was also very challenging and difficult, yet we still showed up and we still done it. You will be amazed at what is on the other side of of Implementing something like this in your life for a long period of time.
Speaker 1:I Say that from a place of it completely altering so many areas of my life and Bringing me so much more clarity, awareness to myself and the world around me.
Speaker 1:In a world where we're consistently pulled from thing to thing, from notification where accessible 24-7, do yourself, give yourself the 15 minutes a day to be able to come back to center, reorganize the mind, reshape, refile everything, calm your nervous system and then go into the world to do the thing that you're here to do.
Speaker 1:As always, my name is mckelcruja. I appreciate you dropping in for this solo episode where I'll be giving you guys all the tools, techniques, skills, learnings I have Implemented, I have learnt over my 15 years in the business, personal development, spiritual places. This is a place where I bring all of them together to give you guys all of these techniques, all of these teachings, all of these understandings, for free and, as always, if you want to take this a step further, if you want to reach out, I do have one-on-one mentoring group programs and some paid products online as well. So if, no matter where you're at, I've got something for you, and if you have any questions, anything you want me to unpack you want my feedback on, send them in contact me on Instagram and I'll be putting some episodes later on, together with all of your questions you guys send in. So appreciate you. Thank you again and peace you.