Long-Term Benefits of Meditation

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about how meditation conditions experiences that we really like. So it's not uncommon to have spontaneous experiences of openness, of compassion, love, freedom, selflessness, and ease. Most people can associate into moments, often many moments throughout their life, where they've had these experiences. And when it comes to meditation, often what we're experiencing during it is not something that's totally unfamiliar to us.

We've all experienced moments of peace. We've all experienced moments of openness. We've all experienced moments of connection. So it's not like it's taking us into this hidden room where we get to touch into a sensory experience we've never had before. But what it is doing that's important to keep in mind, is it's conditioning these experiences more into our beings so they become a more natural expression of who we are in the world.

And I think that's important to keep in mind because sometimes meditation can feel mundane or it can feel like, well, you know what? I get this experience when I go out in nature or I connect with a friend or I have my first sip of caffeine and I feel a little bit more open and energized and good. It's like, yes, we can experience a lot of those moments throughout the day in different ways, often in relationship to certain things that are arising. But if we want to feel that more organically and we want our expression to be one of openness, compassion and love that can be consistent in a way that's less dependent on the variables or there are certain triggers around us throughout the day, that's where meditation practice comes in. And it's conditioning these experiences into our beings so they do become an organic expression of who we are. So hopefully just serving as a little bit more motivation as you continue on your meditation practice.

Know that this is deep work, and it's one of the reasons why I like to thank you for your practice for doing it. Let's settle in for today's meditation.