What is Meditation?

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Welcome to the Eastwesticism podcast where our host, Todd Perelmuter shares the lessons he's learned spending eight years living with gurus, monks, lamas, and shamans across 35 countries and five continents join in the journey as he brings the best scientifically proven methods for living your best life, from the east and the west, straight to you. The path to peace, love, health, and happiness starts here.

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Meditation is turning our attention away from the material world, turning it inward, tuning in to our body, our breath, and the present moment, and becoming fully alert, and fully conscious of our environment and body. Without looking at it through the cloud of thoughts and opinions and judgments. We just be instead of what we're used to doing, which is constantly doing and it's actually our natural state of being, we humans were in our heads all the time as a common you'll never say like that horse has to in its head.

The idea doesn't make any sense because horses are just experiencing life and reacting in a very conscious mindful way. Basically, around 10 to 15,000 years ago, human beings used to be like that. And then our time started to become taken up by different things. And instead of living, looking for food, making sure our huts were good and being with our families when that happened, we had to start planning and thinking about the future instead of living in the present moment.

 We had to plan our crop cycles and we had to plan our whole lives around when will we plant the seeds and when will harvest the crops. Worrying about what if there's a drought what do we do, we can't just forage and migrate whenever we want because now our lives are attached to this area of land. And so we settled down. Cities were built up and then we built armies to protect our land and then we started to play sports and watch sports. 

Then came the attention-stealing industries the trillion-dollar industries of our attention which was the news, film, television, radio, and later social media and podcasts. Even drugs and alcohol take our attention away from the present moment and kind of dull our senses for a short time being. All of this filled up our lives to the point where now anytime we're just sitting still, it's almost alien to most of us and we're not comfortable with it. We find it boring, we find it very difficult. Many people say that of meditation when they first start it.

It's a shame because that's it's not only our natural state of being but it is our most peaceful way of being. I don't think there's a wild horse in nature who's been bored for one second. I think they just live and enjoy their lives and enjoy the peace of it, kind of makes you realize like, we can't have peace on earth because we can't really handle peace for a few minutes without feeling intense boredom and the need for creating some kind of chaos in our lives. And enjoying the chaos of others through cinema and other mediums. 

Meditation is allowing our brains to kind of train it. To be this in this healing, peaceful, present state where everything is joyful. You see a baby, you see an animal, and there's no suffering unless there's the experience of pain in that moment, but then after the pain is gone, they don't go, gosh, that was really bad. 

Only humans do that stuff where a normal state of living is living in the past or the future. We just live, asleep at the wheel, if you will, for most of our life. So, meditation, when you just sit down, close your eyes, and focus on the present moment, either through your breath or your body or your surroundings, is really like mind training to become more peaceful and happier, more bliss in our daily lives and kind of subduing the thinking minds unconscious generating of suffering, which we all do, and meditation helps us get out of that.


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