Unleash The Power of Meditation
This episode we are going to talk about Meditation – we’ve had a lot of listeners ask about this and I am really excited to cover this topic!
It’s something that I’ve done nearly every day for over 2 years and something that has a ton of research-proven benefits.
In this episode we will talk about the myriad benefits of meditation, look at a few different ways to meditate, discuss a simple and easy way to get started on meditation – that finally got me into a daily meditation practice- and much more!
Thank you so much for listening!
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SHOW NOTES, LINKS & RESEARCH
Meditation Improves Your Ability to Be Introspective (see here)
Meditation Decreases Depression (see here)
Meditation Increases Immune System Function (see here and here)
Meditation Improves Your Ability to Regulate Your Emotions (see here)
Meditation Increases Grey Matter (see here)
Meditation Increases Brain Size In Areas Related to Emotional Regulation (see here and here)
Meditation Increases Cortical Thickness In Areas Related to Paying Attention (see here)
Meditation Increases Your Ability to Focus & Multitask (see here and here)
Vishen Lakhiani's Envisioning Method (Description + Guided Meditation here)
Vishen Lakhiani on Mixergy (see here)
The Reality of Perception Episode (see here)
The Power of Compassion (see here)
Understanding e=mc2 (see here)
"We Are All Connected" (see here)
[Meditation Music] Zen Garden (pt 1) by David & Steve Gordon ( see here)
[Meditation Music] It Shall Be Beautiful by David & Steve Gordon (see here)
[Meditation Music] Ravi Shankar Sitar Music (see here)
[Meditation Playlist] Matt Bodnar's Zen Garden Spotify Playlist (see here)
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
I'm really excited today because we're going to talk about meditation, which is something that I am really passionate about and something that, as I mentioned in the intro, I've been doing for more than two years on an almost daily basis. And I wanted to kind of open with an old Zen proverb that I really like, which is: If you don't have 20 minutes to meditate, you need two hours. That's something I think we should all think about. Meditation, as we'll discuss on the podcast and I'm sure that many listeners are already aware of, is something that is incredibly beneficial to you. There's tons of research about the benefits of meditation, but a lot of people get sometimes kind of caught up or confused by the fact that there are so many different ways to meditate; there's so many different methodologies; there's so much noise. It's hard to kind of distinguish the signal from all of that. So, what we're going to talk about today: I'm going to give you the way that I got started meditating. I'm going to give you a really simple method. It's very easy. It takes between five and 15 minutes to do, typically in the morning or at night right before you go to sleep, and it's something that really... You know, I kind of intermittently meditated for a year or two when I first became interested, and I'll kind of tell my whole story about how I got started on meditation. But once I discovered this methodology, it gave me sort of the framework and the guidelines that enabled me to meditate on a consistent and ongoing basis, and start to really reap a lot of the real benefits of meditation. So, let's start out with a couple of my personal favorite reasons why meditation is so important. I think, in a meta sense, meditation enables you to view your own thinking and capture and be aware of what's going on in your mind; being aware of the dialogue that's constantly running; being aware of the things and the thoughts that sometimes kind of appear in your mind almost on autopilot. And that awareness, that self-awareness of your thought patterns, of what's happening in your brain, being aware of that gives you the ability to effect so much more change in your life. And, you know, going back even to the last episode where we talked about NLP and we talked about the software running in the back of your mind with Andy Murphy, meditation is the tool, in many ways, that enables you to kind of pause to see those patterns, to see that language in your mind that's telling you that you can do something or that you can't do something or that's kind of a script on autopilot from your past. Another episode, we talked about limiting beliefs. One of the best ways to kind of catch limiting beliefs in your mind is with meditation. When you meditate, you're able to kind of pick up on that chatter, that mental...those mental messages and you're able to say, hey, hold on. What was that feeling? What was that thing that I just had, that I just felt? That sort of twinge of doubt or that little phrase that just fluttered through my brain. And you can say hold on a second. That's something that I need to write down. That's a limiting belief, something that's been lurking in the back of my subconscious, that's been stopping me from doing what I really want to do. And the episode we did on limiting beliefs really drilled down into that, so if it's something you want to explore more, I highly recommend checking that episode out. Another incredible benefit of meditation is, and the