hello hello hello welcome back to you are not alone the topic today is on meditation if you have any other questions that we did not answer on today's podcast slash video please leave it in the comments please message us on instagram at yna you are not alone or on our facebook and let's get this episode started the person who really knows a lot more about meditation here is mr will black right over here hiya he can help really help us discuss about the focuses on meditation the why the how
the different types and honestly giving you the listener and now the viewer a better understanding of what meditation really is and i've got a little bit of background information on it cheyenne and brandon are really going to give you more of questions to really help you guys really understand what we're trying to help you learn about meditation so i think the first question that we can go into is what is meditation and why should we meditate well if you'd like to get us started
yeah meditation is usually thought of as like like something like these ancient monks do right they just sit down they may be home to themselves and they sit there and just be peaceful and in a sense that's kind of what it is um what we've learned is you can kind of do it however you want to you know like i like to get comfortable i like to lay down i will play some type of resonance frequency and i will think or try not to think about whatever i'm meditating about this day
and uh cena you talked about um your way of doing it is walking out in nature yeah so with meditation the issue is i believe that today we really think it's the crossing your legs sitting and umming um the buddhas just just the way how they meditate is what meditation is and i and what i've read is that that's that is one form of meditation but there's many different forms of meditation my form of meditation is walking through nature i really enjoy just being in a
peaceful state of mind hiking new trails it really just allows my mind to come to a sense of peacefulness and that's what meditation really is so if i could describe anything as what meditation could be it's a feeling of peacefulness at the end it's stop thinking and stop allowing the ego to continue having the thoughts in your head and being at a full um what how would you describe it well a full uh peaceful standing peaceful awareness of just what you're going through what
you're feeling and just understanding not only about what's around you but what's going on inside of you and inside of your head yeah like i i like to think about it kind of like like an onion this outer shell is how you're feeling maybe you're feeling depressed maybe you're suffering from drug addiction alcohol addiction anything of that sort and as you cut away these layers thinking about you know inside yourself why am i feeling this way and then you go deeper and why am i feeling that way
and you keep getting deeper until you get to the core of something you really want to focus on and it really gives you that ability to understand what is the core root of the problem that you're going through it's not just i feel depressed it is now this is why i feel depressed and it lets you better address that situation on your own rather than just going day by day feeling depressed now you know why now you know how to take action on it and it's kind of how i think to it it is
just reaching that point of where you can actually see what the the overarching problem is and how to fix it so let me ask you two shannon and brandon on your thoughts on meditation cheyenne what what really got you interested into meditation what would bring you more into meditating more often and what could we help try to help you guys understand a lot more about what meditation really is well like you guys said before like i used to always think that meditation was just like sitting down
and being in a relaxated mind and doing like the um but the more that i hear you guys talk about it it just seems to be much more than that and for myself i would have to say that if i if i wanted to be more at peace or a little bit less anxious then that would be something that i would do um most of the times though like i'm pretty mindful and i try to not overthink too many things and really just look at them from a perspective that is not of my own ego i would say um
but i do want more of an understanding of what it could really bring out of somebody that they maybe have not yet tapped into i think the main focus as again with this whole podcast is the understanding of mental health trying to help people get a better perspective on what's going on inside their head a better perspective of different disorders and a better perspective of things that you can do in your life to not only better your mental health but honestly gain more of a self-awareness
of who you are and with meditation i think the most powerful thing about meditation and will you can jump in whenever you're ready is trying to understand how meditation can help your mental health and how performing these kinds of um peaceful meditative experiences how can something like this really help somebody with depression anxiety or anything that they're going through if you could do you have any feelings of how the viewer and the listener could really
understand how using meditation could help better their mental health yeah it's kind of like what i said about about before but i'll kind of go like deeper into it so usually with you know problems say drug or alcohol addiction you are suppressing certain feelings and that is the idea the entire idea is to suppress those feelings you don't want to you don't want to deal with it you just want to get by you know then until you take your next drink your next dose with
mindfulness and meditation you are directly addressing those problems and acting on how to fix them and not just with you know feeling depressed it could be anxiety related it could be anything you might even just feel stuck in life right now but taking that step to begin meditation which is a very slow and hard process because it's something you have to stick with before you start seeing results it leads you just ultimately to feeling better because maybe like i said maybe
you're stuck somewhere in life but that first step of doing meditation can curb some of that anxiety and depression you can now tell yourself genuinely tell yourself that you are acting towards bettering yourself even if you've just taken the smallest step and that's some of the hardest parts with meditation is that it takes a long time to see results you know you can meditate every day for three months and you'll maybe are just now beginning to see the benefits
