Mindfulness Meditation For Absolute Beginners!

1. Intro redone: Hello and welcome to the course mindfulness meditation for absolute beginners. In my opinion, mindfulness meditation is the single best thing that someone can do to establish a calm, controlled, and happy mental state. In this course, we're going to go over the basics. We're going to get you started. I work as an online mental health advocate, author and coach. I've helped thousands of people move from a place of surviving to passionately thriving. One of the very first things I get them doing is meditating daily. The reason is simple. When you practice mindfulness meditation, what you're doing is basically teaching your mind, step back and detach. You'll learn that although you feel overwhelmed though you feel trapped by, or whether you feel associated with the thoughts, moods, emotions, memories, all those things that are popping up. You're actually something separate from it. You'll see that there's a gap between you and those thoughts. And in that gap, you will find peace. I'm not talking about a spiritual, We were something like that. Know what I'm talking about is you'll see that you're having the thoughts, but you're over here. Does that make sense? You will learn to detach. You'll learn to see that what you are is the thing having the thoughts. You will notice that the other thing having the thought, not the thoughts themselves. It sounds a little bit conceptual, but throughout this course, I'll be guiding you will produce some sessions together. And you will develop a simple method to start meditating daily and over time. And with practice, you'll start separating yourself from the concept of associating to those thoughts. So what I'm going to be doing from this course is drawing from my book, Mindfulness, a guidebook to the present moment. This book covers an introduction to mindfulness from the very beginning, which is what we're going to be going into. But it also gets too quiet advanced practices. So we're gonna be looking at the first set of third to half of the book and basically breaking it down and giving you those tools in a visual format and we'll be practicing together. My name is Zachary Phillips and like I said, I'm an online advocate, mental health advocate, author and coach. And basically I just want to give you the gift of meditation. We're going to cover how to do it, when to do it, how to establish it into your life, and to troubleshoot some basic practices. We're gonna look at different approaches for people that have different needs, different abilities. And I just got I just can't wait to give it to you because it's going to it's going to change your life. It's changed. My life has changed the lives of so many people. So without further ado, let's get into it. 2. What Is Meditation: Okay, so before we get into the practice, let's just quickly define terms here. Mindfulness meditation is the awareness that arises from purposely paying nonjudgmental attention to the present moment. The witness that arises from purposely paying nonjudgmental attention to the present moment. A little bit convoluted, but let's just break it down. Well, it's sort of look at it from a practical perspective. We're going to be learning how to judge reality as it is for what it is. Every time we see something, we instantly get this overlay of memory, emotion, mood, learning. It's whatever brains do. Someone says something and we interpret their tone and then we get this backlog of information that just pops into my mind that triggers memories, that triggers moods, that triggers emotions. All happening like this. But from a mouthful perspective, we learn to see that whole process happening in real time. Over time. And with practice, we start to observe reality as it is, what it is. We see the stimulus coming in. We also see our response to that stimulus. We see that, oh, okay, that's what's actually happening in San response to it. And it gives us a little breath, a little bit of time to be able to make better decisions. But this just a little thing that I want to suggest here. Mindfulness meditation is a skill. It's something that we can practice. It's something that we can learn to do overtime. Let's just say you were taking up a exercise regime or learning a language or doing any new skill. It will take tone, just like you can't go into the gym and lift weights once and expect to be strong. You can't meditate one. So just think about meditating and expected. Just get it down pat. This is a learned skill I practiced skill. I've been meditating daily for years now. And I still get out along with my emotions. I still get impacted. My mind isn't enlightened or pure or not quite sure if such a state exists. But what I do know is that overtime I'm seeing a trend towards more comma controlled list, just automatic responsive mind. I'm seeing a more free and fluid mind. I'm seeing a more joyful mind. I'm seeing the gap between the emotion popping up and having to act on it separate. I'm seeing a bit more of reality as it is for what it is. What we're going to be learning is to basically draw attention to the present moment non-judgmentally. Something pops up and it becomes a thing to be observed. Now something to judge. The classic example here is time. If you stub your toe, you, there's a, there's a meditative saying that it's like someone that stubs their toe, hurts themselves twice. First with the pain and then when they're thinking about the pain, pain does arise and it is annoying or it is bad. But if we learn to look at an observer, we don't suffer again. If you have a terrible breakup with someone and then you see them bang, jealousy pops up. Nothing external is really happening to cause you to suffer, other than the feelings that are generated in Saudi of mind and that might've been caused by the person appearing, might've been caused by you just thinking about them right here, notice it popped up, but you're suffering now. But if you can turn and look and see that emotion with practice, you'll see that that emotion dissipates. One of the things that we will start discovering is that when you turn in facial emotions, when you see them, when you're willing to just embrace them and let them sort of burn through you. They actually dissipate quite quickly. So that's something we're gonna be looking at doing as well. Without further ado, let's get into the practice. 