way it kind of ties into being able to grow and to challenge yourself and to push yourself... We talked a lot more about this in the episode on embracing discomfort. But one of the ways that you grow and improve is by expending and playing in the edges of your comfort zone, playing in the places where you're uncomfortable. And meditation gives you, again, that same kind of mental ability to sort of flag a thought and say, you know what? This is me hiding from this uncomfortable situation and this is an opportunity, instead of hiding, to step up to the plate and say, I'm not going to let...I'm not going to back down from this situation. I'm going to force myself to do something that's uncomfortable and push myself outside of my comfort zone. So, here are a few more benefits of meditation. And, trust me, there's literally a laundry list of things, and all of these are research-backed and we're going to include a bunch of them in the show notes. But meditation has been proven by psychological research to reduce stress, reduce depression, and reduce anxiety. I know that that comes as a shocker to many people. Another interesting benefit is that meditation has been shown in research to actually boost the function of your immune system. Another one: Again, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but meditation improves your ability to regulate your emotions, right, to control your emotional state. Meditation increases the gray matter in your brain. This is a pretty amazing finding. It literally increases the size of your brain and, not only your brain as a whole, but it increases the volume and specifically in areas related to emotional regulation, positive emotions, and self-control. Meditation also increases the cortical thickness of your brain in areas specifically related to paying attention, which yields dividends and increase in your creativity; increase in your ability to focus; increase in your ability to multitask; and so many other things. Again, I'm not going to drill down into all that research. We could spend hours talking about every single one of the studies that showed how powerful and beneficial meditation is. But I think you already know, deep down, how important meditation is and how powerful it really can be. So, let's dig into some of the different kinds of meditation and some of the different ways that people meditate. One of the biggest misconceptions that I want to clear up is that there are many different meditation methodologies. There are many different ways to meditate and there's no right way. There's no right way to get started. You don't necessarily have to sit in a Lotus Position. You don't have to have a mantra. You don't have to have a certain kind of breathing. Part of the reason people get intimidated and don't start meditating is because they get overwhelmed with the deluge of information on the internet. You know, you can google how to meditate. There's 15 different methodologies or more in any given blog post that you're going to look at. The key is to just find something simple, find something easy that can help you get started. You know, that is always the hardest part. You want to just figure out what's the easiest, simplest thing I can do to begin on this path. And I'll tell you the story of how I started meditating. It was kind of almost on a whim. It had been something that I'd been interested in for a long time, and even when I was when I was in high school, I was fortunate enough... I traveled to Southeast Asia and I randomly bought this book on Buddhism and I read it cover-to-cover. I didn't really understand most of it, but it was just something that was really fascinating to me. I've always had kind of a fascination with Zen and East Asian religion and Buddhism and all that stuff. And I read about meditation--that book--and I tried it once or twice, but it really didn't take hold. It didn't really have any effect and I kind of forgot about it. That was when I was 16 or 17. Years and years and years later--it was probably four or five years ago--I was just sitting in my office, working, and I got this urge to search for something on Pandora, and I just searched for the phrase "Zen garden". I don't know why, don't know what prompted me to do that, but I searched for the phrase "Zen garden" and just created a Pandora station that was sort of this chill, like, spa music. And I was just working, kind of listening to it. It was early in the morning and, you know, that's of my favorite time of day. And I listened to three or four songs and then suddenly I just got this really powerful urge to just sort of sit down and sit in kind of a Lotus posture and meditate. And I didn't know what I was doing, but I just started doing that and it was really enjoyable and I kind of started seeing... I didn't do it every day. I would do it once a week, couple times a month. Whenever I sort of got this urge, I would just pop on some kind of chill spa music and I would meditate. But I couldn't really establish a daily practice with that. I was... Sometimes, it felt really fruitful, it felt really engaging and enlightening in some ways, but oftentimes I would just feel like, what am I doing? What is this? What going on? And it wasn't really until I