Meditating 1 Hour Every Day – 1 Year Later

Meditating 1 Hour Every Day – 1 Year Later

Introduction: Ethan’s Journey into Meditation

hey there, this is Ethan, and in this Article, I want to go over my experience meditating for one hour every day for an entire year.

Now real quick, in light of my last Article um I thought it would be appropriate to go ahead and, you know, give my background experience meditating, where am I coming from when it comes to meditating, and like, what is it that I, like, you know, do I have anything of value to say when it comes to meditation, and give the audience, you guys, some background information from where I’m coming from.

So if you haven’t checked that Article out, you should check that Article out.

I will leave a little, uh, description or the, uh,

what are those even called?

You can tell I’m new to YouTube. Link.

I will leave a link in this Article too, so if you haven’t seen it, you should go check it out I go over what I find to be the most significant point when it comes to meditating, what the primary purpose of meditation is, what it is what the primary purpose that I have found when it comes to meditating and what I think that the majority of people would benefit from.

You know, there’s something about sitting and doing absolutely nothing and just being with yourself for hours on end that changes your relationship to the self, it changes your life relationship, and uh it can radically transform the way you experience everything.

So, without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into this Article.

The reason that I got into meditation in the first place was that I was going through a lot of anger probably roughly like two years ago or so.

I haven’t been doing the hour a day for quite that long.

I started out doing like five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes.

But really what it was, my motivation was, was to get a handle on my anger.

I felt like I was just an irate individual.

I had a lot of resentment towards the outside world.

I had a lot of resentment towards myself for not being good enough.

I felt like everywhere I looked, there was someone better than me.

Ethan’s Motivation for Meditating

You know, at school, someone was better at me, you know, at sports.

at socializing, at having good relationships, having friends, like everything.

I just felt like I wasn’t adequate.

And I think that this type of relationship with myself, this sort of self-deprecating negativity towards myself, really was starting to eat away at, not only how I experienced life at large, but it was also eating away at my relationships.

I would lash out at other people, I would lash out at myself, and it was just a very unhealthy cycle.

Now, initially, you know, I thought about, well, I could go to a therapist, I could go maybe take some sort of medication to help with it or, you know, whatever.

I didn’t know.

But I really didn’t like the idea of having to seek external help.

I felt like if it was my anger, at some level, I was going to have to be the one responsible for dealing with it.

And, you know, I had been Googling around and, of course, meditation with its myriad of benefits pops up into, you know, somewhere along the line.

You know, I just said, fuck it.

Like, I’ll give it a shot.

I mean, I don’t have anything else to lose.

What I’ve been doing isn’t working.

For some reason, my telling myself not to be angry, did not help the anger.

And sometimes it felt like it made the anger worse.

So I just felt like, you know, I have nothing to lose.

The Transformative Power of Meditation

I’ll give it a shot. So I started meditating for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and 20 minutes.

And eventually, I felt like the results were so positive that I increased it to an hour.

And I’ve been doing an hour for over a year now.

realistically.

And on that line, you know, that’s one of the biggest benefits I’ve received and I think a lot of people would receive is that your relationship to negative emotions will transform when you start to meditate.

What I learned was that when we want to deal with our negative emotions, we cannot, we cannot repress them.

And that is what I was, that’s what I was ending up doing with my anger was that I would get really, really angry and frustrated.

And then I would think, ah, but I’m not supposed to be angry.

I’m not supposed to be frustrated.

And so I would try to repress it.

But what that would end up doing when I tried to repress and just get rid of the anger, like brute force my way to getting rid of it, was that it would just basically get drilled into my subconscious mind and it wouldn’t go anywhere.

And then it would manifest itself back out into my behaviors in very subtle and sneaky ways, sometimes not-so-sneaky ways.

But when we’re trying to deal with negative emotions, we have to observe them.

the negative emotions, we have to lean into them.

So if I’m feeling angry, rather than repressing the anger, I have to feel the anger to its fullest extent.

So you take the mindset that it’s not that I am angry, it’s that I am experiencing anger.

So when we set up this dynamic where we are no longer the angry one, but instead we’re just observing anger, not only does it allow us to fully feel the anger without being attached to it, but it allows the anger’s energy to play out and eventually dissipate.

So rather than drilling it back down with repression, we have to lean into those negative emotions and release them.

And that’s what you do when you meditate.

When you’re meditating, you’re not supposed to do anything for, let’s say, an hour.