3. Take The Practice Off The Mat: So let's look at how to practice mindfulness meditation. I just wanted to give you a little bit of a distinction here. We practiced formally so that our lives improve informally. What do I mean by that is, is we do our formal meditation practice. We sit down, we're gonna do the techniques that we're gonna go over in this course on the map so that our lives off the mat, everyday lives at work or family as social gatherings, all of that sort of stuff improves. Same thing we exercising the gym to get strong, not to get better at doing Jim stuff. We get strong philosoph. The stuff that we're going to go into now is going to help you improve your mind for your life. It's not about getting better at meditation. It's about recognizing our thoughts, getting mindful so that our lives can improve. With that said, I want you to have this sort of jewel concept. We're going to give a formal practice, but you can apply these techniques, principles, concepts, learnings at anytime you can think to yourself. I noticed that all hawk could be mindful. Now you don't have to split your practice between the mat and often that, that makes sense. 4. How To Meditate: Okay, so the most basic practice that mindfulness meditation consists of is breath focused. I'm going to give you a rundown and I'm going to give you some alternatives if you don't like that approach. Because the way that we meditate, the, the sort of backend essence of it is what's important. It's not exactly the specifics. I'll get into it and it'll give you a little bit of a breakdown to sort of change it and tweak it if it doesn't quite work for you. But the basic white meditate is to sit down, nice posture, close your eyes and draw your attention to the sensations of the breath entering and leaving the nose. You mind wanders. You bring it back to the sensations in mind wanders. You bringing it back to the sensation. That's it, That's all it is. The active meditation isn't about clearing your mind. It isn't about stopping thoughts. It's about drawing your attention back to the meditation object, in this case the breath. Now if closing your eyes as a boda, don't worry about it. Focusing on the legal, focusing on the breath. Isn't that nice view for freaks you out or whatever. You can choose to focus on sensations in the body, maybe your feet touching the ground or your hands on your lap, or even sounds, okay. Any object can be used as a meditational object. The breath is commonly used because it's with you all the time and it's always changing in and out. It's, it is the traditional point of focus, but some people don't like it. And if that's fine, you can keep your eyes open, you can focus on something else. Choose the meditational object. I'll continue using the words, the breadth in this class. But if you prefer to use feelings that your fate or feelings of your hand or your heartbeat if you can feel it, or something that you're looking at, we're gonna go into different types later on or something that you can hear. That's completely fine. The idea is, now when I say breath, you can choose your meditation object. You take your seat. If you close your eyes, you draw your attention to the breath. And when your mind wanders, which it will, you bring it back. For the duration of the session. You might choose to meditate for a minute or five minutes or ten minutes, whatever you truce. And every time you notice your mind wondering, you bring it back among wanted to bring it back among wanted to bring it back. That's it. The active meditation is noticing that your mind has wandered. That's the meditation. It's not about focusing on the breath with this sort of like aggression or this sort of hyperfocus. It's about noticing that your mind is wondered. And then gently bringing it back up my mind. I'm gently bringing it back. That's it. And think about what this is relative to our real lives. Obviously, we're not going to be focusing on our breath for when we were working on when we're interacting with family or friends or all of that sort of stuff. But the act of noticing when I'm on is wanted and bringing it back trains us to notice when our moods has gotten away, when they've gone down a path of rumination or a memory, his sort of jumped in and feels real. That's that's what we're training for when we're when we're trying to do something, when we're trying to be focused and we suddenly somehow discovered that we're on social media. It's about checking back into realities, about waking up to what's happening and the way we practice that skill in same way we would lift in the gym to get strong full life. We draw our attention back to the breath. That's the practice. What we're gonna do in the next video is a short session. I'll sit here and do it with you. I'll close my eyes and we'll draw our attention to the breath. Your mind wanders, bring it back and bring it back. And you'll welcome to replay that session as many times as you like. 5. One Minute Meditation Session: Okay, so we're going to do the first mindfulness meditation. This one's going to be just one minute, just one minute of songs. We're going to close our eyes, see it will stand up stripe and draw our attention to the breath entering and leaving the nose. When the mind wanders, we acknowledge it and gently just return, focus back to the breath. I'm going to set atomic just had casual kitchen told me, hey, for one minute. I'm going to press Stop and I'm going to close my eyes and when it goes off with finished. Yeah. And if you want to choose a different meditational predict other than the breath, if you want to keep your eyes open, that's fine. Just when your mind wanders, you gently bring it back. Let's begin. That's it. Modem. If we were to replay this session, feel free to do so at anytime. 