stumbled upon the particular methodology that I use to meditate now that I really was able to build it into a daily practice. But before we dig into that, there's a couple just rough considerations I want to talk about. One of the biggest buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot when you're talking about meditation is the difference between guided meditation and unguided meditation. And, again, there's no right or wrong answer here. The best way... The best analogy that I've ever heard for thinking about the difference between guided meditation and unguided meditation is that guided meditation is like riding a motorcycle and unguided meditation is like riding a bike. Both will get you where you need to go, but only riding a bike you actually build the muscles that you need to get there yourself. So, if your focus is solely on the destination--you know, anxiety relief, stress relief, that sort of stuff--guided meditation can get you there. And there's a ton of apps and YouTube videos and all kinds of stuff based around guided meditation, which is essentially someone walking you through each phase of some sort of meditation process. I'm sure many of you have either used some of these apps or heard of these things, or tried guided meditation at one point or another. And, again, there's nothing wrong with guided meditation. Actually, guided meditation, in many ways, is how I started down the path of getting a daily meditation practice. Unguided meditation basically means meditating on your own. Now, you can still meditate with sort of a framework that's been predetermined, or you can focus on what's called mindfulness meditation. That's another buzzword. That's another thing you hear a lot when people talk about meditating. Mindfulness meditation is essentially the idea of focusing your thoughts on one particular thing. The reason people talk about mindfulness meditation or the things that people think about when they talk about mindful meditation, a lot of times, it's focusing on breath, right? We've heard that again and again. Focus on your breathing, that kind of thing. Another thing that people think about or do when they're talking about mindfulness meditation is focusing on either a single thought, a single word, or a mantra. That's where you get into things like transcendental meditation, et cetera. Again, if you want to do mindfulness meditation, it's totally fine. It's a very valid form of meditation, but you don't have to do that. There's other kinds of methodologies, other ways that you can meditate that don't have to be just focusing only on breathing, focusing only on saying "om" over and over and over again. But, you can also incorporate parts of mindfulness into another meditation framework or another meditation methodology. But one of my favorite sort of quotes about meditation, specifically around the idea of focusing on breath, that... I think people get really, really discouraged when they try to meditate. They sit down five minutes, ten minutes, and their thoughts are just racing, things pinging back and forth. Oh, I've got to do this. I've got to call so-and-so. Oh, I've got this thing to do. Oh, I need to write this down. And it seems very stressful. And then, you know, maybe eventually they'll kind of come back and be like, oh, I'm supposed to be meditating and I'm terrible at this. I can't clear my brain. I can't get all these thoughts to stop bouncing around. And this this quote really helps kind of clarify that. If you sit down and you do that, you haven't failed at meditating. Meditation is the return to breath. That's the quote. Meditation is the return to breath. Think about that. It's not focusing on your breathing. It's not focusing on that thought or whatever it might be. It's returning back to that after you've been distracted, after you've had your mind racing and running around. It still happens to me to this day. I've been meditating for years and my mind will drift, it will wander. Even this morning when I was meditating, I started thinking about all this stuff, and then [deeply inhales and exhales] returned to my breath. I just returned back to that place. So, meditation cultivates kind of that ability to not be frustrated. Remember, we talked about this, actually, in the episode about dealing with setbacks. It's not about being frustrated and angry that your thoughts kind of went astray; it's pulling back, it's remembering to just return to breath, return back to the methodology that you're using. So, with that in mind, again, it's about getting started as easily as possible. Pick something, start something, and just begin there. And I'm going to give you a methodology that we're going to talk about now that can help you get started, and this is the methodology that I used, that helped me get started with meditation. The method that I use to meditate is something called the envisioning method. This is a meditation framework that was created by a guy named Vishen Lakhiani. He's the founder of the company Mindvalley, and I originally discovered his framework from an incredible talk that he gives on the website Mixergy. If you've never listened to it, I would highly recommend checking that out. This framework is also very similar to the