Meditation Without Bullshit

by Aaron S Elias

  You are probably not even aware of all the noise because you assume it to be normal and you have learnt to live with it. Feel free to put this book down for a minute or two and reflect on your surroundings. Is there peace and quiet or is something distracting you? This could be music, your TV, a wall clock, or noise caused by other people. Try to identify as many sources as you can and keep in mind that any kind of distraction may affect your mental health negatively. You may not even know what it feels like to be without distractions and feel discomfort once you are in a situation where the distractions you are used to are temporarily gone. Those situations are rare, but maybe you have had the experience of a blackout while you were alone at home. Without electricity in your home, did you panic or did you just sit there, knowing or hoping that the problem will be fixed soon? To give you a heads-up: meditation will put you in a similar situation as you will deliberately exclude distractions. As a consequence, you will learn that your mind, when left to its own devices, is a lot more restless than you are aware of. With meditation, we are going to work on that problem.

  Benefits of Meditation

  As a busy person, you may legitimately ask yourself why you should bother with meditation. I think that meditation is one of the most efficient uses of your time. Your daily investment may be as little as a few minutes on the low end. With just fifteen minutes per day, you will reap significant benefits over the long run. Meditating for longer intervals quickly reaches the region of diminishing returns. After all, your spare time is limited. There is the alternative of going all in and joining a monastery. This might maximize your physical well-being but comes at the expense of having to live a life of relative poverty. I am not overly concerned with extremes, however. Instead, I want to highlight how you can benefit from meditation with just a little bit of your spare time, which should be possible even if you were the busiest among my readers.

  First and foremost, meditation is a great way to relax. As long as you do not aim to push your physical limits but instead meditate for a manageable amount of time, there are only positive sides to it. So, let me tell you more about some of the spill-over effects that will positively influence your everyday life. In this chapter, I highlight common occurrences in daily life and how the positive effects of meditation may help you handle them better.

  In a nutshell, meditation is a wonderful tool for calming a restless mind. What is more, you may greatly underestimate how restless your mind is when it is left to its own devices. This is particularly true if you are caught in the rat race and neglect to evaluate how your life is going. That is an easy trap to fall into, considering that the next rung on the ladder is always in sight.

  Confidence

  One of the consequences of regular meditation is that it will make you appear calm and collected. What would you think if you saw someone like that — wouldn't you assume he was experienced, secure about himself and his actions, as well as confident? The fact that people often make unfounded assumptions about confidence became blatantly obvious to me after entering university. I had been meditating for a few years already and my academic record was good. However, I was not the most confident person around. To my great surprise, though, some of my fellow students made assumptions that had little grounding in reality. I did not talk a lot, but when I bothered to contribute something to class or to discussions outside the classroom, it was something worth listening to. In addition, I did not exhibit nervous ticks, which only confirmed their opinion. Without even wanting it, I was encouraged to take positions of responsibility and I won the vote for some admittedly minor roles. Yet, those were decisions by vote, which means that I appeared to be the most capable candidate.

  Those are just anecdotes, but they draw your attention to a few important points. One is that it does not matter how insecure you feel. It is more important how you appear to others. Meditation will help you in that regard as it will make you appear much calmer. You don't even have to demonstrate a lot of competence in many areas either. Obviously, bluffing your way through a class on Multivariate Calculus is infinitely more difficult than doing the same in Introduction to Gender Studies, but you get the idea. In fact, in many occupations, actual competence seems to take a backseat role anyway.

  Confidence is an attribute that is very much in demand. As long as you keep calm and don't do anything stupid, other people view you as confident and probably even competent. I was also surprised that I had the reputation of being a womanizer, despite having had very little sexual experience back then. However, because I was not intimidated by the presence of women, that conclusion seemed unavoidable to some. Furthermore, if you manage to control your thoughts to some extent, which includes getting a hold on self-sabotaging thoughts, you will genuinely become more confident. This means that you will feel more confident.

  In the end, mere outward appearances might be enough to make people believe that you have leadership abilities, even though not much has changed inside yourself. I do not want to make you believe that meditation is a way to bullshit yourself through life. Quite the opposite is true. Instead, the spillover effects of meditation may make people around you draw conclusions about you that are only partly justified. This allows you to enter a virtuous cycle of continuous self-improvement.

  Social Interactions

  With regards to your social interactions, meditation will have an almost immediate positive effect. If you are deficient in that regard, your social skills could improve noticeably within weeks. This happens not because you learn to do something, but because you will get into the habit of stopping to do something unnecessary.