6. Trouble Shooting Your Practice: Okay. So how was that session? How did you go if you skipped it, pleasing to go back do it. So any of these courses get done and people who don't do the class projects, so they don't do the practical aspects or they just think they can get it just by watching. Gotta do it. Go back and do it, see how you went. Now some people take to it instantly. Some people, some people based on their lifestyles, haven't really given themselves much time to just decompress and let the thoughts come. This is an interesting situation and it makes sense given out technology levels. We live in a society where you can always have your headphones in and there's a podcast, is a video, there's, there's news, there's infinite sources of media to fill out a time. There's more information than we could possibly hope to consume it in a lifetime being produced every day. There's this drive to just constantly be putting information in talking to people. When someone that's sort of down that path takes a breath and just lets, lets them on just settle. It can be a little bit overwhelming because you recognize this sort of chaos, this bounce, this jump. It's like your minds like hang on a second. I want to notice that basically anything that takes you away from the focus on the breath, anything that takes you away from the object of meditation, that's something to be noticed and observed. If that's a chaotic feeling, that's a balance. If that's like a sense of the craziness, notice it. If that's a feeling of trepidation or fear or anxiety. Notice. Now, with all this is the caveat that if something's bothering you and you don't like it, you can stop. The there's no there's no don't don't matter yourself. Don't push through. We're not, we're not trying to be monks here. The traditional approach is to push through all barriers and just go down the mindful path. But I've read a few books on mindfulness meditation for the modern world, mindfulness meditation for trauma, mindfulness meditation for the average person. There's a whole collection of books out there. For us, for the regular people, for those of us with different sort of pasts, issues, whatever, we don't need to push through pain. Our goal is to gradually implement a practice over time. Now, when you get good, when you've been meditating for a while, you might choose to sit with those feelings of discomfort, either mental or physical for longer and just observe them for what they are. That's something that I'm working on. It's like, Okay, I'm feeling a lot of physical pain right now. What does it actually feel like? Yes, it's uncomfortable. But what does those feelings of discomfort feeling? I'm feeling mental anguish. What does that look like? I can't always do this, but it's like I'm getting better at seeing it for what it is. But just an assignment. If you are once again, the gym analogy. If you were to start straightaway, you wouldn't go straight to a massive heavy lift. You'd build yourself up. That's what we're trying to do here. With that practices. Overtime. We build ourselves up. So start small. That's why I started with a one-minute session. And if one minute, all you all you do for awhile, fine. But over the course of this, the goals of this course, we will be growing in time. We're going to do a five-minute session, maybe some other sorts of sessions as well. We're going to talk about how to implement a daily routine to build up that time as well. But for the moment starts small. And if it freaks you out, if it's sort of worries you if you're not quite used to it, if it's a bit of a chore, That's fine. Any of those feelings that pop-up there things to be observed as well. 7. Get A Routine Going!: Okay, so let's talk about the practical side of developing a meditation practice. I would suggest that you meditate either first thing the morning or last thing at not I like the morning because I feel like it sets me up for the day. Would actually suggest doing both. Get up, go to the toilet, total of order, whatever you've got to do, and find a particular spot in your house, inside or outside. And just make that your meditation spot. So people who choose to put a lot of paraphernalia, candles, crystals or that sort of stuff. It's not necessary, but you can't do if you like it. You can set incense, you can play some nice soft music. It's up to you. The reason why you're going to choose a particular places that it's sort of primes your mind. It's like, okay, at this time, first thing in the morning, In this place, outside, inside, whatever you've got. I'll be meditating. Some people choose to use a wrapper. Sure. Some people will put on particular clothes. It's up to you. Basically, we just want to get the habit formed. My morning routine is I wake up, get myself ready, I meditate and I exercise. I do that because I viewed that those things are the most important thing in every day. Some people choose to meditate at, not with me, with kids and that sort of stuff. That becomes a little bit challenging because you don't have been toms and all that sort of stuff. But you can choose to experiment and play. Some people only have talked to meditate during their lunch breaks. Whatever it is for you though, film and time that works for you and stick to it. Try and be consistent every day. Start small. Anytime you're implementing a new strategy or a new habit or a new thing into your life, you've got to take that time from somewhere else. That time might come from TV, might come from other forms of distraction. And the good thing about meditation is the overtime when you get better at it, it will give you time because your mind will be more or less distracted and more focused. Time will come. But at stamp, you have to cleave it from other stuff. So start small. Start with at one-minute, start with five-minutes, start with ten minutes, but don't go too nuts. Some people started like, I'm gonna do 60 minutes every day and I'm like, good luck buddy. Data. The reason being is his whilst that's a great intention, chances are you won't have that time. Chances are that time just simply doesn't exist and you'll do it for Waco two and then you'll fall away and not stop meditating completely because life catches up all the things that you put aside to meditate. They've come back and they need attention now. But you can spare a one-minute. You can probably stay a five-minutes itself or kitchen time. The pretty cheap you can find them anyway and just have that beside it. I suggest using a kitchen Tama and not something like your phone because one's getting funds, a distraction, you wake up, you farming, say social media is their people, their YouTube, whatever. Get a kitchen toma, toma, and then resolve to yourself. Okay, for the duration of this timer, I'm going to practice mindfulness meditation. I'm going to draw my attention back to the breath. That's what I'm going to be doing. Yeah. And then do it. Now. After your session, just quick reflection, think back to yourself, How did I go? Did I, did I do the meditation? Now, just want to clarify here, what Kansas is successful