Most articles on why you should meditate give you the same list of benefits and all which hasn’t managed to convince you yet. You’ve no doubt read them, maybe even decided it’s something you should do, but just never got around to it. Reading another one of those articles wouldn’t really change that, would it? So I’m not presenting one of those; it’s not really what we’re about anyway.

We’re about you, making you into your authentic self, the man that you have the potential to be. And it’s time. It’s time to be the man you were meant to be. Should be pretty simple, right? If it was, wouldn’t you have done it already?

It’s a cold fact that you don’t talk to yourself, which makes it very hard to figure out just who you are. You know who you’re told by society to be, but is that you? Maybe. But if you never talk to yourself, never listen to yourself, how would you know? Most people are so disconnected they don’t even talk to themselves in the right language.

In today’s society it has become common practice to exist in a disembodied state. The body is just this lump of flesh that moves the brain around, and the brain is really all that matters. But, it’s not. The brain is just a small part of who you are. And, more importantly, the brain doesn’t actually do all of your thinking. Numerous studies have shown that the brain actually is one of multiple processing centers in the body. It holds a lot of the memories, but not all, and is where most of your higher thought processes come from. But your muscle tissues hold memories, too. You spinal cord and nerves process information and act on it, telling your brain after the fact, so it can process and learn. You even think from your gut, and no, that’s not a euphemism.

Let me explain. If you are in the kitchen and accidently lean back into a hot stove, you will have jumped and pulled away from it before the brain even knows what is going on. That’s the slight moment of disorientation you have before you realize, I touched a hot burner. The body, without the brain processing it, identified a danger and the entire body reacted. The hands pulled away, the feet engaged, the torso turned to see what it was. It even activated the lungs and auditory system to emit sounds of alarm. After it was done, the brain was informed it happened.

If you’ve ever had deep tissue massage, or even medium pressure massage for most people, you’ll probably note that when your massage therapist works on certain muscles your mind engages. For me, a specific set of muscles almost always brings up issues in my mind to a job I quit in 2018 (5 months from this posting). Other areas bring up memories and make me think about the dojo.

There’s even a growing body of research that is making it more and more clear that you think from your gut. Literally. And a part of that thinking isn’t even you, it’s the bacteria that your body keeps there to help with bodily processes. It’s not only becoming evident that this bacteria helps you digest, but it as much as anything else determines your food cravings and tolerances. In other words, you don’t have a sweet tooth, you have a sweet gut bacteria. It’s also becoming more evident that this symbiotic relationship also affects and processes emotions.

That’s an awful lot of you that’s not the brain. The collective of all of this, and other things I didn’t cover, can best be referred to as your mind. Your mind, not your brain (that’s a lump of tissue in your head), is your greater self.

Back to the crazy idea of talking to yourself. You don’t. You likely don’t even know the language of the body or the mind. Your body talks to you on a regular basis but, not knowing the language, you don’t understand it and long ago stopped listening. The language of the body is called “symptoms”. You store the event of a bad encounter with your boss in your brain as a memory, but also in your body. The brain processes it and moves on, the body stews on it and stores the event for later reference (stress). But you never return to it, because you think you’re past it now.

There are many ways to learn the languages of the body and the mind, and to learn to interact with them. Most are complex and very time consuming (and require multiple college degrees). But there is one that can put you on the path that takes little effort or time – meditation.

We’re back to the beginning. You’ve heard about mediation, read the articles, maybe even decided you should do it, but you don’t. You don’t have the time, or the proper gear, or proper place to do it, or any number of excuses. And that’s what they are – excuses. You have the time. You have plenty of time you waste away. After all, you are the one who schedules your time. You’re the one who decides to get up as late as possible and rush out the door for work every day, setting yourself up from the moment you wake to be stressed, even fail. But we’ll get into that in another article.

You do have the time, you have the gear (meditation requires none), and you have the space. You desperately need to push back all these lame excuses, so, it’s time. It’s time to learn to talk to yourself again.

It’s time to begin.