Episode 9: Meditation As a Portal To The Self: How Meditation is The Ultimate Tool To Get To Know Yourself Better, Begin To Heal and Change Your World

In this episode we take another look at the benefits of meditation, specifically looking at meditation as an incredibly powerful tool to help open the door to self enquiry, which is the first step towards greater self knowledge, self awareness and healing. When we can take this first brave step towards getting to know ourselves better, we can begin to understand that we are not our thoughts, or emotions and that they do not define who we are. We can tap into the "true self" within, which is a powerful source of peace and wisdom.

The implications on this shift in perspective can have an amazingly powerful impact not just on how we view and conduct ourselves, but also on our relationships, communities and the wider world around us. 

If you have any comments, questions or anything you would like to hear about related to this podcast, I'd love to hear from you.

Please feel free to message me on Instagram or email me here: helen@feettoearthyoga.co.uk

You can follow me on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/feettoearthyoga/?hl=en

Or why not find out how we can work together with classes classes, courses and 1:1 coaching here: https://www.feettoearthyoga.co.uk/

With love and light,

Helen xxx

Transcript

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Welcome to Be Still and Notice, a yoga podcast. Join me, your host, yoga and meditation instructor Helen Taylor, to dive deeply into the vast ocean of wisdom that is yoga. Explore with me how these ancient practices can help heal and elevate us physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually in an ultra-modern world. Together we'll deepen our practice, explore our connection to divinity and our own inner landscapes with the help of special guests, guided meditations, how-tos and oh so much more. Yoga has the incredible power to change your life on every level and it all begins with stillness. Now let's begin. Hi everyone and welcome to episode 9. In this episode on meditation, we're talking about how meditation really is a doorway to understanding yourself better. When you can understand your true nature and who you really are, you're more able to make positive changes in your life, have deeper and better relationships with others and and develop a sense of compassion and empathy. It really is a profound way to help change your life. I really hope you enjoy the episode and let's get cracking. Hi everyone and welcome, welcome to episode 9 of Be Still and Notice, a yoga podcast. And we have another meditation episode for you today. This one is all about how meditation is a doorway to your inner self. There's so much to talk about here and it really can seem quite complicated in the beginning but when you break it down you realise just how simple meditation is and how it really works. So in our last meditation episode we looked at some of the barriers that people have on their path and things that can stop them, really practical solutions that can really help you get into meditation. And today I really want to talk about why it's such an amazing tool for self-understanding. And really yoga is entirely about understanding the self in the beginning it's about developing through all of the practices which do various different things but you could look at all of them and say this is all about self awareness deepening the knowledge of the self so i like to look at it as Meditation is a doorway to your true nature, your true self, to understanding yourself better. And if you really want to know what makes you tick, start meditating. If you really want to get to know yourself better, sit and be still and meditate. It really is quite as simple as that. And as we mentioned in the previous episode, it's not easy. It's not easy. We all have our own narratives, our own inner dialogues, complex inner worlds, past histories, you know. And it can be confronting to sit with yourself. But trust me, once you get there, it's nowhere near as scary as you think. And I think that anything that deepens your self-knowledge and helps you become more self-aware, helps you really understand yourself better is really one of the most valuable things you could do in your lifetime. Because it impacts everyone else around you. And we'll talk about that a little bit later on. So if you're brave and you have the courage to bear yourself, this is something one of my teachers, Carolyn Cowan, she's very keen on saying, can you stand to be with yourself? Can you bear yourself? And if you can, with kindness and compassion towards yourself, A meditation practice really is, it creates an opportunity for a new perspective on your inner world, on you. It's like taking yourself to the school of you. It's like sitting down in that classroom and there you are, you're the teacher and you're the student. And it's absolutely fascinating that we can do this as human beings. This is the brilliance of the brain, of consciousness. and our existence, our intelligence. So it's a little bit like when you sit down to meditate, it's a little bit like distracting a naughty child with a treat while they get their hair cut. If you imagine your mind with all its thoughts and all its distractions and also your emotions, your emotional landscapes, if you imagine... your mind it's like a naughty child that just will not sit still it's just you know fidgety and grumpy and wants this and wants that if you sit down and meditate and offer that naughty child a game a treat something to play with something to distract it i.e meditation practice so that could be a mantra focusing on the breath suddenly other things are available and we're going to come back to