and that's you know hard for people people are used to that instant gratification and that usually curbs people away from meditation so when it comes to the main focus of trying to really help people understand why they should meditate what got you into meditating and what could really help the listener the viewer try to really help them find out why they should even jump into meditating like why is it something that we do i was just a very hard-headed person as an individual
i kind of thought like yeah i feel like a lot of people go through it it's kind of like you you think you're above everything you think you know everything everybody has those times in their life i feel like it's kind of just a process to go through but i had an experience of where i just was able to let go of my ego and it was the most beautiful experience of my life and it felt more than my life it's indescribable in words and i can't put it into words for you
but that feeling um really made me want to look more into this and delve more into this and through meditation i've been able to not reach that same peak but have begun to be able to understand and get closer to that peak and that's kind of the goal of meditation is a slow process of bettering yourself and reaching that balance of your ego and conscious mind brandon do you have anything that you would want is there anything that you could use in your life that would really help
not only pushing you to meditate more but any reasons that would give you to want to meditate more um with that being said um the reason why i would want to try to get to there or try to meditate um some things in my life is sometimes that i will kind of feel you know not complete with myself i kind of feel like sometimes that like i feel like something is missing or that i don't have some sort of piece of myself at times and i feel like that with meditation
even though i've truly have never done it before but listening to what you guys said and also what we looked up upon as well is that i feel like it could kind of bring like kind of like i said like more of a peace of mind the only thing is is just that more of getting started with it because i know that um with me personally which is kind of a thing i have myself is sometimes i do kind of look for the instant gratification or wanted to things to work right away but you know
what meditation and kind of like what we'll describe you describe that it doesn't come like that it does take time it does take a lot of practice and you know there's some people out there that you know they're really not patient with it but at the same time that you kind of do have to be patient with meditating if you want to get to that to that um what's that word i guess to that max state or to that complete state where you want to get to so with really helping people understand why and
what can get in get them into meditation well how would you do like how what's the first step of doing meditation i would say yeah the honestly the first part and the hardest part is just getting into a state that meditation is i wouldn't say possible but just more easy it's just being able to relax the body and let the the mind flow free and constantly you have a couple different choices you can either go into meditation with an exact thought or you can just be mindful
and let things come to you but the idea is to just let your brain flow free let go of um past issues let go of future problems you see coming and just be in the now moment and being in the present is really the main focus of how meditation can really stop the ego from getting into its sense of play as they like to say and i want to describe to the listener what the ego is just a quick explanation because we keep talking about it and i feel like some people don't really have
a good understanding of what the ego could really be do you have a good summary of what the ego is for me the way i learned about it from like the buddhist monks is how they describe you have your ego and you have your spiritual side and the ego is something you are always comfortable with but can't live without and you can't eliminate and it's important to have ego as well as your spiritual side but it pictures the ego as a circle and it just keeps going around and around and around
you know infinitely and that's what your ego is it is complacent in its spot it likes where you are now it doesn't seek to improve it doesn't seek to get worse it just wants to be where it is but your spiritual is described as a spiral and you are slowly getting bigger as you go around the circle it is never ending you are continuing to grow you are getting bigger and it's important to balance these two together for me what the ego is is i call it the thinker the
voice inside your head the person telling you to do different things the the the question maker and so with the ego it's really important to understand how to stop it from pushing you to positions where you don't want to be so the way that i try to help people understand what the ego is is try to think about something and allow the ego to go into this sort of play with it and that's what the ego is it's the it's the voice that really wants you to continue trying to
have the conversations trying to push you into places where it feels comfortable and takes you away from experiences that you don't really want to try and new experiences for the ego is kind of uh what as they say it's kind of it goes into this defense mechanism where it doesn't want you to because it's not sure of it it's never experienced things like that and what you need to do with the ego is you need it you need it to stop thinking and that's the hardest thing i think meditation really is
in my focus and in my opinion is shutting the ego off and allowing free flow and free thought come in without any asp any any motivation to think any um feeling to think and your emotions are kind of like set to the side as well you don't really feel anything but you feel this peace of mind which is the most beautiful thing i think i would have ever experienced that's just the hardest part because after that goes out of the way that's when you can really start meditating
