The power of meditation

Read this article on Harvard Business Review about meditation. Rings quite true especially the part about meditation making us more productive...

"How? By increasing your capacity to resist distracting urges.

Research shows that an ability to resist urges will improve your relationships, increase your dependability, and raise your performance. If you can resist your urges, you can make better, more thoughtful decisions. You can be more intentional about what you say and how you say it. You can think about the outcome of your actions before following through on them.

Our ability to resist an impulse determines our success in learning a new behavior or changing an old habit. It's probably the single most important skill for our growth and development."

I have not been successful in meditating on my own.. EVER! But there is a day a week where I go into a hot room (40 degrees Celsius to be exact), shut off my thoughts and just listen to my yoga teacher's instructions. It get rather hot in there especially when your mind starts to wander but the basis of the lesson is, "stay in the room for 90 minutes".  It is not easy especially when the whiny part of the brain starts to go, "It's so hot and stuffy in here", "Why are we doing this?", "Are you crazy? Doing yoga in this heat?" or generally trying to convince the rest of your body to give up and get out of the heat but, I learnt that, if you bite down on your resolve and fight the whiny voice, it gives up after a while and you gain absolute control of every part of your body. The results are similar to what the author says about meditating:

"Meditating daily will strengthen your willpower muscle. Your urges won't disappear, but you will be better equipped to manage them. And you will have experience that proves to you that the urge is only a suggestion. You are in control."

The ironic thing I learnt about control is, the more you try to be in control, the more you loose control whereas the more you let go and try not to control, the more you are able to "push the right" buttons and get the outcomes you desire. 

When I began my Bikram journey, I never expected to obtain an alleviated sense of understanding and enlightenment. Totally worth every ringgit I paid for the expensive membership!

On an end note, the author, Peter Bregman, is an advisor to CEOs and their leadership teams. His latest book 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done just echoes Covey's Habit of putting first things first. Interesting... (",)