Tame Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Reclaim Life’s Most Difficult Moments | Big Think.

I get asked this question of, "Geez, I haven’t meditated. How do I get started?" And it’s hard for many people because what many of us don’t appreciate is that – and I use the term in my book, a DJ – but it’s this internal dialogue. It is a dialogue that isn’t necessarily who you really are at all. It is a collection of events, experiences, commentaries from your environment that oftentimes you allow to define you. And not necessarily in a positive way.

As a result, you have an emotional response when you’re listening to these voices or this dialogue or the DJ, if you will. The first thing that I recommend people do, and certainly as one of the bases or the legs of doing mindfulness or meditation, is to simply breathe in and out and be attuned to that. As you get distracted, if it’s really distracting, actually consciously think about the air going through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. The very nature of that type of concentration distracts you from the dialogue.

Once you’ve mastered that, pay attention to the fact that oftentimes your muscles are very tense because, again, you’re carrying your emotions. With intention, go through actually and say, “I’m relaxing the muscles in my feet, my legs, my chest, my abdomen,” and so forth. Sort of go through this process with intention, doing each one of these things, and with intention also distracts you from listening to that voice. Once you’ve done that for a period of time, then you suddenly realize the very nature of that action. The consistency of that means you’re no longer having that same emotional response or you’re not starting to listen to that dialogue.

That starts releasing you. The next step, as you learn these techniques, is the wonderful thing: you can actually change the dialogue and change it to one where it is a supportive dialogue. One of the greatest challenges of people in the West is they have this negative internal dialogue, and it’s the nature, unfortunately, of our society. In Eastern cultures, actually, it’s interesting; it doesn’t really exist.

So when you, if you will, stop the DJ and then change the dialogue to one that is nurturing, supportive of yourself, the most wonderful thing that happens is your physiology changes. Then, the manner in which you react or interact with other people becomes completely different. Having been through this myself and seen this and taught this, it’s really quite extraordinary the possibilities.

When you take the time to do that breathing, when you take the time, if you will, to tame the mind, when you take the time to open your heart and recognize that not only are you suffering, but that everyone in some way or other has burdens. All of those steps then allow you to be much more thoughtful, kind, and interested because then you recognize that the other person is just like you.

When you recognize that key aspect, then what you do to others you’re doing to yourself. If you treat yourself with kindness, compassion, and love, it’s so much easier then to give that gift to other people. It changes not only that other person, it changes the entire environment around you.