Guided visualization to calm your mind

Welcome and thanks for taking out the time for yourself for what will hopefully be a nice inward journey. So just start off sitting upright, feet planted on the ground, if you're ideally on some type of a firm chair.

Start to soften your gaze. If your eyes are still open, gently close them. I like to leave my hands on my lap, palms up to the sky, but whatever feels comfortable for you.

And then, with your eyes closed, gently become a little bit more aware of your breaths. Make them a little bit deeper and a little bit slower at your own time. Breathe in, breathe out, just a little bit deeper and a little bit slower.

So the whole idea behind meditation is trying to ease all the chatter that exists in our brains, trying to still our thoughts. As we do that in every meditation, I'm going to try to introduce some frameworks, ways of thinking about your mind. But as you try to quiet the mind, it will inevitably get distracted.

It might get distracted by some noise in the room or some noise outside, or more likely, it'll get distracted by thoughts that are just surfacing into your consciousness. And if that happens, don't let it make you anxious. A lot of folks, when they meditate, worry that they're doing it wrong. And then if they get distracted, it actually makes things worse. They say, "I'm never going to be able to do this meditation thing."

The important thing is to approach the meditation with a spirit of fun, a spirit of curiosity. Have a sense of humor about it; we are all literally human, and we do very human things. And so when you find your mind wandering a bit, just laugh it off and say, "Oh, there you go mind, just come back to the stillness." Not a big deal; don't beat up on yourself over it.

As part of that, as we go through this meditation, as much as possible, try to keep a little bit of a smile on your face. Your eyes are closed, but you can still smile a little bit, or at least smile with your mind. Remind yourself that this should be fun; this is relaxing.

So with that said, let's keep breathing in, breathing out, a little bit deeper, a little bit slower. The framework that I'm going to introduce for how you can still your mind is one that I use a lot, which is imagining all the thoughts in your subconscious as the ocean.

The surface of the ocean is the interface between your subconscious and your consciousness. Most of us have a pretty choppy surface; there's a lot of thoughts that are jumping up and down out of our subconscious, and sometimes we're drowning in those thoughts. One way to think about it is we can elevate ourselves. We can elevate ourselves above the surface of that water.

When you start to elevate yourself, you're not suppressing the thoughts, but you're just looking down on them. You see that they're still there; the surface is still choppy, there's still waves. But as you rise and look down on it, you realize that you are not those thoughts; you are not the surface of the water.

So whether the thing that's bothering you is an assignment you have to do, some interpersonal relations, or just something in your life not working out the way that you would like it to, remind yourself that that is not you. You are not defined by the outcome of that situation. Those are just waves on that ocean.

The more that you surface above them and look at them and analyze them, you realize that they have no control over you. Once that happens, things start to slow down. The surface of that water begins to get calmer and calmer and calmer. And there you are, floating above that surface, just pure awareness.

You realize that you're a lot more than you thought you were. You aren't just your physical body; you aren't just those thoughts that you see as waves on the surface of that ocean. You aren't even just that identity that you associate yourself with: your name, your position in the world, your status, what people think of you, your relations. Those are aspects of you, but they aren't you.

You are something much bigger than all of them. You are the space in which they occur, in which they happen, but they aren't you. And now let's just try to sit in that pure awareness for the next minute or so.

And once again, if your thoughts wander, not a big deal; that's just the choppiness on the surface of that water. You need to elevate yourself back to that pure awareness. And if the quiet bothers you, don't worry; I will be back in about a minute.

All right, so that was a relatively short amount of time for you to be on your own. As you'll see, as we do more and more advanced meditations, give yourself more and more time. Over time, you won't need me talking; in fact, that will probably annoy you. You'll just be able to sit down, still your mind, and realize that you are not your thoughts.

These things that are bothering you, they're only going to bother you as much as you let them bother you. In the whole scheme of things, in all of time and space, none of them are really what should define you or are anywhere near as important as we sometimes make them out to be.

I'll see you in the next meditation.