this concept of the seer or the atman that i mentioned in the previous episode so if you haven't listened to that episode it could be quite helpful as a little foundational thinking for this episode um So what it allows is it allows you to experience the naughty child, the monkey mind, the really busy, distracted mind that can be full of so much. Once that mind is distracted, what's there? Again, in that previous episode, I talked about Atma Vichara. Who knows these thoughts? Who knows these thoughts? And in yoga, they call that Atman, Brahman, sometimes the seer, sometimes the witness, sometimes the knower. So in this episode, we're going to call this the seer. So when the mad monkey mind is distracted by process, By meditation process, whether that's reciting a mantra, focusing on the breath, focusing on an object, whatever that might be, the seer can be seen. Now the magical thing about the seer is that it's not governed by the emotions or your thoughts themselves. The seer is ever present in every single one of us. It's the part of your consciousness that is aware of your thoughts, that is aware of your emotions. It's the part of your consciousness that is always calm, present, ever wise, ever knowing, ever kind, ever peaceful. And ever loving, always love is there. When you create space for the seer to be there, when you tune in, because it really is a tuning in, not a tuning out. Ram Dass really famously said that. I think it's a perfect way to describe it. When you meditate, you're distracting the mind. You're saying, no, you shut up for a bit. I need to talk to this part of myself. I need to commune with this seeing part of myself. And once you've made contact with this part of yourself, you begin to understand the separateness of your mind and your consciousness. So the mind that is like, oh, I need to do the shopping tomorrow... I need to do this, I need to do that, I'm feeling fat, I don't feel great, I'm excited. It's the emotions as well. The seer is never entangled in all of that melodrama that plays out in our lives. So when you can be in contact with the seer, you can naturally become calmer and more peaceful and you can begin to To hold a mirror up to your thoughts, your narratives and your emotions, suddenly you're not identifying yourself with these thoughts and emotions. So for example, if you're someone who... It struggles with body image. That can be a really, really difficult one. Your internal narrative might be, I don't like how I look. I feel ugly. I am ugly. I don't like my body. Very, very negative. In meditation, you can realize that that is just a part of you, a part of your mind from experiences probably conditioned. It could be for all sorts of different reasons. that's a part of your mind that is just carrying on in its own little negative narrative when you're in touch with the seer you can see that when you're in that entirely you can become lost in it and believe it to be absolutely true and when you're lost in something it's very hard to find a way out of it or a way to overcome it so Contacting, being, communing with this seer, this peaceful, present space of your consciousness is such a powerful tool for self-development, self-knowledge, self-understanding and healing. I can't emphasize that enough. So simple, isn't it? Shut up the mind, distract it, because you can't just get rid of all your thoughts, but distract it. Focus it on something else and allow the seer, all calm, all present, not involved with any melodrama, to come to the fore. It's a fascinating process. So when you understand you're not your emotions and you're not your thoughts... You can imagine maybe that your emotions are like the waves on an ocean, but the seer is like the deep sea beneath those waves. It's part of the same being. But in the depth of the sea, it's still and dark and quiet and peaceful. Whereas right on the surface of the ocean, it might be really choppy. The wind is blowing. The waves are massive. There can be boats and all sorts going on. But right at the bottom of the ocean, it's still and calm and quiet. And it really is a huge amount about presence. The seer is always present and in present moment thinking. The seer is neutral, doesn't get involved in the dramas, doesn't have anything to play out, doesn't have any agenda. The seer is just there. And the more objective... you become, the more you can commune with this seer and see this as the true self of you because that's essentially what it is. That's your true nature, your true state of being. Everything else is learned behaviour, suffering, struggles. They're all part of being a human being and that's part of what we're here to do, I believe. is to learn and overcome these strifes these struggles these melodramas to learn more about ourselves and why these things play out why things affect us the way i do they do why we become upset but and triggered about certain things As we learn more and we become more objective and go, right, okay, why am I feeling this? Where does that come from? It becomes deeply fascinating. And you can become really, really objective about yourself. And the more you practice, the more it comes into your everyday waking world. And you'll begin to notice when you're reacting to something. And you'll be like, oh, okay, that's interesting. Why did I just do that? There's greater self-awareness. And of course, this is going to impact everything in your life. Your relationships massively, the way you communicate with people, the way you begin to communicate with yourself. The way you live, the way you operate in the world. Because our own self-awareness is just massively, massively important for our self-development. And perhaps you've met someone that has zero level of self-awareness. And they're just fighting through