yeah and that's the hardest far part for people i feel like it's easily relatable to the gym you don't go to the gym for one day and you have massive gains 106 years it takes time it takes experiences it takes a lot of self-awareness and that's what we want you the viewer and listener to understand is how to gain self-awareness and how to stop the ego from thinking i would say right yeah and uh it like brings me back to a conversation we had before where you said that
everybody needs that kind of balance of their ego in their life so to you like what would be the right amount because i know meditation in general is just a balance of your ego and the negatives and the positives of it for you like how would you say would be like what would you call too much of suppressing that ego and what would be too much of not doing that because obviously it also depends on the type of life that you want to live like you can be like a monk or you could be
a hermit just living out and about and you don't really have the same values of life as other people whereas like somebody who's trying to fit into today's society um are just out in the open world with each other communicating with each other what like how can they bring that balance in what's too much what's too little i think so let's let's start with extremes on both sides the extreme side of full meditation and full self-awareness with no ego is kind of what a life a monk lives
right a buddhist lives they live in um very in these temples where they all they do is meditate they bring a lot of self-awareness they bring a lot of focus um there's a lot of other things that they do as well it's not just meditating but the main focus of it is to bring uh full p full peace to themselves a full self-awareness um and let's look at the extreme of the ego so i would look at the extreme of the ego being someone who is so fully into society that
meditation is is just not even a thought peaceful self-awareness is not a thing spiritual awakenings doesn't exist to them and it's kind of allowing the thinker to gain what whatever it wants giving the ego everything that it could possibly need not trying new experiences not allowing yourself to go out there and um really understand that there's more to society than just working there's more to society than your friends there's more to society than just uh experiencing little things in life
and those i would say are two extremes of one with the ego and one with uh without the ego i would say and so what you need in life is a balance and it's like a tipping scale if you look at it one side if you give one side more than the other the negatives and positives switch completely but if you can give a full balance of the ego not allowing the ego to fully think and not giving it its full control but also not you don't and it's kind of sad to say this and i don't want to come off and be
like don't don't meditate like forever you know like don't don't become a buddhist don't become a like you're more than welcome to if that's something that you really want to find find out about yourself like that's definitely something um powerful and and i'm not i'm also not saying that giving the ego full control is a bad thing it has its pros and cons with everything in life everything comes with pros and cons and you just need to figure out the balance of what's what's enough and for
me like for my meditation i go on hikes i love being in nature i think the power of that nature and energy that nature gives off is just absolutely breathtaking beautiful and it's free you know like you don't have to pay anything to just go for a hike you know or for a walk and so that is what i really enjoy the most about my level of meditating i still i still try to be a part of society 100 but i also try to take myself out of society and try to enjoy more of a peaceful
spiritual awakening with not only because i feel like at some points in life you get so focused with everything going on in your life whether it's work whether it's your friends whether it's the drama whether whatever your family whatever it is i feel like sometimes as humans we get just get so lost in our brains that we never find the shutoffs like we never are just like turn off i'm too lost in the sauce too lost in the sauce so you say that sure oh and i've been there and
i feel like a lot of people have been there everybody's been there right and i feel like once you get overwhelmed to the point that's where the that's where the balancing comes into such an important factor because if you don't balance it if you don't allow yourself to shut off sometimes and go for peaceful walks and go for yourself more self-awareness you kind of are going to go down in a spiraling direction i don't know will if have you ever felt like in a point in the point of your life where
everything was going wrong it felt like you were spiraling down depression is hitting you in the face anxiety is punching you left what did you do to help really understand that meditation is the thing i need to be using i need to meditate more this is something that's not this is something that's really good for my mental health um for me the meditation thing really opened my eyes to a new way of approaching problems and kind of like how i said before with any other types
of substance abuse it's usually to block those problems out you don't want to think about it and that helps in the moment but overall you are not improving you are stuck in that ego that circle you are not rising to that spiritual side of you and creating that spiral where you are constantly improving yourself and once you reach that spiral which meditation for me is what got me to that point of being able to balance the circle and the spiral or the ego and the conscious
to improving my life and not just covering something up and going day by day keeping it covered up and not thinking about it it's hard it's very hard to think about those things that may have brought you down to the bottom of that pit but the only way to improve things and get better is to address those problems directly and understand exactly what those problems are because they may look different on the surface but maybe arising because of something else and the only way that i
found to get to that point was through meditation and being able to look at things completely from myself on the inside and cutting those layers deeper and deeper and deeper until i get to that core point of this is what i need to fix then i can move on to that next layer back i can work my way back up i can fix this layer then i can repair this layer and it keeps going until you are creating new layers you know kind of like how i think about it like a mental shield like now things are getting