daily meditation routine that Tony Robbins follows and many other people recommend. And we'll include a link to this in the show notes as well, but if you look Vishen Lakhiani up on YouTube, you can find him. There's about a 20-minute clip where he actually walks through every piece of the envisioning method and then does, at the end of that clip, a 15-minute guided meditation where he actually walks you through each of those steps. And, remember, guided meditation is a lot like training wheels It's something that can help you go through the various pieces of a meditation practice with someone else walking you through. And once you've used guided meditation to kind of get started to follow the process, eventually you can build the muscles, build the skills to meditate on your own without some sort of guided practice. The envisioning method is a six-part framework. The total time it takes to meditate using the envisioning method is approximately between five--if you're really in a hurry--and 15, maybe 20 minutes. It probably takes 10 to 15 minutes on average if you do sort of a normal run through of each of the six pieces. So, if you're thinking 10 to 15 minutes, six pieces, it's approximately two to three minutes on each different piece of the framework. The first piece of the envisioning method--the first one which I honestly think is the single most important piece of the entire framework--is a focus on gratitude, is a segment about gratitude. So, what does that mean? Basically, you take two to three minutes and you focus on a few things that you're really, really grateful for in your life. You focus on maybe some big things in your life. You focus on even the smallest things, you know. Just tiny, little things. One of my favorite quotes from Tony Robbins is: The key to happiness is to trade your expectations for appreciation. But the crazy thing about gratitude... And, actually, the majority... Not every piece of the envisioning method... Again, it's a six-part framework. Not every piece of it is it scientifically-backed and totally rooted in research and we'll talk about that when we get to the piece that isn't, but the majority of the sort of legs of this framework are rooted in the science and the research of positive psychology. So, gratitude, for example. This is one of my favorite studies they did a research study where they had two groups of people. They had the research group and the control group. The research group, they had them write in a gratitude journal for seven days. They had them write three things that they were grateful for for seven days. That's it. After the seven days, they stopped. They didn't do anything else. The control group did nothing. Six months later... And they measured them for a six-month period. Six months later, the people who had spent one week writing down three things they were grateful for each day were 10% happier than the people who had done nothing. Think about that. That was one week. They stopped after a week of doing that. That's the power of gratitude. Again, it's research-backed. And I think everybody knows, fundamentally, gratitude is one of the most important pillars to happiness, one of the most important pillars to living a fulfilled life. And gratitude is something that is, to me, the single most important piece of the envisioning method and the thing that brings me back to doing it every single day. Now, if you think about that, if you think about somebody doing that for seven days, it has an impact on their happiness six months later. Imagine if you do it every single day. Imagine the compounding effect of that focus on gratitude every single day. You start your day. The first thing you do is focus on how incredibly grateful you are to be alive, how incredibly grateful you are to have the blessings that you have in your life. There's no better way to start your day. There's no better way to begin your meditation, either. The second piece is compassion or connectedness, and, to me, there's a couple things that I focus on in this segment. And, again, these things are actually more rooted in kind of the ideas of physical science, physics, and biology, but they're things that, to me, just sort of resonate very deeply. The goal of the compassion segment or the connectedness segment of the envisioning method is to cultivate a deep sense of care, a deep sense of empathy, a deep sense of compassion for the other people in your life, for those around you, for everyone that you interact with. We talked about this a little bit in the episode on perceiving reality. We also talked about compassion and how important it is in-depth in the interview that we did with Chris Cook. It's an incredible episode. But compassion is so important and the idea is, basically, you think about how interconnected all life truly is and it really kind of ties you back into a deep sense of compassion for others and for those around you. And I think about a couple different things that sort of root and really ground this for me. And, again, these...all three of these, as crazy as some of them may sound, are rooted fundamentally in physical science. The first is an incredible quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I'm sure many of you