meditation. As successful meditation is the one that you did if you wanted, was super distracted or if it was super focused, they are equally good. It's about the intention, it's about doing it. It's not about how it felt to remember, the goal of meditation is to draw our attention back to the breath, is to have the meditation. We're having to observe reality as it is for what it is. Some days you will be super focused. Some days you'll be scattered. Provided you do the meditation, you're doing the meditation and you're getting the benefits. That's it. Because we're at really think about it in your life. Some days will be fine. Someday it will be chaotic. Sometimes that chaos will come from within. Sometimes it will come from without either way you've got to get good at responding to it, to dealing with it, to processing it, to recognize again, the best meditation is the one that you do. I suggest sit down every morning. Particular time, set atomic one to five minutes starting off in, you could build up that time overtime. I reckon. As much as you can. Personally, I meditate ten to 20 minutes a day. Normally. I do think about and do sort of mini meditation throughout the day. And then we'll get onto that in the lightest and the lightest session. But in terms of a formal practice, tend to 20 minutes because simply put, I don't have the time. I'm busy, but I do make time for that meditation in there. Ten to 20 minutes at the tongue, but start with one minute, start with five minutes and slowly build up. And if you're interested in establishing a morning routine or habit building, I've got a couple of courses on on my Skillshare profile, so check those out. I think I've got a habit one I morning routine one and a few others around that topic. They will all go into depth about how to establish the morning routine instead of getting family on board, all of that sort of stuff. But the simple crux of it is Troodon choose applies, set a timer and doing yeah. 8. Tools To Increase Focus: Now I'm gonna give you a couple of tips to help refocus. You will help focus yourself onto the breath or the meditation object. The first one is to start a session with an intention. So basically you sit down, you say a timer and before you press Start, you think it's okay for the duration of the session, I'm going to draw my attention back to the breath. We're gonna remain focused. I'm gonna be diligent. I'm going to do the practice. I'm going to sit here with the intention to metatag just a few seconds just to sentence just a reminder to yourself of what you're actually doing. Just a slight breath, mental breath. But then you can also take a physical breath if you sit down the scientist self. The duration of this session, I'm going to focus on the breath. I'm going to meditate mindfully. And then you do a couple of slow deep breath in through the nose, out through the mouth, breathing deep into your belly to really just settle your body. Just just do that with me right now. Just feel how just comma you feel ready from that comp space. Then you begin your meditation. It's great way to sort of frame the meditation practice. Like I said, if we do it at the same place, at the same time, every day, that's helping to frame. But if we also just frame the context of our mind and our bodies, we set the context I'm gonna meditate. This is what I'm about to do. I'm going to stay focused. I'm going to have the meditation I'm having. I'm going to practice with diligence. And then we do a couple of slow, calm breathing through the nose, out through the mouth. We set ourselves up for success. By success, I mean, completing the meditation session. There's a couple of other little techniques that you can do to make that session a little bit more focused. Over time, you'll get better at doing this naturally new. We're just sort of like intuitively do this. But there's a couple of tools. They're counting and labeling. One of the ways that if you find yourself kind of distracted, bouncing around, not focused, is to count in breathing and f, you think internally, in and out. You count all the way like that in an app all the way up to ten. And then start again. One to 101 to 101 to ten. You can count for the duration of the session. The reason you don't count beyond ten is because it's not about counting to the highest number. It's not about getting I counted 300 into my session. It's not about that. It's about using the breath with the number just as a sort of a label or a tool to focus yourself. Some people might choose, rather than counting, saying in and out. Does that makes sense because it's not about counting. It's about adding a little bit of extra focus. As you're doing the meditation. I use counting in a couple of ways. Either you can do it if I'm noticing that I'm a bit not really focused at the start of the session, count to ten. And then just let the breath flow and just do the practice like we previously described. During this session. If I noticed myself being super distracted, I'll do another session of counting. Now sometimes I don't need to count. Sometimes I can count to ten at the stop and then I'm fine. Other times I'm trying to do with the whole session. And I noticed that I can't even get to ten my mind so distracted that I forget that I'm counting. I forget. And then I'm like, Oh my God, I check back in. I do them off on this thing. I'm like, Okay, I'm supposed to be meditating right now, not planning now thinking of doing all of these other mental work also has to be monthly meditating. And I was counting. Then I stop account again one to ten. And if I get to ten, It's like, yeah, that's a win. But I mean, it's a wind. The fact that I'm doing it. The other tool that you can employ, you can do this in addition to counting or instead of count is labeling. Let's say we're doing a meditation, slowly, calmly breathing. And I moved pops up. You just think these self, it might be a mood, might be angry, jealousy, FEA, whatever the mood pops up and you just labeled yourself just generally mood. Then you just look at the mood that's popped up. And then returning for expected the breath. Meditating, meditating, a emotion pops up, are you feeling pumps up? A memory pumps up. Memory might be a memory of the past, might be your memory of a couple of days ago, childhood, whatever. Doesn't matter. It just memory. You'll look at that. You look at it. You notice you'll hear the members there. Let it