 In today's video, I'm going to talk about a counter-intuitive approach that can make you a consistent meditator. So stay with me. One of the tools that we use in therapy, in life in general, is meditation. Meditation is a very very important practice to start to develop self-awareness, to develop intimacy, to work on our healing, to find guidance, to get in touch with an intuitive guidance that's there for all of us if we want it. But a bit of stillness is necessary to get out of the intellectual busy mind all the time. So meditation is a very very useful thing. The problem with it of course is, you know, we're all trying to be consistent with it and if you're like many many people, you may have tried to meditate and after a while it just kind of fades out, you're not meditating anymore. And I want to kind of propose an approach here, a few little tips, that will make it a lot easier for you to be a consistent meditator. A lot of it is to do with the way we frame it and our attitude towards it. So the first thing is a practical thing I'm going to mention and it's that this goes against a lot of advice, you'll see people say things like meditate for an hour a day, meditate for half an hour, whatever it is. And I am of the belief that the first tip here is don't time your meditations. Don't put a limit on it. Because meditation comes with another thing which is called resistance. Resistance to meditation, resistance to going into that stillness to be with yourself. Because you know we're coming into contact, we're becoming much more aware of just how busy the mind is all the time and some of that negativity is in there. So there is a part of us that resists going in to kind of be the observer of that and to feel some of those emotions that can come up. So there's a very natural, there's nothing wrong with this, it's very very natural that there's a resistance to doing meditation. The thing is you know if we're saying well I'm going to meditate for an hour today and I have resistance to even doing it at all, I'm going to be much less likely to sit to do any kind of meditation at all. So my approach has become and I found this much more helpful in my own life and for those people who have tried this, is to not put any limit on the time. Basically your job is done once you are in a quiet position and you sit. You could say you're meditating then right, you're just not doing anything, you're sitting in the whatever position you want to sit in to do meditation. But as soon as you're there, this feeling should be I'm done, I'm finished already and I would just see how long this lasts but there's no time limit to it. Once it lasts for however long it lasts. That is helpful not only to overcome the resistance but it's also very helpful because in meditation the thing we're actually trying to do is to not do anything. So to have a sense though of I'm already finished, it's completed kind of helps us get into that feeling of oh I don't have to do anything here, I don't have to make anything happen, I don't have to develop endurance or I don't have to develop discipline or train myself to still the thoughts that are in my mind. So don't time your meditations. If you're one of those people that can easily meditate for an hour a day with no resistance, just ignore this, this doesn't apply. But for anyone out there who feels I really struggle to meditate regularly and the way to do that is to just look at if you've held this as an intention just look back over the last month and ask yourself how many times did I actually meditate even though I had the intention that I would do it regularly and if it's not that regular you just don't beat yourself up about it. It's just okay there must be something that's stopping me, there must be a resistance to that. We don't work against the resistance, we bring in the resistance we say this is what I'm using here right now, I'm going to go with this bring this with me not work in opposition to it and you'll find you're not overwhelming yourself at the thoughts of committing to all these huge meditation sessions. So don't time your meditation sessions. The other thing is a few other things I would say about meditation Again it's a hugely, hugely helpful thing to do because we're also busy now. You know a lot of time we're sitting in passive consumption of content, entertainment, news, everything else not to mention dealing with responsibilities and everything else. So just to sit in a place where you're not doing something for a while to sit in even you could call it contemplation is very, very, very helpful. But we're trying to instill a sense of non-doership. This is the part where I don't do anything and that includes any internal doing. I'm not even trying to make myself feel better. I'm not even trying to sit in silence. I'm not even trying to arrive at a place of peace. In meditation we just show up to see what is just happening now and that's it with no agenda. And I think that has been for me and for other people I've talked to the thing that made meditation open up for them when it's not about accomplishing something. It's in fact the opposite of that. It's just about not doing anything at all. So again this is not a video to say don't do meditation. I am a big, big advocate for meditation. But to do it in a way that isn't going to overwhelm you and it isn't going to have you fighting against that natural resistance to do in this. If none of us had these conflicted difficult emotions inside us and our minds weren't so busy all the time then one would need meditation. But those things are there for most of us. Therefore there is going to be resistance. We see the problem is we have these other ways of blocking those out. We have our defense mechanisms and coping strategies and ways to distract ourselves from them which work, they don't work for very long is the only problem but they do work temporarily. So as long as those are there as an alternative strategies for dealing with this it's the meditation we can put on the long finger. But to get proactive with dealing with these things is a practice of meditation can be very, very helpful. But there will be resistance. So don't beat yourself up about that. Just realize that what can I do to make it easier for me to move into that space of meditation. No big commitments will be won. If you meditate for a minute, beautiful. That's a one minute meditation. To be honest, I've done way longer meditation sessions like hours at a time and I honestly couldn't say to you that they were better in any way. Sometimes a brief meditation is just as helpful. It might open up something or it might lead to an insight that you wouldn't have had otherwise had you not sat down for those five minutes of meditation. So this idea, I think it's a very western thing of more is better all the time so we need to kind of get out of that, I think, this idea that more is always better. It's not really that. I think it's more about a kind of however you can get into that state of I'm not doing something here or there's nothing to accomplish with this. If you're in that state for a second, that's kind of what we're aiming for. It doesn't have to be necessarily three hours or something. So the practical part of this video again, guys, is just try that out. Maybe just know what time, how long you meditate and see if it leads you into less strong resistance towards doing it at all in the first place. Hope that's useful and as always, thanks so much for being with me in this video and I'll see you again next time. Bye for now.