Well, if negative emotions come up, you automatically have to take the role of the observer.

Another thing that meditation has done is it’s increased my ability to focus dramatically.

You know, I didn’t used to think that focus was something that we could increase.

I thought it was sort of just a genetic trait that some people were really lucky that they had a lot of focus and other people weren’t so lucky.

And then some people were so unlucky that they had to take medications such as, you know, Adderall for their ADHD to be able to focus.

While I do think there are legitimate reasons to take medications such as Adderall for people, I think for the vast majority of us, Just sitting down and practicing meditation, whether it’s for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, or up to an hour, you’re going to experience an increased ability to focus.

Challenges and Rewards of Meditating for an Hour

Focus is not purely genetic, but, it’s something that we can train ourselves to get better at, and we can eventually reach levels of focus that are almost unimaginable.

I’ve had moments when I’m meditating where, for whatever reason, my mind just decides to shut up, and I enter a flow state with my breath.

And I’m just blissed out in the moment following my breath.

And it’s not something I can communicate very well with words, the significance of it.

But all I can tell you is that the more that you meditate, and especially when you start getting to these long amounts, like an hour at a time, you will eventually experience flow states and levels of focus that are like you would never think you’d be able to achieve with something as boring as just breathing.

But nonetheless, you can do that.

What this has allowed me to do is it’s allowed me to experience life as almost just this walking flow state.

When I am at my job or if I’m walking in a park or if I’m cooking dinner or cleaning dishes or whatever, showering even, I’m able to enter flow states with those day-to-day activities and it creates this much more rich experience of life.

And if you guys don’t know what a flow state is, it’s basically…

an experience where you are so focused that your sense of self starts to get lower, your mind is completely shut off, and you are just locked in, locked into the present moment.

So being able to experience flow with wherever I am in life, I mean, that is a very, very significant, powerful tool.

And it’s beautiful.

It makes life just radically… more rich.

That’s the best way I can describe it.

is just a richer richer fuller experience when I’m able to be focused on the present moment.

And meditating for an hour, it has taught me how to do that.

Another thing that meditating has done uh is that it’s it’s allowed me to be more aware.

Okay, it’s allowed me to be more aware and grow my awareness to levels that, again, I didn’t think were possible.

I don’t normally, or i didn’t normally think of awareness as being something that you could increase.

That idea didn’t make sense to me.

Even the concept of awareness still doesn’t exactly make sense to me.

It’s something that I contemplate pretty heavily a lot, but I think for most people we kind of understand what awareness is.

Like you’re aware of your computer screen right now or your phone, whatever you’re watching this on.

I’m aware of the camera that I’m talking to, but imagine being able to take that awareness and then to just expand it to infinity That’s eventually what you’re going to be able to do when you meditate for long periods, which is to expand your awareness to just ineffable levels that words cannot do justice to capture just how magical and quasi-mystical that state of consciousness is.

So, when your awareness expands like that, it’s almost as if colors are brighter and sounds are cleaner and crisper, smells feel fuller, you know, tastes are richer.

Everything just has an extra spice to it.

And life begins to take on this added element of magnificence is a good word for it.

Even though like meditation, you know, when you meditate, it’s not always gonna be rainbows and butterflies when you sit down, like sometimes it’s gonna be boring.

The long-term effect on your conscious day-to-day experience is that your consciousness does start to transform.

You do start to, experience life differently.

And that’s exactly what I’ve experienced.

And the last thing that I want to end you guys with, I think this is one of the most significant points, is that meditation has taught me so much about happiness.

I didn’t have many opinions on happiness before I started meditating.

Like, I didn’t understand what it was.

I felt like I was a happy individual.

You know, if someone asked me, hey, are you satisfied?

I would think, you know, for the most part, yes, I’m happy, except for the whole anger thing that i was dealing with.

But I mean, for the most part, I was happy, but I didn’t understand what happiness was.

Meditation and meditating for an hour at a time have taught me where happiness derives from.

And happiness derives from just being, your sense of existence itself.

That’s where happiness realistically is derived from. I can’t use words to explain rationalize or argue with somebody about why this is the case.

someone could tell me like, oh, happiness is just a brain chemical, or oh, happiness is this happiness is that.

And I’m not really like I’m not looking for a dictionary definition of happiness.

I’m not looking for a scientific explanation of happiness.

I’m looking for happiness in my direct experience, like in my day-to-day experience, not in a book, not in a sentence, not in a word or words.