go, return your focus back to the breath. You can label things just in broad categories. You wouldn't say it as an in memory memory of my fifth birthday party. Just memory. Mood, emotion, memory, physical sensation. You feel like a scratch on your leg. It's not too much that you need to deal with it. We just physical sensation. You label the things that pop up typically when you label them and then just give them a little bit of mental attention. Look at the mindfully. And so you turn your meditation object from the breath briefly, two or whatever is pumped up. It'll dissipate, then you return your focus back to the breath. Then the caveat to this is that sometimes sensations pop up in your mind that sort of seemingly can't be labeled. It feels like chaos. It feels like this overwhelmed. I call that a cloud as a cloud of overwhelming feelings and that's what I labeled it has it's like, oh, the Cloud. What you're doing with this practice is you're doing it normal meditation may be accounting. Maybe something pops up. You label your attention back, label it, draw your attention back, labeled drawing attention back. Physical sensations, moods, memories, or the cloud, immersions, the glass, whatever pops up. You could even have the simplest labeled as just distraction. Something that's pulled your attention away from the breath. Does that makes sense? The next session we're going to do a five-minute meditation to get them. We're going to be employing these the full gamut of what we've looked at. We're going to set the intention to do the breaths. Then we're going to use the tools of counting and labeling if we need to during the session. I'll start off, I'll guide you into it, then will sit in silence together and do it and you'll be doing the internal work as I'm doing it. Let's get into it. 9. Five Minute Meditation Session: Hello and welcome to the mindfulness meditation session number two, we're going to be doing five minutes of mindfulness right now. I've got the time. What I'm going to do is very shortly and when star at the top, we're going to close our eyes, sit or stand up nasa striped and draw our attention to the breath entering and leaving the nose. When I'm I don't want us we're going to bring it back. If you choose to have your eyes open, we'll choose a different meditational object. That's completely fine. Go to stop and meditation session with a sitting of intentions. For the next five minutes, we're going to be meditating mindfully. We're going to be drawing our attention to the meditation object. And when our mind wanders, we're going to gently in currently bring it back. I'm going to stop the session with a few deep and slow breaths. And we can use the skills of counting or labeling if our mind wanders or if we're feeling like we need to employ them to get a little bit more focused onto the breath. Let's begin. We're gonna do three breaths. Then I'm going to stop the timer. Let's begin. Well done. If you would like to repeat this session, feel free to play this video at any time. 10. Lag Between Actions & Results: So how did you go with the previous session? Like I said before, give it a try. It's only five minutes. But the longer you practice, the better you will feel, the better impact it will have. Same thing with the exercise analogy. Doing something is always better than nothing if you do 105 minutes of exercise a day, infinitely stronger Had you have started years ago. Same thing with meditation. A little bit is better than nothing. So don't feel like doing one minute or five minutes is worthless. Doing something is infinitely better than nothing. I want to suggest something to you. They will be a lag between your actions and your results. Once again, the exercise analogy, it works perfectly. I know I keep using it, but if I was to do some exercise today, what's the chances that you will see the results today? You want to be close to exercise consistently every day for a month, two months, for three months. I do the work here, but the reward comes over here. Only after a few months when people start to notice the changes in my body, only after a few months will start to feel stronger, fitter, healthier. Action he rewarding. Same with meditation. You might feel better after a session, you might not. We're looking at a long-term goal. It's a skill development. We put in the work and then there'll be a lag after time and then we get the reward. Unfortunately, that's just how it is with anything. Any course that you're doing on this website on Skillshare, you got to put in the work, otherwise you're not going to get better. But unfortunately, you will have to wait to get the best results. The best thing you can do, like I said, is to develop that meditation practice. Stop now and over time you'll see improvements. Meditate daily. One of the things that I like about mindfulness meditation is that it's, it's not spiritual, it's not religious. It's literally just, it's always the exact, what's the exact opposite of that? I disliked that it's cold meditation because meditation has this sort of woo, Spiritual overtimes. Always doing. We're doing here is just observing reality as it is for what it is. If you notice the practice of what I'm getting you to do, it isn't to pry, it isn't to do some sort of crazy ritual is not to do anything that isn't happening already. It's just watching, it's just observing, It's just noticing what is happening. Removing the cloud of distraction from our mind. I like it because it means that this practice mindfulness meditation is available to everyone. It's not limited. You're not limited in doing this practice. If you are of a certain prescription, mental state, whatever, anyone can do it. So if you know someone that would be maybe a little bit verse to a meditative practice because of those misconceptions, just let them know. It's like, Hey, mindfulness meditation is just observing reality as it is for what it is. It's not. There's nothing spiritual, nothing. We were just taking away all of the mental preconceptions that pop up and just seeing things as they are. In the next session, we're gonna be looking at a few different ways to play with mindfulness. How we can observe different things. 