Meditation - One Thing That Could Be Holding You Back
by Steve Gill,

There is one thing that can stop us from meditating effectively.  In fact, it can sabotage our best efforts.  And that thing is: our conscious minds.

Our conscious mind is the part of our minds that is active during the normal awake state (Beta). You’re using your conscious mind right now as you are reading this.  It shapes our perception of reality by filtering everything it receives through the normal five senses and relating it to our knowledge and past experiences.  It’s responsible for conscious thought, logic, reasoning, etc.

As you probably already know, our perception of reality can be shattered, or at least cracked, when we encounter something that we’ve never seen of experienced before.  For example, traveling to another country can really change our perspective of the world as we see things we never knew existing.  Imagine if you could travel into space.  How much would that affect your view of the world?  Most astronauts have commented that they see the Earth in a totally different way after seeing it from space.

This same part of your mind can also be our worst enemy, sowing the seeds of doubt when trying something new.  It pops up thoughts like: “you’ll never be any good at this, so why bother trying” and “last time you tried that you failed”.  It’s our built-in critic system that’s available every waking moment.

Our conscious minds like to be in control at all times. So when we try to meditate it doesn’t like it because one of the things we that happen when we meditate is disconnect from our conscious minds for a while.  Unfortunately it usually won’t give up without a fight.

That’s why when we try to meditate we suddenly start getting itches that need to be scratched.  We get thoughts about other things we need to do like “I must remember to post that letter”, “did I pay the phone bill”.  It will try to make us give up by dropping thoughts into our heads like “this is a waste of time, nothing is happening” and “this is pointless”.  These are all distractions caused by our conscious minds. 

If this is happening to you then it’s important that you persevere and work through this phase.  You will eventually gain control over it if you persist.  When it occurs, do some deep breathing.  If you are using a meditation CD such as the ones available from Mindwaves, focus your attention on the sounds of the meditation.  Gently push these interrupting thoughts aside for attention later.  Ignore any physical distractions.  They will disappear after a while.

With some practice you will be able to quickly bypass your conscious mind and free yourself up for the deep levels of calm and peacefulness that only meditation can give you.  You’ll also open yourself up to other levels of consciousness that your conscious mind is preventing you from experiencing.