Or “The Gauntlet of Infinity Consciousness Stones” ✨

(image photoshopped by yours humble author)

They say that if you could put all the benefits of walking and exercising into a single pill, it would be the best and most sold medicine ever¹.

Likewise, a pill that could produce all the numerous benefits of meditation might run the risk of being banned. Look online, and you will find several studies linking meditation to:

• Reduction in the frequency of problematic thoughts
• Increased feeling of well-being
• Anxiety Control
• Rejuvenation
• Even effects similar to Near-Death Experiences^A

And in my case, Meditation was one of the facilitators of treating myself from long-standing feelings of Depression, Anxiety and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

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A Balanced Mind is a Powerful Learner.

And so, echoing the general theme of the Blog, the time has come for me to share my personal experience and story with Meditation, and advocate for the many benefits it can bring!

Meditating is basically like Collecting the Infinity Stones from Avengers. Throwing your most Loved One into the abyss optional.

The Fateful Encounter with Harcore Meditation (2022)

My life completely changed in 2022, when I met Daniel M. Ingram’s work. He is a hardcore Buddhist Meditator who claims, with certain neurological evidence, that he has “erased” his ego. 

I was already familiar with meditation by that time. It was not unusual for me to try and control my emotions with 10-minute, short Meditation sessions, focusing mainly on breath control and returning my attention to the present. But something about hearing him say that “he could not locate himself” fascinated me profoundly.

2022 was an extremely rough year for me, because I was dealing with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms including sleep deprivation, major depression and constant nightmares. I changed psychologists, experimented with numerous different therapeutic approaches like EMDR, self-directed Brainspotting, Active Imagination, Theater Therapy and many more to try and set myself free from the emotional hell that followed me like the plague.

However, Meditating regularly and with proper instructions was the KEY deciding factor in making me rise above all those terrible emotional conditions. And because of that, I am here to advocate for its many benefits, both known to science as from my own personal experience.

Sit in a half-lotus position, relax your spine and start reading!

Improve your Concentration

The contemporary world is constantly inviting us to pay attention to something else, something other than what is in front of us.

Now, imagine choosing to focus on your Breath – a very subtle and changing sensation – and being able to sustain that focus for many seconds, even minutes, or even a whole hour.

This level of Concentration can significantly improve your life. Here are some potential benefits:

• resist intrusive thoughts leading to greater emotional stability

• focus on work for longer stretches, increasing productivity
• fully experiencing food, reducing the need to eat and cravings
• better results at the gym by learning to target specific muscles

And the most important, of course:

Being able to control your life and attention again. Choosing when you want to respond to a notification, message, or app.

The fact is? We have been conditioned by Social Media to click on anything that has a Red or Blue Heart with an engaging animation. Ever noticed how Instagram notification will replay the animation if you don’t click them right away?

Even when we go into these platforms to perform a useful, productive activity, and that includes talking with friends, we find ourselves scrolling endlessly. I unfortunately have done this several times today, and will likely do so in the future.

Meditation improves precisely the self-Awareness mechanisms that create space between stimulus and response. Such gap – noticing an urge but not immediately acting on it –  is the hallmark of strong attention and the key to getting out of unhealthy habits.

Forget The Power of Habit²?

Develop true Willpower. Control what you want or don’t want to focus on for good. No conditioning needed!

Improved Sleep Quality

It is well-documented that meditators need less sleep to feel completely refreshed. Daniel Ingram makes this point in his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.

That is likely because sleep becomes more stable, with less activity from the anxious parts of the brain, and increases time spent in deeper states of sleep. When you wake up, you feel more refreshed because you’ve had a higher-quality rest.

In fact, when I started meditating, I did not know about this, and was really worried that I kept waking up in the middle of the night! I wondered why my sleep was starting to get “so bad”, even though my emotional state greatly improved..

But then I learned that was something very normal – biphasic sleep, very common in pre-modern societies.

Since you learn to worry less about problems and sensations, you also sleep faster. No more lying in bed for 30 minutes ruminating and checking social media!

With this improved Sleep, your day becomes more productive. You have more available hours to dedicate to your awaken activities. And you even recall your Dreams better, which has huge implications for Therapeutic Goals, aside from enabling Lucid Dreaming – a topic I really want to cover in the future!

Stress and Anxiety Control

We live higly distracted lives, immersed in tons of constant, lingering stress. Anxiety and Depression have been on the rise for a while now, and much of what I write and read revolves around Mental Health, dealing with Emotions and managing Stress³. I don’t have any reasons to think that will change anytime soon.

Stress and anxiety also play crucial roles in learning. Specialists in the language learning community, such as Stephen Krashen, emphasize this point, and I even recorded a Youtube video about the subject.

I aimed at becoming a specialist in Learning, but the fact is I am quickly becoming a student of Applied Psychology. Joke also included in the Youtube video.

Things get even worse if we look into our responsibilities in life, which I like to classify in three spectrums: 

• Work: Job market instability, economic crises, AI disrupting industries.
• Romance: Rising divorce rates, difficulty finding meaningful connections.
• Meaning: Existential questions and the search for fulfillment.

We have monkey brains, which have simply not been adapted to the sort of low-key stress and pressure we receive on a daily basis, taking ever bigger chunks of these three areas.