harder again but you've already understood how to address these problems and you can now address them quicker and fix them quicker and it makes life a little easier having this understanding that your ego is repairable and with the ego being repairable did you ever feel like in a moment where the ego was in full control of like everything that you were trying to do and you used meditation to really help you shut the ego off but i feel like a lot of people try to
grasp meditation as this thing that again like we talked about like the humming and the focus but with meditation how did you get better at it because it's not something that you can just easily just get good at right like it takes time but how did you get better at it like was it more practice was it more reading was it understanding yourself more or was it more of just like again more practice and all you did was just do more meditate meditation it's kind of
all of the all of those things that i mean firstly you are going to get out of it what you put into it if you do not believe at all that this can help you it won't but it on the other hand if you believe that it can help you it will slowly start to help you um there's a lot of books in business that go along the lines of you are what you think and that aspect comes into play with meditation and even you you can tell talk to yourself about it but thinking positive makes you feel more positive
it's just at what level of positivity are you thinking about or what level of negativity are you thinking about for me what i usually do is when i first started i had no idea what i was doing i had i was lucky enough to have that experience where i just my ego was gone i went through this beautiful piece of life and that's what got me really interested in it so right off the bat i was already pretty interested in it did it happen again no not for a long time and even to that degree it hasn't but
what i would do is sessions were usually 20 minutes i would just lay down get you know for me it's getting comfortable putting on headphones wear like a sleeping mask to block out the light and playing some resonance frequency you know for cena it's you it's walking through nature everybody's a little bit different and first off it's finding what you what works for you the best or what you think will work for you the best for me it's laying down getting completely
relaxed and i would repeat that process and my mind would be drifting all over the place and that's okay that's going to happen for the first it's different for everybody it could be years it could be months where you don't you have no idea what you were doing you just your mind is slowly slowly going through its processes of flowing and eventually you were able to control that the flowing of your mind before eventually you can really understand how to not switch it off but just block
those thoughts for a time that you can actually relax and pick a specific thought that you want to focus on reading as well has helped me a lot in understanding exactly what you are feeling what to act on what to think about specifically that helps for me when i first started and i still use it to this day is what right before i start it usually takes me about 30 minutes to 45 minutes to get into a deep relaxed relaxing state um and what i will first start out with doing is
laying down probably like five minutes in i'm pretty comfortable i feel like i can stay in this position for however long and i think about just a white void you thinking about in your head you have a doorway in front of you and you open that door inside this door is a chest and inside the chest you put all the thoughts that you are currently thinking about anything like oh i have to go to the store later uh three years ago i got into a car accident everything goes into
this box and you close it you seal it you walk back out the door and you close it and now consciously every time you think about those things you can say you can tell yourself hey i locked that away we're not going to think about that right now we're going to continue thinking about nothing another easy way to do that is also focus on something usually like breathing or like monks do they do these arms it's just another form of stopping your your train of thought to
to get to that end goal of nothing which is achievable it's just very hard to get to but over the years of doing it it's become easier and easier and it's come to the point where now i can sit there for an hour and a half to two hours sometimes i always have a goal of trying to go for 30 minutes but some days it just goes for two hours you lose i just lose track of the time because of the way i'm feeling or the way that my thoughts are going some days are better than others some days i'm
just not into it some days i'm really into it but it gets a lot easier and the the hardest part is just continuing to do it just 20 minutes a day and even if you can't do it every day 20 minutes every other day it's really just that sticking to it is what gets you better at it the consistency yeah and that's what's really important in a lot of things that we need to do more to better our mental health consistency figuring out things that really help you meditating might not work for you
completely understandable but there's a lot of things in life that you can find that can really help better your mental health and before we wrap all of this up brandon was there anything that you wanted to know more about meditating or had any initial questions that the listener or the viewer could really try to grasp more of what meditation is now that you have really understood heard more is there anything else on your mind that could really help the viewer in the
list and understand how to not only but maybe better their mental health but really help them understand meditation more definitely um this question i kind of have a little bit in my head when you guys were talking it may sound kind of simple but um past trauma or um kind of like past life um could that help with like trying to solve unresolved issues that you kind of left in your past so kind of like for an example um i had this story in my head that kind of never
really said to people but like so back in like 2018 um i was at pretty much like the highest of my height in my life you know cause i was going on a trip to mexico with my dad to go see my diaz and all them and once when i got back that's when kind of like my life turned a big 360.
