How to Meditate for Self-Development
Many people have told me that meditation got them through a tough period — but now that they don’t need it, they don’t do it anymore.
If you think of meditation as a treatment for an illness, then yes, you don’t need it once you’re feeling better. But do you want to simply get back to your familiar baseline, or do you want to transcend to a more fulfilling experience of life?
I use meditation as part of a wider programme for self-development. It can work at the level of self-regulation, to help with stress and emotional reactivity — and that alone can be life changing for a lot of people. It also comes into play when you want to work through the patterns that limit your growth, and cultivate the qualities that will usher in your idealised life.
With practice, meditation can help develop your ability to shift your internal perspective, watch your thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and ultimately cultivate a level of self-awareness that is vital for high performance.
So meditation gets us part of the way there, through:
self-regulation: helping us get out of survival mode, so we can respond rather than react
self-awareness: bringing your unconscious patterns, beliefs, emotions and ‘parts of self’ into conscious awareness
But there’s more to the process than this level of meditation; being able to settle and watch your internal and external experience doesn’t necessarily mean you will make the shifts that will help you evolve into the best version of yourself. For that, there’s some rewiring to do.
I use a meditative state (a state of highly attuned, calm yet alert awareness) to ask my subconscious questions, explore confusing emotions, and meet the parts of myself that I keep hidden even from myself. In this process, you might relive old memories, feel deep emotion, and sometimes find deep insight or even resolution.
This work requires attuned mindfulness as you observe everything that’s arising in the present moment, yet you are also an active participant as you explore the part of your mind that we think of as ‘not real’, but in fact contains all of your secret motivations and desires, forgotten disappointments and unmet needs: your imagination.
The imagination is a treasure chest filled with roadmaps to your fullest potential. We don’t imagine things out of thin air; all your creative content is derived from the symbolic language that your unconscious mind speaks.
In practice, I work with a Jungian exercise called Active Imagination. A simple example of how this works is, say you have mixed feelings about someone in your life. When you drop into meditative awareness, you imagine this person in front of you. Do you have an urge to push them away, embrace them, tell them something? Do you imagine them doing/saying something, wearing/holding something symbolic or giving off some kind of energy?
In the safety of your own imagination, you have the space to explore the dynamics of you and this person without the surface level reactivity that may appear if they were really in front of you. This practice offers the opportunity to discover the depths of what you really feel, and in some cases the opportunity to vent, resolve or forgive in a way that never necessarily needs to happen in reality.
Without the ability to drop into meditation, the programmes in your mind can distract you from the truth of what’s here. Even with lots of practice, sensitive material can trigger the protective mechanisms that keep you from feeling vulnerable feelings or remembering painful memories. This process takes many repetitions, and must always be prefaced with the ability to return to a place of safety.
I offer this process to my 1-to-1 coaching clients, and in my monthly Meditation & Self-Development workshops. Working with me privately is preferable if you’re very focused on cultivating high performance, or if you’re dealing with sensitive issues that you’d like guidance with. The group setting is a lighter touch, and is suitable for those who would like to find like-minded people to share and practice with in community.
