Meditation: What’s In It For Me? A Wholistic Guide to Meditation and its Incredible Benefits

The single most powerful tool for improving yourself, your life and the world, meditation is more than a bad ass daily practice. It’s fundamental to health and happiness. Here’s how.

Sitting still. Breathing deeply. Doing nothing. Weird mantras. Unfortunately, meditation is often portrayed as a seriously boring pastime that appeals mostly to foreigners and weirdos.

Don’t let this fool you: The truth is that meditation is the single most powerful tool that you have for becoming a better person and improving your quality of life.

What you may not realize is that…

Meditation is Incredibly Bad Ass

Jedi knights. Ninja monks. Practitioners of sexual kung-fu. (You heard me: Sexual. Kung. Fu.)
All of these extraordinarily bad ass individuals have one thing in common:

Meditation.

Meditation means you know yourself better today than you did yesterday. It means you are building the capacity to enjoy life more than you ever thought possible, that you have a presence which others can feel, a presence that others crave.

Physical Fitness For Your Spiritual Self

Your physical body is overlaid by a network of energetic pathways and nexuses that make up The Etheric Body. When you hear about chakras, acupuncture meridians, or ‘blockages’, you’re actually hearing about the Etheric Body. It’s no coincidence that everything from Chinese Medicine to Kabbalah describes this ‘other’ body with remarkable similarity; while it isn’t physical, it is real, and it’s an important part of who we are as humans, how we function, and how we access our personal power… or don’t.

Awareness of the energetic flows and forces in your body is the first step towards harnessing that energy consciously, like Neo in the matrix but probably less 90’s. That’s why I recommend you start with:

Mindfulness Meditation: Empowers You To Live Your Life Fully, On Purpose, With Awareness.

How much time do you spend on auto-pilot? Acting out the habits of your mind, not even really there? Most of us spend a lot of time like that.

Most of us end up coasting through a lot of life’s major moments (hint: that’s every moment) and major decisions, relying on a mix of instinct, habit and memory instead of being truly present. We end up lost in thought, worry, planning, daydreaming, remembering… and so, lost to the wonders around us. All the time. Every single moment. That’s what life is: moments. Most of us are missing them.

Mindfulness is the practice of paying deliberate attention instead. Sounds simple, and it is; but it’s not easy.

A great place to start with mindfulness a Body Scan. This one is literally seven minutes long. You have seven minutes right? Just follow along, and really feel what’s happening in your body. Don’t judge, don’t worry, and if you do judge or worry, don’t judge yourself or worry about it! Just allow what’s happening to happen, and try to stay aware of it, awake, and focused on this moment right now. Whatever happens is OK. If you get distracted, that’s OK; just notice it.

What this teaches you is that everything is OK. There’s a quiet, peaceful center in your being that is always OK. No matter what. Mindfulness teaches you to access that place, every day.

Mindfulness meditations include body scans like that one, sitting and simply witnessing whatever thoughts or sensations arise within you, focusing on something in particular (a candle flame, a thought or image, counting, your breath, a mantra), or can be the more challenging zen-typed ‘just sit there and become transparent to yourself’.

Building awareness is the greatest gift you can give yourself. Trust me on this. You will get better at it as time goes on, and that growing awareness will change the way you experience everything in your life. It will also open the door for more advanced types of meditation. Start a daily practice. It doesn’t have to be long. Within a few weeks or months, you’ll notice changes in yourself, your life, your entire world. Then, you’ll be ready for more advanced practice, including:

Loving-Kindness Meditation: Taking You Down The Path of The Heart

This sounds so cheesy right? The Path of the Heart? What does that even mean?

The Heart is the center of the energetic body. It is the point around which all the energy of your body orbits, your core; like the axle of the wheel. It is the point of balance. If your heart isn’t the center of your life, then you aren’t the center of your life. Period.

The heart knows what needs to happen, and following it requires surrender: allowing what’s happening to happen, trusting that it is right and what’s best for you. It’s allowing yourself to sink into the flow of life, love and beauty all around you. This kind of surrender is a vital part of true joy and peace.

When you think of where ‘you’ are located in your body, you probably think of your head. Is it possible that ‘you’ are actually located in your heart? Wouldn’t that be kind of liberating?

My first tattoo is the little North Star right over my heart. It represents trusting the guidance that my heart offers. The benefits? Living in the moment and loving life! Foodgasms included!