and so basically what happened a couple things happened number one um i gotta go for my job and then number two um a situation happened with with someone but during that kind of like i kind of wish i kind of knew about meditation during that time and i kind of wish i learned how to practice it but i mean that's the past can't really do anything about it but basically what happened is i went to a downward spiral and basically like i just didn't care in life i didn't really care
what i did or what i was doing i kind of just went about my own business not thinking what my actions were going to do to myself so i just went basically what i call like a wild path like i didn't care about anything um i did i drank a lot actually um that i'm around really sad but i did drink a lot to help suppress those feelings and to help with the pain and just trying to like not think about it and just say oh it'll be a next day you know it'll probably go
away but then when it will come back i wouldn't think about it again but then it will start come resurfacing all over again and i'll do a bit back on the same routine over and over and over and it kind of lasted for like maybe like a good year and a half or so maybe almost close to two years until i got to the point where like i kind of had to tell myself like i need to change what i'm doing and the crazy thing was that even when i first started doing it my mind was telling me to stop instantly
but i kind of just ignored and just think like oh like you know like what what does my mind have to do to help with me like it's probably not telling me to do the right not it's not the right thing to do because i was just so ignorant during that time so could meditation help with those past traumas to get over it so when you start spiraling i feel like you start looking for paths to try to better yourself and so once we don't find anything we kind of get lost and
try to answer our problems with other stimulants and things that actually make us feel better in the moments rather than in the long term and i feel like meditation is more long term than short term and so if you are spiraling and you're kind of looking for this kind of what can really help me better my spiral i guess and kind of pull me back up meditation would definitely be something to look into but again like will said it's consistency it's not going to be
i feel like you're going to need to try it a couple times like if you're watching this and you are dealing with some sort of issues and you're spiraling take a second and learn more about meditation but don't give up after the first time the second time the third time just keep doing it don't don't allow yourself don't allow the ego to stop itself from gaining what it wants because the ego doesn't the ego doesn't like meditation because it shuts it off but sometimes all we need to do is just
turn the lights off and just sit and relax and allow our thoughts to free flow and there are so many videos and things you itunes spotify that you can find that is guided meditation that is a awesome first first step to take is just following a guided meditation it will tell you how to relax he she whoever will guide you through it it's even if you don't accomplish your own feelings you are getting into that state of meditation and really feeling that relaxation that's a beautiful feeling and
cheyenne was there anything that you wanted to learn that maybe you still had a question on that could really help the viewer and the listener understand more about meditation um my questions mainly were just how to get into that meditative state you know like not generally like a step-by-step uh thing and just also like hearing about uh brandon's story and how you guys uh deal with you know pain depression anything that's like wrong in your life for any negative portions of your life
it's i almost i almost viewed it kind of as a band-aid where in the long run it's not really that you know like it's something that you need to be consistent with you need to come back to time and time again because you're basically changing your mental state of mind to also help you get better in these other aspects of your life too so i mean for me when it comes to meditation would just be how to achieve that and i i was really intrigued by your story on how
you went and went to like walks and you went on hikes and how will he would just sit there and be in this really intense meditative state whereas you know it's it just shows me the contrast between all the different ways you can do it so my question pretty much got answered on how you can go through and get and achieve that peace of mind and that's the most beautiful thing here about yna is we're here to help people try to gain a better understanding of not only their mental health but also
better understanding how they can improve it it's beautiful it's beautiful isn't that good it's nice so we really appreciate you guys all listening uh catch our new clothing lines that will be on our website at www.sbc.com we love your we really appreciate you guys supporting us not only the podcast but our new uh youtube channel and we really can't wait to catch you guys on the next episode so please please please remember [Music] you