the world in their own way. And that's their path. That's fine. We're each on our own separate journeys. So no judgment there. But perhaps you have met someone like that and it's a car crash. It really is a car crash. If not already happening, then waiting to happen. There's something about the ability to be able to pause and self-reflect that is just so powerful. It's such a powerful tool to be able to change. So if there's something in your life that you don't like about yourself, something you do that seems to be on repeat for most of us, there are several things. And this is a lifetime's work, by the way. a lifetime's work of self-inquiry, deepening self-knowledge, and really finding out about what makes you do the things you do. And once you know more, once you're more objective and have a deeper self-awareness, you can begin to make changes, small changes. You can begin to go, do you know what? This thing keeps coming up, this past event. I haven't really faced up to this. I haven't grieved. I haven't given myself time. I need to speak to this person. I need to move forward. I need to change my job. Whatever it might be, it could be a hundred thousand million different things. But it all begins with that first step. of self-awareness. And that's why meditation is an incredibly powerful tool. When we create greater self-understanding, this is where it leads to higher levels of understanding, empathizing with other people. We become not so navel-gazing and more outward-thinking, compassionate. We're more able to step into someone else's shoes, see things from the other side, move past trauma responses into objective, compassionate thinking. And let's face it, the world needs more compassion right now. It really does. And we aren't all built to change the world, but I believe we are all built to change ourselves. We have that capability. We have the ability to tune in and master ourselves. When we tune in to the seer, when we know that we are not our emotions, they do not make up our identity. They're something we experience. We are not our thoughts. They are not who we are or what we are. But they are just patterns of thinking from society, from our histories, snapshots of our mind's activity. Just because we have a bad thought about someone doesn't mean we're a bad person. So higher levels of self-awareness Give us greater levels of emotional intelligence. It can really help us to deepen our relationships and begin the path to healing. Because if you're constantly acting out on your triggers, your trauma responses, things that really affect you, if you're constantly, constantly reacting to other people... instead of responding, you're not addressing the issue. It's like going round and round in circles. Same thing on repeat. And so many of us, me included, do this, have done this. You come out of one relationship, you go into another one, and you do the same. The same thing happens. Why does that happen? Because you haven't addressed the issue. You haven't been able to see why. What the real problem is. How you affect that relationship, that other person. How your behaviour is cause and effect. So my friends, it's a huge topic. And it's simple. Greater self-awareness leads to... greater expansion of consciousness. It leads to healing. It leads to greater emotional intelligence. It leads to greater compassion and empathy in others because the more you understand yourself, the more you can understand other people and where they're coming from. It leads to a more peaceful state of being. And come on, we're not robots. We're human beings and we're born to be fallible. We're messy. We make mistakes. We're emotional. We are animalistic. We're all these things. But yoga has given us the tools. Not just yoga, lots of ancient disciplines throughout the world. Every religion uses a form of meditation as a way in. as a way into that more peaceful state of being perhaps you call it communing with God the divine there are many different ways of looking at it but from a yogic perspective when you commune with the seer when you realize you're not your thoughts, you're not your emotions, and you can be in the depth and stillness of a dark sea and look up and see the waves above that aren't affecting you, that's when real change can happen. That's when healing can begin. That's when you can begin to move forward, become... the next iteration of you as we all are constantly changing, constantly moving forwards, moving backwards. And I just, on another note, something I have really learned in the past year is that healing is not linear. So everything comes around and around and around again. Healing happens just as it should. And quite often you'll think, oh, I've got there, I've got there. And then it comes up again, and it comes up again, and it comes up again. That is as it should be. Healing is not a straight line. It is like a series of spirals, spiraling upwards. And until issues... are completely resolved, which may take several lifetimes, then they will come back and they will come back. But doing the work of knowing yourself, know thyself, is oh so worth it. So if you're brave enough to sit down be still and notice if you're brave enough to do that then the rewards are endless thank you so much for listening my friends and I'll speak to you again soon until next time thank you so much for listening to the be still and notice podcast I really hope you enjoyed this episode and perhaps it even added something to your life. If you know someone that might benefit, please share this episode with them and of course a review would be so much appreciated. Please find all the information relating to this episode including relevant links in the show notes and until next time, sending you so much love and light. on your path to yoga.