A question I get quite often is, “How do you meditate?” How do I teach you to be you? How do I teach you to breathe?
Now.. I get it. Yes, there are breathing coaches out there. There’re coaches for everything. But when you’re born you have a natural ability to breathe. Children know how to breathe properly. It’s just a matter of you reconnecting with yourself. You’ve lost touch.
When I was a trainer I had to actually tap people’s muscles, because they could not articulate an exercise properly and were so out of touch with their body. That’s what got me to realize, ‘Oh my God, can you imagine how much more out of touch people are with their emotional body?’
How do I teach you to be you? I mean Lao Tzu says, “Do you have the patience to sit until the mud settles and your water clears?”
It’s that simple. You sit and do nothing, and you catch your mind drifting off and you bring it back. Of course some of the most dangerous thoughts that stop you from discovering the real you are things like (and the mind will play tricks on you of course): “I can’t do this”, “there’s no value in this”, “there’s no reason”, “I get no benefit out of it”.
Because of course the mind, the ego, does not want you to control it, so it’s going to tell you a story, and the story is: there’s nothing here for you, don’t waste your time. This is one of the hardest things to overcome, is to stop trusting yourself, to believe that there’s good science behind this.
Believe it or not, this is what the ancient mystics talked about. We made gods out of people who have had the fortitude to journey off into that desert, that forest of the subconscious, and come back and teach us the way. The way is, you sit and you wait until the mud settles and the water clears.
Author
Brian Cunningham is the CEO of PureLife LLC, and has also worked as a personal trainer for Equinox.
Host of Quantum Physiques Radio and Featured Writer in Positive Impact Magazine.