Following your heart may sound cheesy and cliched. It is! And it’s a cliche for a reason: your heart is where your joy lives. If you want to access it, you have to open your heart.

Are you starting to see how important, liberating, and powerful this Path of the Heart could be for you?

The heart is also the organ of cleansing of the energetic body, similar to the liver in the physical body; if the heart is functioning properly, it will clear trauma and energetic buildup from all the rest of the etheric system. If it isn’t, then stresses, hurts, grief and fears will build up, like cholesterol in the bloodstream of your soul, bog you down, and drain your energy, a little bit more every day. This manifests as physical or mental illness, and it’s a main cause of premature aging and burn out.

Loving Kindness, or Metta, meditation is a way to support the heart in healing towards its true power and purpose: to be the center of your life, so that you are the center of your life; to clean your etheric body, leaving you free, unencumbered, energetic; and to enable you to give and receive love more profound and potent than you have ever experienced before.

There are many guided Loving Kindness meditations online that I encourage you to try. If you want to try it on your own, the basics are simple:
-Quiet yourself and focus (that’s why mindfulness is the foundation!).
-Focus on a living thing or person (example: yourself!), and imagine your heart opening to them, shining a warm, gentle light on them.
-Repeat the phrases: “May you be well, may you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be free from suffering,” and really mean them.

If you try this, prepare for your life to change in ways you could not have imagined.

Energetic Meditations: Live Longer, Feel Healthier, Think Clearer, Maybe Become A Wizard

The benefits of keeping your etheric body healthy are the same as keeping your physical body healthy.

Seriously.

The basic exercise here is the microcosmic orbit. Mantak Chia, a renegade Taoist Yoga expert sharing this information with the world after literally millennia of secrecy, has several books on the subject, as well as several videos. Check these out to get the basics on this exercise.

This exercise may seem simple, but there is a lot to it. Opening the orbit takes an average of 2 years of dedicated daily practice, either doing the microcosmic orbit or a martial art that focuses on energy (like chi gong). Opening the orbit is the first step towards the seemingly mythical powers of sexual kung fu, energetic inner alchemy, and other incredibly powerful, advanced energetic meditations. Live longer, have better organ health, enjoy life more, be more vital… that’s what these meditations are designed to do, have been developed over thousands of years to do.

There are ways to open the channel more quickly: you could do microcosmic orbit throughout your day, do a martial art, do tai-chi, do chi-gong, or better yet, get a Reiki attunement, which blasts the circuit open the same way high pressure water blasts open a clogged pipe. I would recommend Gen-dai Reiki (the kind I do!) as it includes dozens of energetic practices that you can include in your daily meditation practice, all designed to clean and tone your etheric body. Gen-dai Reiki teachers will take the time to provide you with a framework for your spiritual practice, and guide you through the process over months or even years, instead of giving you an attunement over the weekend and never seeing you again.

It’s really worth it to do this and open the channel, no matter how long it takes. That’s because it opens the door for…

Advanced Energetic Meditations, including Sexual Kung Fu. I will leave the benefits to your imagination; that’s what they’re limited by.

Is this as good as it sounds?

It is better.

Tantra, ‘valley orgasm’, sharing of energy with your partner for incredible closeness, healing and vitality… these are the obvious external benefits of these advanced energetic practices.

The internal benefits though… those can’t be put into words.

If You Want To Be Better, Do Better, And Feel Better, Meditate.

The practice you choose doesn’t matter. The best practice for you is whichever practice feels right to you at this time in your life. The important thing is to do it. It may seem like a lot of work, and it is. But you are worth it.

Simply paying attention to your breath, noticing your thoughts, witnessing the sensations of your body; these things will change you. The health benefits, sexual experiences, psychic powers… those are icing on the cake.

So often in this life, we feel forlorn and small. Meditation will teach you first hand that you aren’t small and alone in a vast meaningless world. You’re bigger than you can imagine, making meaning of your own. You aren’t your thoughts, your worries, your plans… you’re that calm point of peace and joy at the center of your being, a point that is OK no matter what.

And this is all just the beginning. There is always something new to learn when it comes to meditation, because there is always this moment to experience a little bit more fully than the last. We are all beginners on this path, and the more advanced practices you discover, the more you’ll realize how much more there is to know.

It’s the journey of a lifetime, and it will transform your life. So get meditating! Do it right now!

What are your experiences with meditation? Did I miss something important? Let us know in the comments!