A Meditation Masterclass

dose of calmness. Every weekday morning, I'll share a meditation story, offer a simple practical tip about how you or a loved one can stay a bit calmer in your life, and then we'll end each episode together with a moment of gratitude. My hope is that I can share what I know to anyone who needs it. Ready, sit comfortably, take a few deep breaths, and let's begin today's journey. I'm going to tell you the time I taught Oprah

Winfrey to meditate. Yeah, that's some serious name dropping. Oprah Winfrey and her television crew wanted to do a story on the David Lynch Foundation, and part of that, Oprah decided she wanted to learn transcendental meditation. She told me that she practiced all sorts of different types of meditation and had failed at each one of them and was very skeptical that she'd be able to learn t M.

I said, let's give it a try. And after the first meditation, she opened her eyes and she had almost tears in her eyes, and she said, that's the most human friendly meditation I've ever practiced in my life. I like to achieve, I like to be successful, and I always failed at other forms of meditation. I would sit there for a minute or two and then I just get up because I couldn't clear my mind of thoughts.

And she was so satisfied with TM that she ended up personally paying for all four hundred employees of her Opra Winfrey network to learn to meditate as well. What is it about different types of meditation? That's what I want to talk about. Now we hear meditation all the time. There's never been a more important time to meditate. And now so much pressure and stress and tension in the world, there's never been more opportunities to do some form of meditation.

And there's never been more of a misunderstanding about what meditation actually is what it does. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to give you a little mini master class I want to let you know when someone says meditation, that they're not all the same. And the analogy I like to use is the analogy of an ocean. You're on a little boat and you're in the middle of the ocean, and all of a sudden you get these giant, dirty, forty ft high waves, and you could think,

oh my gosh, the whole ocean is an upheaval. Whole ocean is a bit of an exaggeration, because if you did a cross section, you'd realize that you may have thirty or forty fifty high waves. But the ocean is many miles deep. And while the ocean can be turbulent on the surface, the ocean, by its nature is pretty

darned silent at its depth. And that's wonderful. Analogy for the mind, surface of our mind is the active thinking God to God, to God of mind, I gotta do this, and I gotta do that, and I gotta call him, and I gotta call her, and I gotta make a list all the goddess. So it's a natural human desire to say, I'd like some inner calm, your clarity, your peace, and the operative where there is inner. The question is is there such a thing as an inner and if so,

how do we get there? And that's been the realm of meditation throughout time to provide equanimity, power, creativity, happiness, focus to the mind. There are three basic types of meditation. The first is called focused attention, and that's a meditation that says, if you want to have a calm mind, thoughts are the disruptor of calm, so just clear your mind of thoughts. It's like saying, if you want to have a calm ocean, waves of the disruptor of calm,

so stop waves. Difficult to do. Second type of meditation open monitoring. That's mindfulness techniques. That's where you observe of your thoughts, you observe your mood, you observe your feelings. You're mindful, you're in the present, you're not thinking about the past or worried about the future. These two approaches pertain to the surface of the mind that they're called

cognitive approaches. The third type is transcendental meditation or self transcending, and that technique hypothesizes the deep within every one of us right now is a level where your mind is already calm and settled and peaceful. And alert. Like the ocean has a silent depth, and transcendental meditation provides effortless access to that deep quiet state of calm, gives a body a state of rest in many regards deeper than sleep.

It increases serotonin, which is a happiness neurotransmitter, reduces courtisol, which is a stress hormone, and has a whole constellation of benefits. My tip for today, there are so many benefits to come from try incidental meditation, from all sorts of meditation. I encourage you to look deeply into them. All these approaches have benefits, all of them have integrity. Just like you choose one vitamin or one medicine for

particular outcomes, we do the same with meditation. So I don't want you to think, oh, I do this, so I'm not going to do that where I tried this and it doesn't work. I encourage you to look deeply into them. Go online tm dot org something called mindfulness based stress reduction. Look into them. All. Right, let's end this time together doing something that I think should be a feature of our everyday life, and that's appreciation and gratitude.

So let's take thirty seconds of quiet. Thirty seconds to take a break, just take a moment. It turns out when we do that, it's good for our health as well. I'll be right back all right. Thank you for joining. This is Bob Roth. Keep calm. Thanks for listening today. I hope you heard something that inspires, that uplifts you and that you can incorporate into your own life. Until next time, remember, meditate, be kind, and be true to yourself. Hey, all of you out there, I'd love to hear from you.

You can send me your stories, your questions, or anything else on your mind. Just connect with me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at meditation Bob. You can also send me an email at meditation Bob Roth at gmail dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.