11. Playing With Your Practice - Part 1: Okay, so remember our goal is to get amputation off the mat and into our everyday lives. It's not about learning how to focus on the breath for that psych goal is to be able to observe reality as it is forwarded. These two notice how mental states as they arrive so it can make better choices in the moment. With that in mind, we're going to look at a few different ways we can play with him off when it's meditation, a few different objects that we can use. Like I said, we choose the breadth because that's the most traditionally with this always and it's constantly changing. It's a great approach, but some people don't like it. And beyond that, It's always good to just explore the other options because we're not just doing one form of mindfulness. We want to be mindful in the same way if you were exercising good induce, do one exercise, you do a collection to get your full body feeling good. That's what we doing. With that in mind. Let's take a look at the different options. It talks about it in one of the earliest session talking about labeling. Labeling effectively a list. For example, a memory pops up, we turn and look at it because memory, we observe it. Then we're trying to for expected the breath. But we could choose to have that mental object as a meditation object. We could look at the memory that arises and just keep returning our focus back to that memory. It could be something that arises naturally or it could be something that we chose to evoke. You might go, I'm going to meditate on the concept of love. I'm going to meditate on my memory of my fifth birthday party. I'm going to meditate on a mental construct, a person you might wanted to bring it back, and I wanted to bring it back, it becomes a meditational object. That's something that you can do. It is a little bit of an advanced practice, but some people gravitate to it and I love it. That's why I suggesting it here. The other option is to look at the other senses. We've already discussed sensation of feeling, but there are other feelings we can use other than the breath, you could choose to do, the sensation of the feet on the ground. What do you close on your skin or wind window in your face. You could also choose to get a meditation object to assist you. For example, here I've got just a simple rock. Now, this is just a rocker I've found you could use a clean, you could use whatever you like and you just feel what it feels like in your hand. You just running your hand over it, running a hand over it. It's like, What am I feeling in my finger right now? That becomes a meditational kid. You might want as you bring it back, you can employ the same skill. Doing a walking meditation. You say self RP going to go for a short walk. No music, no nothing but you'll focusing on the sensation of your feet as they as as you're walking. I was like my foot's rising. It's moving, it's falling, warehousing, grieving, folding, folding, and that becomes a meditation on feed. Like I said, you can say anything you like, provided that you follow the approach, the object doesn't matter itself. But let's go through a few more. You could choose to do a visual sensation, something that you're seeing. So it could be nitrogen, it could be a candle, it could be flat, or it could be a picture. But if you go back to Iraq, I'm not sure if you can see it properly here, but notice it's not quite uniform, it's not quite unique. There's little divots, there's little bits in it. Grab a rock and just look at it. You just stare at it like, Oh, look at this, look at the color changes, look at the little divots, look at all the different approaches. Now remember, you're just objective, we're just looking at a rock here, but we're not training our ability to look at our rock. We're training our abilities to return our focus back to the meditational gate. In this case, it's what the rock looks like. You could do it with a colon, you can do it with anything. It's a visual stimulus. You could choose to do sound. So as we're meditating, you'll notice that sounds are popping up. Nature of birds, trucks, trees, whatever it is, wind, ocean. Choose the snout between your focus back to it or it could be old sound. The sound arises, you observe it, you look at it. You mindfully focus on it. Your mind wanders, you bring it back to that. You could do, you could do music. But I'll suggest not using something with lyrics and not using words as a mindful focus. At least not starting off because words are very good at evoking other sorts of things in trapping you in this story. We would spoken and bam, we just, it's triggered. We think we evoke remote, we remember. That's why they're amazing, but it's also makes it hard as a meditation on connectivity is starting out. You could also choose to do a mouthful focus on what you can smell. You might set some incense or not scandal. Once again, a smell of the trees of the ocean and just return your focus back to the smell. You could also choose to do mindful, tasting when you're eating, reading, watching a show, you're not talking. He just sitting there just eating the food. What does it taste like? What does it actually tastes like? It's an interesting approach because as you monthly eat, you'll realize that you loved the taste of some things and you actually don't like other things, you just eating it out of habit. You can take the step approach and do mindful eating, which is observing the desire to, you put the food in your mouth. You observe it mindfully. Your mind wanders, you bring it back. What does, what does eating feel that? Well, it's pumping up. Yes. This can be quite intense as a practice. It's something that I'm currently working on. You can also start looking at using different tools as an aid to practice. What I've got here are some meditation beats. These ones Buddhist, these ones that are Orthodox Christian. The religious practice doesn't matter. This Muslim ones that his Jewish wants his whole variety of different religious practice ones. But you can also just use just literally just like a string of pills. There's just plastic base. It doesn't matter. It's not about the religious overtones, it's about using them as a tool. What you do is you hold in your hand and you feel on your thumb when you take a breath. Go to the next one. Breathe in and out. Next one, breathe in and out and excellent breathing in that next one breathe in and out. The focusing, in this case, the meditational object is the sensation of the bead at the thinker. If the noticing of yourself in the desire to rush through them, it's noticing what arises as you're doing them. Some birds like these on