know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is. If you don't, he is the narrator of the most recent edition of the TV show Cosmos. He is a very prominent astrophysicist and scientist. But this quote really resonates deep with me and it's something that I focus on every time that I come back to the idea of compassion and idea of connectedness. And the quote is: We are all connected to each other, biologically; to the Earth, chemically; to the rest of the universe, atomically. If you really think about that at each of those different levels, that's a fundamentally true statement from a scientific standpoint, right. We are all connected to the universe atomically. What does that mean? If you really think about it, at an atomic level, the atoms in your body are the same as...the components of the atoms in your body are the same as the components in the sun; the components in the planets in our solar system; the components in the stars throughout our galaxy. Another thing that I think about is energy-mass equivalence. E=mc2 -- everybody's heard that equation. What does that actually mean? Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. That's a core component of physics. It's an equation that's incredibly well-known. But what it actually means is that mass is energy. All mass is nothing but energy. Everything around you. You. It's all just energy and, to me, that really helps kind of ground me and connect me to not only other people in my life, but the entire universe. The last is one of my favorite quotes. It's from Carl Sagan, who I'm a big fan of. "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies, were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff." Again, this is something else that's rooted in physics, rooted in physical science, and is a true statement. Every atom in your body, except for the helium and the hydrogen, was formed in a collapsing star, and the reason that's the case is because helium and hydrogen--which are the two most common elements in the universe--can only fuse together at such great temperatures to form other elements that it has to be in a supernova--it has to be in a collapsing star--for those elements to form together and form everything else on the periodic table. So, the vast majority of not only your body, but everything around you was formed in the explosion of a collapsing star. You and everything around you is literally made from stars. You were born out of a star. Again, this stuff sounds kind of crazy. It sounds a little bit woo-woo, but all three of those things are fundamentally true, scientific statements. And the reason I like those statements is because they're true, they're scientific, but they really kind of create this sort of unique feeling that makes you kind of think about the universe. It ties you back in. You know, whatever your religious beliefs are, those statements kind of tie you into the idea of, hey, there's an underlying connectedness here. There's an underlying kind of need for a root cause of compassion. And we talked about how important compassion is on the episode where we interviewed Dr. Chris Cook. But, you know, that's why you have this compassion segment as part of the envisioning method. The third component of the envisioning method is forgiveness. One of my favorite quotes about forgiveness is a quote from Gandhi. "Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong. The weak cannot forgive." And one of the things that took me a long time to come to grips with about the idea of forgiveness is that the reason forgiveness is important is not because someone else deserves to be forgiven; it's because it's bad for you to hang on to that bitterness, to hang on to that anger. They actually did a research study at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Karen Schwartz says, "There is an enormous physical burden to being hurt and disappointed. Chronic anger puts you into a fight-or-flight mode, which results in numerous changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and immune response. Those changes then increase the risk of depression, heart disease, and diabetes, among other conditions. Forgiveness, however, calms stress levels, leading to improved health." Again, this stuff isn't made up. This is backed by research. It's backed by medical studies. The reason it's important to forgive is not because someone else deserves it if somebody has wronged you; it's because the only way to truly move forward, the only way that you can ever really reach happiness, is by letting go, is by forgiving. It's because you will benefit from forgiveness, not because they deserve it. If you think about people like Gandhi, people like Nelson Mandela, their incredible power for forgiveness is what enabled them to create such incredible results. It's what enabled them to achieve so much. And that's why... The part of the forgiveness practice is basically not only to forgive yourself, which often is the hardest part--it's often the hardest to forgive yourself--but it's to forgive other people who have wronged you even for this smallest things. You want to forgive somebody who cut you off in traffic. You want to forgive somebody who was rude to you. I'm reminded of, again, another Tony Robbins story