Anshu Bahanda: This is Anshu Bahanda on Wellness Curated. Thanks for joining me on this podcast. My mission is to empower you with health and wellness, so that you can then go and empower others. The world feels like a sadder and more stressed place than ever. Post pandemic reports of higher levels of strain are backed up by polls. A recent one from just 2021 found that four in ten adults worldwide suffer with anxiety and feel unable to cope. So rather than reaching for comfort food or seeking some release through medication or alcohol, let’s look at how meditation can really help to clear our minds, boost concentration, energy and sleep. In our series in meditation, our guest, Amrita Mann will be our guide. We’ll cover key aspects in each session meditation for health, also for wealth, for love and for happiness. Amrita is an incredible healer. And we’re starting with the question, why meditate? And the one thing that people say a lot, which is that it’s very difficult to meditate or “I can’t clear my mind” “It’s very difficult to empty my mind.”
Amrita Mann: Of course, like anything you start, any practice, it’s not easy. It’s going to take a while. It’s going to be like you’re tuning your body and the thoughts that you have, which you’re not aware of, suddenly come into your awareness. So when all those thoughts are coming to your awareness, when you are in silence, it actually feels like an uncomfortable feeling because you don’t want to think of it. We are tuned to just bypass or block out the thoughts that we don’t want to think in our life. Some of us overthink it, but it’s just that when you are sitting down to clear your mind, all of that will come to your mind. So it does get a little difficult initially. All you need to know is just let it flow. Let it flow. Come back to your breath. It’s like an annoying child. You have to keep pacifying it and say, “okay, I see you, I understand you” and then come back to your breath, come back to what you’re doing or whatever. Whether you’re focusing on a cant of flame, whatever kind of meditation you’re doing, if you’re focusing on an image, you can come back to the image. It’s just about noticing when your mind starts wandering. And sometimes, it can happen to even people who’ve been meditating for years and years that they sit down for meditation for half an hour, almost 28 minutes of that half an hour, their mind all over the place, but still do it because it’s only through continuous practising that you will be able to realise where your thoughts are going. And that is the whole purpose of meditating. You want to clear those thoughts in some way.
AB: People say very often that they don’t have time to meditate, it takes up too much time. What are your views on that?
AM: You don’t need that much time. Honestly, 30 minutes a day is really good. But if you can’t take that out, at least try 5-10 minutes in the morning and 5-10 minutes in the evening just as soon as you wake up and just before bed. I think everybody can like some people who are very stressed out. I even tell them to set an alarm every 1 hour, just take five minutes out just to focus on your breath and then go back to doing what you’re doing. It energises you, it makes you aware of what you’re doing. You’re not just running around in a stressful situation because when you are in a stressful situation, you’re actually just bringing on more stress. So when you take those five minutes out at any time in the day when you feel that it’s too much and you don’t have the time to dream, that’s the time you say, “I’m going to give myself five minutes” So even if you do that much in a day, I think you slowly see the benefits of taking that five minutes out.
AB: How does meditation help?
AM: Meditation is like taking a spiritual shower. There are so many things that go on in our mind and our thoughts, emotions. And meditation really helps clear that energy. It helps you remove all the toxic thoughts, emotions. If you’re doing any mantra, even if you just do it like seven times, twelve times, you don’t have the time to do it too much with the intention of clearing all the toxicity of the day, the evening, or you set an intention in the morning when you’re doing your morning meditation, whatever, it just helps you clear your energy so that you’re not carrying other people’s energies consciously, subconsciously, so that you’re centred. It also brings you closer to your divine self because the more you go into silence, the more you connect with your heart, the more you’re connecting with your intuition, or that voice of spirit within you. So you’re guided better.
AB: Anything else that we need to tell people to do?
AM: I think these are the basic things like invocation before you start any meditation.
AB: Explain invocation.
AM: It’s like an intention, but you’re intending to connect. We’ll be doing it in meditation also. But it’s just like, to the Divine Supreme Being, or to your higher guides and angels, and to all the beings of Light, love whoever you want to connect with at that point in time, if you want to connect with your higher self, if you want to connect to the cosmos or whoever you believe in. So that invocation is important to call out. It’s like when you call a person by name, they respond. But when you just say, “hey, I’m trying to connect with you”, nobody knows who you’re trying to connect with. Of course, we have guides and angels, but that’s a much longer process. So when we do an invocation, we are putting that intention out of the cosmic world that we are now wanting to connect.
AB: Anything after meditation, like, I like to sit silently for a few minutes.
AM: Avoiding triggers is very important because it’s very easy to get triggered when you have just finished a meditation. You notice even during meditation sometimes if there’s something happening externally, it’s very easy to get triggered. Bring your awareness back to yourself because you’ve done this work for yourself. Whenever a thought comes in which is not in your highest interest or an emotion that comes up, emotions you should allow yourself to feel. But when you’re having repetitive thoughts about something, which is not good, because what meditation does is, like I said, it’s like a spiritual shower, so whatever seeds we have within our chakras or within our body, they start coming out. So sometimes you’ll notice people get more angry when they meditate. They get more triggered when they meditate because those are the seeds we have within us. So it’s important to acknowledge that this is the emotion that gave out soon after I meditated. Because sometimes people get very disheartened. They say, “I’m doing all this work and there’s only muck coming out, or I’m feeling worse about myself” but that is the whole point, actually, to clear yourself of all these energies. But if you’re going to give into them, you’re going to make them stronger. So you need to be aware that is one of the main things that I feel, that people who are starting on the meditation path, they feel that their life has become more difficult. And it does, because on one hand, you’re trying to bring this peaceful, blissful energy. But actually, meditation is not really about being blissed out. It’s actually about going through all that stuff that you have inside of you and clearing it from the system. And then in your next meditation, whenever you do it, you can set an intention then, because when you’re aware of something within you, you can clear it.
AB: Really interesting. So, Amrita, tell me something. So you’re saying that stuff that’s embedded deep down, so cellular memories and cellular traumas could also start surfacing?
AM: Yes.
AB: So just so people are prepared, how long would they expect things to be coming up?
AM: It is like a graph which goes up and down, you will feel very good. Some days you’ll feel completely clear, happy, positive, joyful, everything. And there are days where you will feel completely, like, down in the dark. You feel like “why is this happening to me? Why is someone making this?” Because it’s like it all doesn’t come out at once. Because we can’t handle it at once. If it comes out at once, it’s more traumatic sometimes. So it comes out and layers the same situation where it repeats itself. If you haven’t healed a certain trauma or certain pain, that thing will keep repeating. It will keep coming up again and again for you to heal, or it will come up in layers. And the more you clear it, the less bad you feel about it. So it’s a journey. It’s not something that just clears out and it’s done.
AB: Wonderful, Amrita. Thank you so much for the chat on answering questions that many people have had about meditation. Thanks for joining us. Hope you enjoyed the Wellness Curated podcast. Please subscribe and tell your friends and family about it. And here’s to you, leading your best life.