there, just start over a 100 loan. But you can get longer and shorter, shorter sets of Bates. Some people that are religious or spiritual, we'll add a prayer or a mantra or some sort of words over the top. So the practice is now the mutation of JPS, now the bead plus the breath plus the internal repetition of the module. That's something you can employ. Your mind wanted to bring back down and bring it back. Once again, it doesn't have to be spiritual with people. Add these spiritual overtones to it. And you'll notice that if you look into a variety of religious practices, they doing these things. If you think if there's a ritualistic Y2 prime and you do that mindfully as in focus on the breath, focus on the movements of the body, focus on the thoughts of your spiritual entity or whatever you're going full. That itself is mindfulness. And part of me wonders if the benefits of those practices are derived from the benefit of mindfulness as well. There's definitely a lot of crossover there. Point I'm making here is that you can choose any meditation object, any of the senses, any internal object, and just set that for your session. Return your focus back to it. In the next session we're going to look at bringing imitation off the mat and into our everyday lives a little bit more, sir. 12. Playing With Your Practice - Part 2: So our goal is to get ourselves mindful throughout the day. So the benefits of mindfulness meditation persist throughout our lives and not just limited to the meditation man, limited to our formal practice. There's a couple of things that I like to do here. One of them can be to set an alarm on your phone or on your watch to go off at certain random or specified intervals. It beeps and you just take them on full breadth of that time. And the idea is, is that it's like all, remember your meditation practice. You could set it to be once or twice or five times a day. The idea is that it's just one breath, just one little moment throughout your day to take a breath to calm down, to settle yourself, and to just sort of rejig your mind. It's like a little mini race in how like after a day you've slept on it, you've had some something going on, you wake up and you can see things in a bit of a better line. One breath can do that. Let's just try it right now. We're just here, we're just going to focus on our breath in and out. Nice and slow breath and it's just going to resettle us. Let's give it a try. Doesn't that feel nice right now? We do that monthly Every so often when our alarm goes off. The other way we can implement that mindful breath is based on an environmental trigger. For example, as you transition. So you could transition from home to work, from work back to home. That's true transitions. So when you arrive at work, when you arrive at home, you do just a minute of mindfulness meditation, just sitting in the car, you arrive at work or as you get home. And if you have more transitions, you could do them because we're trying to have an environmental trigger to get you meditating. Just a little bit. Just get you in that mindfulness mode that's just triggered by the environment, so it just arises. Another one could be every time you touch a door handle, let me touch your door handle. You just think mindfulness idea is, is that it's trying to just draw your attention to what's actually happening in your mind. Your mind is constantly throwing up stuff. You're constantly there. When you do a formal practices, you see it as it's happening. But that's always happening. Every time you touch a door handle, if you touch that door handle, you like what's going on in my mind right now. Just a little thought, just a little, just impetus to think about your mind, to think about your mental state. Just a little pause. What it's doing that's helping you to do it naturally. It's helping you to do it in the moment without when you're not touching the door handle or when your alarm isn't going off. Our goal is to learn how to just catch those thoughts before we pulled by them and make some poor choices. Another option is to get a meditation buddy, show them this course, send them the link, get them meditating with you. And then just ever so often was like, Hey, remember meditation, Hey man, from a cinema message and then a direct dig em, send them a tweet or whatever it is, give them a call and talk about your practice and meditate with them. If you've got someone that you can talk to with your practice, it ups the mindfulness not in a spiritual way, but in the fact that it's gonna be on your mind more, the fact that you gonna be able to talk through different issues to the fact that you'll be able to say, Hey, I found this awesome guided meditation. Check it out. Oh hi, all of that sort of stuff that can really help. I suggest you try a couple of the following things. Item, set an alarm on your phone and go watch. Just to end then just think mindfulness. Do a little session when they go off. Every time he touching the door handle. Just a quick photo of mindfulness. If we're told me transition a short one-minute session just to sitting in your car, just one minute mindfulness breaks all these little things throughout the day. Don't have to do them all. But the more that you do, the calm your mind will be, the more detached tool being, the better you'll be able to just observe reality as it is for what it is to set back to start seeing your thoughts as something that are distinctly different from you? Yeah. 13. Class project: The class project will be for you to do a short meditation journal. What I want you to do is over the next seven days, just write down your meditation experience. As the class project progresses every day, you're going to update your progress. What you're going to do is day one, dydt time as in how long he meditated for this could be one minute, five minutes, ten minutes, whatever you choose. Just a little note on how you went. It could be a question saying like, Oh, how do I deal with this? Or just a little thing of saying like, hey, this was quite peaceful or my mom was really chaotic. I couldn't focus on the meditational object at all. Whatever it is. You're gonna commit to doing seven days straight. Seven days. Now this could be seven days of one-minute. It's not much time, but the idea is, is that to get into this practice, we need to start doing the practice. Doing these class project we'll do is get you started on that habit. It