But what is happiness like in my experience?

And happiness derives from our from the essence of our being.

So being with the moment, whatever moment you’re in, accepting it openly and fully is what allows us to experience happiness.

And this is so fundamental that I want to talk more about in another article because I think this is such a radical idea of happiness, but It’s so fundamental to our experience, and it’s one of the universal features that I think pretty much everyone wants to have, which is which is happiness But if we can manage to find happiness with just sitting on a cushion, doing nothing for an hour, We will be able to find happiness with our day-to-day experience of life.

So all I can tell you is you’re gonna have to just trust me.

You can either trust me or you don’t have to, but happiness is derived from being, just being, doing nothing.

And if we can find happiness there, it’s game over, dude.

You got the skeleton key to life, man.

Like, you don’t have to do anything.

You can just sit around all day, be a hobo, and be happy.

But maybe don’t be a hobo if you don’t want to.

So, yeah.

The last thing that I want to end this Article with is just kind of a warning or a reminder, I suppose, which is that meditation for an hour a day, is not easy.

It has moments where it can get pretty grueling, very boring, and sometimes very hard to stay focused and steady if, for example, you start dealing with some repressed traumas that have happened in the past or recently.

Things start to surface.

When you sit still like that, your mind starts to face things that you didn’t want to have to face.

So you have to be ready for that.

You have to be ready.

You have to be fearless enough to face the boredom, to face the past trauma, to face the negative emotions, because it inevitably will come up, especially on these longer sits.

You also have to have a strong desire to transform the way you experience life.

I mean, meditating for an hour, the first thing that’s gonna go is your motivation to do this.

It’s not easy, it’s not a walk in the park, and you’re not gonna experience the significant benefits of this practice,

I would say, until at least six months, okay?

so you have to recognize that if you’re trying to do this at this scale, you have to at least give yourself six months.

That’s what I told myself when I was starting I thought I said to myself, you know what?

The first three months, that’s just building a habit.

It takes 90 days to build a habit, or at least that’s what Google told me, I think.

So the first three months are just focused on building the habit of an hour.

The next three months are just giving it enough time to solidify and show me what it’s capable of doing.

And I promise that if you can commit to an hour a day, your life will become so much fuller and so much richer.

But it’s going to take a lot of work to get there.

It’s going to take a lot of discipline.

So you have to have the desire for one, to create this conscious change in your day-to-day experience.

But two, like I said in my last Article, to understand yourself at a deeper level.

There’s no other greater cause in life except to understand who you are authentic, like who you are.

Not what society told you you are.

Not what your parents told you who you are. Not what your religion said.

Not what science says. Not what your friends say. None of that. I mean you at your absolute existential level.

So you have to have a strong desire to really understand these things, to transform the way you experience life at large.

And if you can do that, you will absolutely see benefit from meditating, especially at this scale. I have meditated…

experience these benefits of meditating at this scale and even though it sucks sometimes like it it’s like hard sometimes you’ll notice that eventually, you start having more and more sits where your experience is no longer uh boring and difficult but rather extremely rich and fulfilling and sometimes you’ll notice that at a given course of the day, your meditation practice for that one hour was the most Fulfilling and significant thing that you did for the entire day, which I know sounds kind of radical, but I I’m just I can only speak from my own experience and that’s that’s what I’ve experienced. So it seems that the people that I’ve talked to when they meditate or other people that I’ve talked to that are into Meditation that do it regularly that do it at this scale have reported similar things So I’ll go ahead and leave it there you guys.

I hope that whoever is watching this Article I hope you guys enjoyed it I would encourage everyone to give it a shot. Again, six months, man. Like, that’s really the timeline you need to see the full impact of what meditation, meditating for an hour has to offer. But if you’re not going to do it for an hour, that’s totally fine. You will still find benefit in doing it for one minute, five minutes, ten minutes. Any amount is better than none. That’s pretty much it. If you enjoyed the Article, please hit that like button. If you like the style of content um things like meditation, philosophy, psychology, just understanding life at a deeper level, exploring big picture questions, hit that subscribe button. There’s so much that I want to talk about, so many more crazy things I want to discuss.

So I’ll go ahead and end it here. Oh, wait, no, no, no. The last thing, please comment. Please comment. I know that some of you out there who are watching this have meditated before. I want to hear your feedback. I want to start a discussion.

And yeah, if you have any questions, please let me know in the comment section below. And yeah, that’s pretty much it. Until next time.