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And here’s where Meditation shines. It allows you to disentangle yourself from the Monkey-Mind³. 

Opposed to that fast-paced societal pressure, Meditation invites you to a moment for yourself, dedicated to fully committing one’s thoughts and attention to the present moment. You become more aware of what’s going on around you, in your body, and also of what’s going around in your own head.

The increased self awareness allows your parasympathetic system to realize that you are, in fact, not in a situation of danger, activating the neural pathways that promote rest and digestion. 

Body tensions slowly decrease as your muscles realize they don’t need to be activated. You naturally straighten your spine.

And then, there’s the “Dopamine Detoxing” that happens in your brain. If you have never heard about the term, you probably haven’t consumed as much self-help as some unfortunate souls like myself.

The Sensory and Stimulus Deprivation of Meditation helps your neurological system to rebalance from needing too much input to be satisfied, happy, or literally not go into a mental breakdown. 

We are already talking about Psychology here, and CHAT-GPT even tried to make me remove the next part. It might be one of the most important ones.

Psychotherapy

My best sessions of therapy have been in Lotus position, in my house, with the wind on my skin, reflecting upon things that were hitting me hard emotionally, causing me to feel sad or, more often, simply getting in the way of my meditative practice.

In fact, Meditation is so effective for Therapy that, in the book “Saints and Psychopaths”, when asked why Westerners don’t reach Enlightenment⁴, a teacher says:

“Because they do too much psychotherapy during meditation”

The West is catching up to Buddha’s teachings, though. Even Freud, the father of our Modern Psychotherapy style, considered Buddha the father of the unconscious.

Formal Meditative Practice is constantly mentioning Consciousness, Attention, Perception and their relation to ourselves, to the world within, and to the world without. They have their own form of modeling consciousness, but let’s not go too far and keep it simple.

Simply increasing your emotional pain tolerance through meditation and your awareness of your own cognitive processes might be enough to outpace your regular Therapy.

In fact, I outpaced my regular therapy so much that I have been psychologist-free since 2024.

You have Convinced me – Now, how do I start?

As with anything, start small. People think they need to meditate for long periods, but 3 to 5 minutes in the beginning is plenty. Even this can be an intense workout, depending on your general mental state and other factors.

Set a Timer

Use a timer to make sure you’re meditating for the required time. Some find that 5 minutes is extremely easy this way, although when you’re in a bad mood, that same time might feel like an eternity.

Pick a Calm Time

Select a time of the day that is calm in your house and where you have a decent amount of energy. These are important factors in the beginning – being tired or distracted can really be problematic for your concentration. 

I used to meditate with White Noise playing, but I prefer hearing ambient sound, especially if I can hear wind, rain or something with a regular cadence. Even fans are fine.

If you really, really have trouble focusing, you can pick a Guided Meditation. Although, at some point, meditating with Guided Meditation feels like having sex with a Narrator to me 😸

Choose Beginner-friendly technique

Here are the ones I generally recommend when I give a Meditation Workshop:

• Counting Breaths: Mentally count each inhale, aiming for 10. If distracted, start over at one.
• Focusing on a Physical Sensation: Rest your hands on your knees and focus on the feeling of touch.
• Candle Gazing: Light a candle and focus on the flame, which can be easier than internal-based meditations. You can read more about Candle Meditating here!

I want to know More!

I am currently producing content on Meditation, due to my work as a Language Teacher and Mentor for Programmers (and other side projects), that content sometimes gets deprioritized.

But I do have some slots available in my agenda for 15-minute chats with me. 

These are completely free. Although they’re generally targeted at people who want to improve with Language Learning, Career or Programming, I would LOVE to use that time to talk about Meditation!

I would also really recommend anything with the name Daniel Ingram on it, like his already mentioned book, this video and his X account. He also owns “Dharma Overground”, a forum where you can ask questions, although it is a bit more advanced.

I am also a bit active on X, if you want to follow me there and.
I usually feel more comfortable and inclined to drop personal bits of knowledge there. In other social media platforms, there’s the chance I will go full behaviorist-style Digital Marketing.

I hope you have found this article useful, and see you around, my Learning Friend ☺️

References and Further Reading

1. This saying is so common that I do not know where I originally found it, but here’s one article. If you google for Walking benefits, you will find thousands of them! 

2. A famous book on habits and Mental Triggers, and how to manipulate them to engage into productivity activities. Meditation trumps Habit Building because it does not require the Engineering of triggers to produce long-lasting choosing of Useful Activities.

3. By monkey-mind, I mean the primate brain. It seems that Meditators are again in front of science because, hundreds of years ago, the Analogy of the Mind being like a Monkey has already been spread by Zen monks, whilst it took us Darwin to believe in Evolution and our Primate ancestry!

4. Enlightenment is a complicated subject, but it basically means reaching a state of a “Purified Mind”. I won’t claim that such a thing is possible, but specialists like Daniel himself claim it is, and there’s a wide range of scientific evidence to back that.

1. Daniel Ingram wrote a paper about that precise subject but I cannot seem to find it. You may look into his “Fire Kasina” book but, I do warn you, it might be too much if you’re not Spiritually-inclined!