  Maybe you get nervous around people, especially around attractive women. This is an aspect that is strongly exacerbated by a restless mind. Through meditation, you will learn to control your mind and your thoughts, which will help you in any social interaction. Insecure people tend to second-guess the actions of the people they deal with, even if there is no good reason to do so. Second-guessing easily leads to feeling nervous or being tense. This is reflected in your voice and gestures. Consequently, by not entertaining unnecessary thoughts and thus freeing up mental energy, you will be able to be more spontaneous. By reacting more intuitively, you may even be able to showcase more of your humor and wittiness.

  Meditation is a pathway to becoming a lot calmer in general. That level of calmness will be your new baseline from which every interaction starts. Fumbling around and stuttering nervously may soon be much less of an issue than they are today. This could mean that the next time you see a cute girl in the library who smiles at you, you will not automatically lose your composure. Instead, you will find it not too difficult to return her smile or walk up to her, if you so desire. If the previous example sounded like something you could never do, it is due to psychological barriers. There is nothing that should stop you from interacting with strangers, especially if you find them attractive or interesting. However, by being unable to control your racing thoughts, you quickly get into a loop, resulting in you telling yourself that the girl could not possibly have been smiling at you, or that someone you are talking to does not like you but merely talks to you because he wants to be friendly.

  Not all social interactions are pleasant. Surely, you have been in situations in which you wanted to stand up to someone or express a contrarian position in a discussion. In the end, you did not do so, despite knowing that you were right or that you could have influenced the discussion for the better. Too many experiences like that can make you harbor resentments or even turn you into a misanthrope. Learning to control your thoughts, instead of the other way round, will make you less nervous, help you present yourself better and more easily connect with people.

  Examinations

  Examinations are a big part of most of our life. This may be surprising to those of you who have yet to graduate from university. Depending on your chosen profession, there may be many more examinations left to pass before your career is fully established. This is particularly the case in accounti
ng and finance. There are certifications to be earned in many other fields too, and some of those have high failure rates. That being said, university may be tougher, if only for the fact that your GPA (in the US) or overall degree classification (in the UK) determines whether you will even get a foot in the door in certain fields.

  No matter how good a student you are, you may be afraid of examinations. This nervousness could be justified because you are poorly prepared and pin your hopes on the arguably implausible expectation that an upcoming exam will be a lot easier than previous exams you managed to get your hands on. Fear of failure due to being ill-prepared can be remedied. Just work harder! However, many students are well prepared and nonetheless fear failure. This is irrational because they should know that they will do well. Yet, despite having mastered the material to a reasonable degree, they are afraid of failing. Some even get caught in a cascade of negative thoughts: they will do poorly on the upcoming exam and on many others. Consequently, their GPA will tank and they will not land a good job. Finally, they conjure up a nightmarish scenario in which they end up living in the basement of the house of their aging parents, living off food stamps, and being a failure on every metric imaginable. Regardless of where you find yourself on this spectrum, you will arguably do a lot better if you get a hold on your thoughts.

  In general, in an examination situation the effects of meditation yield enormous dividends. Not only will you be less disturbed by external events and be able to deal with intrusive thoughts, you will also, through repeated practice, be able to relax much more quickly. It is one thing to be able to relax when you are undisturbed while sitting in the lotus position, but it is quite another to do so when you are stressed out because of an upcoming exam. If you learn to do this, you can reasonably expect to do better with the same amount of work. Ideally, you will be able to maximize your potential because your thoughts no longer sabotage you.

  Heated Arguments

  A surprising amount of people have anger management issues, which is unfortunate as there is little to be gained by losing your composure. There are many situations that may justifiably make you angry, at least if you do not have a firm grip on your emotions. One of the most disgraceful displays of human behavior I experienced was when a Lufthansa flight out of Italy I was about to take was first delayed for ninety minutes, and later on canceled. Only a minority of the people in the queue waiting to speak to a service agent voiced their disapproval, but among those who did there were people who lacked all self-awareness. The worst was a middle-aged Italian guy in an expensive suit who wildly gesticulated while unleashing a torrent of expletives on the service staff. He only shut up after airport security showed up. That guy seemed oblivious that his inability to control his emotions wasted not only his time but also the service agent's time and the time of everyone who was still waiting for their turn.

  I understand when people get upset when facing frustration. However, there is plenty of human behavior for which there is no excuse at all. Have you possibly dated someone who later turned out to barely be able to keep on top of things? People like that create chaos around them and it is only a matter of time until they, yet again, fall victim to their own inability of keeping themselves organized and making plans. A positive interpretation is that such people can learn to improve but there are also people who seem to be of inferior cognitive ability and simply cannot identify a weakness and systematically work on it. As a reader of this book, though, I presume you are smart, dedicated, and motivated enough to work on yourself.