does a couple of things. It gets you practicing, it gets you used to it, and it gets you the opportunity to have some feedback for me. You might be like, How do I deal with this? You ask it in that session and I'll update you on it. I've done a couple of these meditation practices before, and I have somebody messaging me. They went outside of Skillshare onto social and messaging me up to day 100. They keeping ongoing and it's been amazing and their practices progressed exponentially. But they got started with a project on Skillshare. Start with 07 days, start with one minute a day, or five, whatever you whatever you choose. Note down the day, day one to seven. How long he meditated for any questions or issues? That's it updated every day. That's the process. It will give me some feedback. I'll be able to sort of address and talk you through. It will give you a little bit of that social pressure now, such purchase initiating word, but if you commit to that seven days, I'll be seeing that you're committing to it. I'll say those updates coming in, I'll be responding to you. You've got a little bit of gardens, a little bit of support. It's important that we actually do the class projects because you get that God, you get that support. It means that rather than just having these mindfulness meditation sessions, these class projects as just conceptual. It's like, Oh, you can meditate, here's the idea of it. It's like no, let's actually do it seven days. Write it down super quick and easy to load. Take you half a minute to a minute to update it. So really we're looking at a two minute commitment here every day for seven days, 14 minutes. Not much, but if that gets you meditating daily, my God, the benefits will be exponential. Jump on board, give it a try, let me know and we'll give you some feedback and getting to it. Yeah. 14. Quick Recap: All right, so a little bit of a quick recap here. Remember meditation is the awareness that arises from purposely paying nonjudgmental attention to the present moment. In layman's terms, this means we're observing reality as it is for what it is. We're learning the ability to detach from our thoughts as thoughts are over here and we are over there looking at those thoughts, going out. We're getting that time in-between the gap. That's where we want to be sitting because we wouldn't want to be living because that will help us to make better choices. We won't be so emotional, we won't be so impulsive. And we'll be able to just make decisions that are more representative of our best self. The basic way to practice meditation is to choose a meditation object, set atomic, and return our focus back to that meditational object. Typically that's the breath, eyes closed, sitting up straight, nice and calm. But you can choose any meditation object, focusing on any of the senses, internal things that you come to, things that pop up. It's up to you. Choose a meditation object that works for you and stick to it for the session. Try them all. I suggest starting with the breath, but if that doesn't work for you, that's completely fine too, to practice, we sit down and do a couple of deep breaths, starting a session. Internally set our intention to meditate, then press down on the timer. Amanda wonders we bring it back. That's the active meditation. It's not about making our thoughts disappear. It's not about having a blank mind. It's about noticing the reality of mind. It's about noticing and when it wonders and bringing it back, That's the meditation. Remember, I, good or bad meditation session isn't based on how chaotic or cameo mindless it's about if you did the practice. That's how you know if it's a good session on no other measurement. So did you meditate today, grant? You did a good meditation session. That's what we're going for. We gave the tools of labeling and counting. Remember counting, you're just counting each breath up to ten and starting again as an idea to focus, you can do that at the start of the session. Or if you find your mind not focusing that much at all. We can also choose the idea of labeling. That is, something pops off and like how memory, mood, emotion, thought. And if it's something that you can't be labeled the Cloud. I suggested the class project is seven day meditation journal. Get started, do it. We can get some feedback and you can ask some questions. Also want to suggest a couple of resources, like I said it stop the mindfulness. I guidebook to the present moment. This book, we'll go over the stuff we've covered in this course in a lot more depth and it will go into some advanced practices as well. So grab yourself a copy to add as an e-book, paperback and audio book. I'll put a link down below. I will also suggest that you check out a bunch of the other meditation courses that I've got up on Skillshare, there are many available. If you are interested in doing some guided sessions with me. I do a collection of, I think I've got over 50 at this stage, maybe more on Insert Tom as well as a bunch of courses there. So I'll put links down to the book, check out the other Skillshare courses and the Insight Timer in the in the show notes and the description is below, you'll be able to find those. And just up there or over there somewhere. It will say, write and review this course, please do so lets me know how I'm doing it. Let me know what you are more of an opportunity for you to tell me if you enjoyed it, if you didn't want, I could improve on what you want moral, but you unless solve all that sort of stuff, plus the good ones make you feel great. So please do write and review. If you want to check out the other stuff that I'm doing, the other books and podcasts, all of the other stuff hit over to my website at Zachary Clifton Phillips.com. It's all there in all available. And if you'd like to follow me on social media and maybe keep me updated beyond the Skillshare courses you can do so on social media at Zach P. Phillips, you can find me every way at SAC Bay Phillips. So like I said, if you've stuck with me through this whole, whole course, well done. Meditation will change your life. It will be a subtle slow change over time, but it will work. It's not mystical, It's not woo-woo. It's just observing reality as it is for what it is. It's actually just stepping back and seeing things as they are. That's the practice. Give it a try. Do the class project, connect with me all of that good stuff and have a great day.