that he tells or a thing that he talks about is the idea of it's easy to be nice to people when they're nice to you. The way you build the muscle of compassion is to be nice to people when they are mean to you, when they are rude to you, because we know that the vast majority of the time, the reason that they're being mean, the reason that they're being rude -- it has to do with them. It doesn't have to do with you. It has to do with the situation they're in. It has to do with the mood or the state that they're in. It has to do with a lot of things, of which probably none of that has to do with you. And so forgiveness... And the reason you practice this every day is because, you know, when you start getting into this practice, you're going to be really searching and thinking for...thinking about forgiveness for things that maybe are some big things in your life that you've been really holding on to, some grudges, some things you're angry about from your past, et cetera. You want to slowly work through all that stuff. But you once you've done that, you can start forgiving people even for the most minor, trivial things that happen in your daily life. And the ability to let go of those things during your meditation practice also enables you to let go of them in real time. In your life, when something happens, you can step back and be like, you know what? I forgive this person. It's not worth...It's not worth it for me to hold on to this anger, to hold on to this grudge, to hold on to this bitterness. I'm just going to let go because my happiness is more important than being right or than being bitter or angry at this person because of some sort of wrong that they did to me. And I think the forgiveness segment is, in many ways, one of the hardest parts of the envisioning method, but it's something that I think is incredibly important. And, again, all three of the segments we've talked about so far are rooted and backed in research. These are not made up, woo-woo ideas. All of these things are grounded in research or science that shows how this is practically beneficial for you. The next two parts of the envisioning method--part four and part five--are both around the idea of positive visualization. The first--part four--is about positively visualizing your day, visualizing how the day is going to unfold, and kind of really creating a vision in your mind of everything going perfectly, everything going the way that you want it to go, everything going...everything being ideal. The second part, five, is about visualizing your life three years from now. And Vishen Lakhiani talks about the concept that we can accomplish less than we want to in one year, but we can accomplish much more than we believe we can in three years. And so the idea is to look three years in the future and envision your perfect like, envision everything that you want, all of your dreams coming true, your goals coming true, everything that you're working towards--the best-case scenario--and then double it. And the reason you do this both with your day and with your kind of ideal future is because positive visualization has been shown by research to open up new neural pathways, to open your mind's eye to the possibility of some other alternate route, some other journey, just the same way that... And we talked about this in-depth in the episode about the reality of perception and how the way we perceive reality doesn't necessarily mimic, don't necessarily actually represent what reality really is. We also talked about this in the episode about limiting beliefs. But the concept that the way...the map that you use to understand reality, the belief structure that you have that tells you what reality is can be flawed. It can be based on faulty assumptions or imperfect assumptions, and that map interprets all the information that you get from the world. And so positive visualization helps reshape that map in a positive way, in a way that opens the door for new opportunities, new possibilities, and things that you might never have seen before; doors that you might never have thought about before; paths that you would never have taken before. That's why it's so powerful. There's an incredible study around the idea of exercise. There's a doctor named [INAUDIBLE 00:31:05], who's an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, and he did a study where he had one group of participants actually lift weights and do physical practice. He had another group simply mentally visualize that they were lifting weights, that they were doing practice every single day. The group who actually lifted weights had a 30% muscle increase. The group who only conducted mental exercises of weight training increased their strength by 13 1/2%. Think about that. This is three months after the experiment, when they took these measurements. By never going to the gym, only visualizing the fact that they were going to go to the gym, that they were lifting weights, they increased their muscle mass by 13 1/2%. It's incredible when you think about the fact that just using your mind can physically reshape your body, just visualizing physical training can grow your muscle mass. If you think about that when you apply that to the rest of the areas of your