  There is a flip side to being able to control your emotions: you will be able to stay calm when someone explodes in your face. Frankly, if you ever find yourself in such a situation, you should think long and hard about how you ended up in it because you probably ignored countless red flags. Concrete examples are histrionic girlfriends, emotionally immature colleagues, and abusive managers. Such people have in common that whenever something annoys them, they would rather unload their frustrations than address the underlying issue. You will find it a lot easier to not get caught up in that kind of emotional drama and walk away unharmed if you manage to cultivate a calm disposition.

  Anxieties and Feelings of Insecurity

  Less dramatic than clinically relevant aberrant psychological behavior are anxieties. Those can be crippling but I am more concerned with everyday occurrences. In the following, I largely focus on women as I have rarely encountered similar behavior in men. Women who are prone to suffering from anxieties, if not full-blown panic attacks, seem to follow a particular pattern. First, something innocuous happens, which leads to an association with an unwelcome memory. Instead of not dwelling on it and moving on, they unearth one negative association after another. It is worse if said negative emotion has led to an emotional breakdown in the past already. Before they know it, they are trapped in a circle of racing thoughts.

  Consider how this played out with an emotionally unstable former girlfriend of mine. Sadly, she was unable to identify the emotional pattern she was trapped with. It roughly went as follows: she was unhappy about something, but instead of tackling the issue, she created conflict as a means of distraction. For instance, she may ask you to get some milk on the way to her place, and you forget it. You may think that the blame is on you, but you don't realize that even if you had gotten a carton of milk, something else would have upset her. She uses this as a justification for starting an argument. Clearly, you have now proven that you do not care about her. Seconds later, she is screaming at you. With such a person you cannot reason. To her, every single conclusion along the way is perfectly valid. I think the underlying issue is that such women do not have a firm grip on their emotions and quickly enter a circle of constantly reinforcing negative thoughts.

  It may not be immediately obvious how the previous example relates to meditation. One of the biggest benefits of meditation is that it will teach you to not engage your mind in needless speculation. Let me spell out how this plays out for a novice, an intermediate practitioner, and someone very experienced. When novices have a random thought enter their mind, they tend to chase it. One thought leads to another, which may or may not be connected to the preceding thought they had. This is the essence of having a restless mind. An intermediate practitioner may still have many thoughts entering his mind but he will not engage them. Those thoughts just come and go. As a very experienced practitioner, however, you are used to meditating with an empty mind, which is an incredibly empowering experience. Thus, intrusive thoughts are not even an issue for you anymore.

  Indeed, meditation should not be viewed in isolation of your daily life. The further you progress in your meditative practice, the more it will change how you react in everyday situations. Do you now see how this relates to people who do not have a firm grip on their emotions? In my view, emotionally unstable people have limited agency. Instead of themselves controlling their emotions, it is the other way round. One way of working on that problem is therefore to meditate in order to strengthen your mental stability.

  The example of an old girlfriend of mine mentioned above was rather extreme, so let me present a milder variation that may be more relatable. Let's say you do something but the outcome is disappointing, so you question an entire series of future plans and ignore past successes. For instance, you may have built an ego around your mathematical ability, but then you find yourself in a class on abstract algebra. You spend an entire day on the worksheet, but you just cannot get anywhere. Does this mean that your possibly stellar previous academic record is for naught and that you should drop out or study something less challenging? Well, it depends. Negative feedback from your environment may be a legitimate reason to reevaluate your self-image. However, there is also pointless fretting over trivialities. With a clear head it is easier to decide what kind of situation you are facing. Are you genuinely on the wrong track in life or are you simply dealing with a temporary setback you should be able to overcome with perseverance? The latter should not lead to anxiety, wh
ile the former probably should. In any case, it is important that you keep moving forward.

  Plenty of men end up in situations where their anxiety triggers a fight-or-flight response. They feel threatened and may say or do something they will soon afterwards regret. If this applies to you, then think about why you get aggressive. More often than not, it is a sign of insecurity. The subsequent question is: why are you insecure? Once you figure that out, you will be able to work on that part of your personality. Losing your temper and resorting to verbal abuse or even physical violence will hardly ever do you any good. You may think you have sound reasons to react as you do, but it is hardly more sensible than your girlfriend freaking out about some minor or possibly even imagined incident.

  Meditation teaches you to keep a cool head. Ideally, you will learn to put your aggression and insecurities to work in a more beneficial way. After all, having a chip on your shoulder can be a powerful motivational force. This means that you won't show your extreme side in an argument. Meditation will also help you to avoid getting into such situations because occurrences that used to annoy or anger you, you will endure more easily. One day, you will rightly ask yourself why you even got mad about such incidents in the past.