Meditation: My Journey & Learning from a Teacher.
In February this year (2020), I completed my Masters thesis on the relationship between Mindfulness / Acceptance Based Interventions using meditation and paired psycho-education with High Performance Athletes experiencing high levels of stress. The results were promising… more on that in another post.
During this time I also completed my meditation teacher training through 1 Giant Mind facilitated by teacher and author, Jonni Pollard.
The months leading up to the completion of my teacher training were pretty full on (understatement), and I feel it’s important that you guys know why I bothered to throw myself into additional study and work.
That starts with why I bothered to invest in learning meditation from a teacher myself 6 years ago today.
Life long guidance from a teacher with in depth training & first hand experience.
Mindfulness meditation apps & yoga savasana gave me a taste of how the mind could settle. But it didn’t give me in depth knowledge & skills to drop into those deeper, more expansive layers of consciousness that I knew to exist. It wasn’t until I learned from a well trained and experienced teacher using a technique unlike all the others, that my busy little mind was triggered in the most profound way. Without this technique and skills from a teacher who had thrown himself into extensive training with years of experience, I would not have been able to access that expansiveness. Six years later, I still have my teacher’s guidance, along with a deep connectedness with a mediation community of mentors and life long friends.
2. Less effort.
I always found meditation frustrating. All the mental effort & focus required felt like shit admin - something I could only ‘enjoy’ if I was already feeling all ‘namaste’ (which was not that often). This made it hard to integrate meditation into my day-to-day. Once I learned meditation from Matt, I was pretty quick realise just how effortless these self transcendental meditative techniques are. I was convinced not even the most experienced teacher could get my mind to drop down but oh how I was wrong. I was taught how to let go of control and let the technique do the work. This made meditation easy and something that I wanted to do, rather than felt like I ‘should’ be doing.
3. A self sufficient practice with real and long lasting change.
I’d seen the fMRI images of meditators along with copious amounts of research (including my own), and I knew that a consistent meditation practice was where the brain made the most significant functional and structural changes. I knew half-assing meditation with random apps and the odd yoga class wasn’t going to elicit real change and long lasting growth. I needed a practice that would seamlessly fit into my hyperactive day-to-day consistently. I invested in a course with a teacher so I could learn the knowledge that complemented the technique I was learning and the experiences I was having. Here, I was able to drop in deep within my first few sessions and integrate the practice into my daily life while experiencing all juicy brain adaptations and benefits that coincided.
I invested in meditation teacher training for one reason - to bring people out of knowing and into Being; to help people embody change rather than wanting, wishing and reading about it.
My meditation teaching is seperate to my 1-on-1 psychology sessions. Find out more about learning to meditation with my meditation course here.