life, positive visualization can help you improve, can help you grow, can help open up new doors and new possibilities for your reality. The last part of the envisioning method is something called the blessing, and this is the one...this is not scientifically-based, but it is something that Vishen recommends and something that I think is a worthwhile component of the envisioning method. It doesn't matter necessarily if you're religious, if you're an atheist, but the idea of the blessing is that you sort of imagine a positive energy flowing through your body and supporting and healing you. And it sounds kind of woo-woo, but, again, think about the fact that we talked about earlier, that energy is mass, right. Everything around us, including ourselves... We are nothing but energy. So, the idea is you envision...you sort of visualize a positive healing energy flowing into your body to heal you, to support you, to bless you, and to kind of help you along the journey, help you along your path. And, again, if you want to get more details and you want to get an actual guided walk-through through the entire envisioning method, Vishen has a YouTube video where he does the entire thing and we will link to it in the show notes, or you can just search his name or you can search the envisioning method on YouTube and you can find all that stuff. The last piece I want to talk about is the environment, that how do you meditate, through some of the sort of specifics and the logistics. Personally, I like to meditate first thing in the morning when I get up, and I think that, to me, either first thing when you get up or right before you go to sleep are the two most important times to meditate. And either or. I mean, you can do both if you want as well. But the reality is the day gets so busy, it gets so hectic that if you don't carve out and set a time and really say, I am going to do this every single day at...you know, as soon as I wake up, you're not going to do it. And it's not a huge time commitment--again, 10, 15 minutes; five minutes if you're really in a rush--but the power of meditation is that doing it every single day is what builds that mental muscle. It's what increases physically the gray matter in your brain. It's what changes the structure of your brain -- building that practice every single day. Think back to the gratitude journal, the idea that just doing it for one week has that powerful of a benefit. Imagine stacking that every single day for years. It can completely transform your life. In terms of what I physically do when I meditate, I, personally, typically sit in a Lotus posture, but it doesn't really matter. You can sit in a chair. You can lay on the floor. Most people recommend that you don't meditate laying in bed simply because often you'll just fall asleep. But sometimes I'll just lay on the ground. But, you know, I like to sit in a Lotus posture and one of the things that really kind of helps me get in-state, helps me get into my meditation zone and block out whatever might be going around--I've meditated on a plane before; I've meditated all kinds of places--is having a sort of meditation playlist, and I have a couple songs and artists that I recommend personally that I love to listen to when I meditate. But it really helps me kind of get in the zone and get to the place of being calm, being centered, and get back to that kind of meditation state of mind. One of them is the song Zen Garden by David and Steve Gordon. I absolutely love this song. There's a couple different versions of it, but there's about a 30-minute version, so you're not going to run out of time, you're not going to run out of song if you're only meditating for 10 or 15 minutes. But it just, to me, personally, it really centers me, brings me to that kind of place and that space I want to be when I'm meditating. The next is there's an album by the same artists, David and Steve Gordon, called Gratitude that's incredible. That really helps me kind of get centered and meditate. And they're some of my favorite artists kind of in this segment that really have some awesome music. Another one is sitar music by Ravi Shankar. And if you're not familiar with Ravi Shankar, he's a fascinating guy. But if you kind of have... If you're in the mood for something to kind of get a little bit more of an Indian vibe, that sitar music is really, really cool to meditate to. And, actually, I meditated to sitar music this morning. But if you want to find some of this stuff, I created a Spotify playlist titled "Zen Garden". If you want to follow that, you can get all those songs. You can just look me up or look that up on Spotify. You can find it. All the music is on there or you can find a lot of it on YouTube, SoundCloud, something like that. But, again, the key about meditation is just get started. The benefits are there. You know the benefits are real. The question is: Can you commit 10 minutes a day to all these amazing benefits? Can you commit 10 minutes a day to this kind of framework? Find the easiest, simplest way for you to get started and just do it. Try it for a week. Try it for two weeks. You'll start to get addicted to it and realize that it's awesome and that you look forward to it and it's something you really enjoy.