I trembled, my body shook, I gazed into the void. I suddenly found myself in a condition I’d never been in before – will I ever get out of this? I was terrified, a shiver ran through my entire body, despite lingering in tropical Costa Rica. What powerful force had taken control over me?

Never mind, I just wanted to practice my clickbait writing skills here. Yet the experience I’m referring to was an impressive one – for sure you’ll find the whole story ultimately at the end of this article. In this post, I’d like to merge personal experiences from my meditation practice with some basic facts about this powerful tool.

basic meditation blah blah

Meditation will enhance our ability to stay focused by reducing our susceptibility to distraction. A meditative state acts as a stop sign. It stops our mind from steering us into thoughts about the future or the past keeping us on the straight road named presence. In addition, we successively stop worrying about happenings that are outside of our control. How? Again, it’s a training session in which we practice focusing on one particular thing – a candle in the dark, a point on the wall, or the like. For instance, I initially started meditating while focusing on my breath. Every morning, I sat down quite directly after getting up to make sure my thoughts were fairly calm and not too busy. As soon as a thought appeared, I started to count each inhale and exhale until I reached 10. The focus on the counting let the thought disappear or at least reduced my urge to follow it. In case it wasn’t effective enough, I raised my inner voice. Sometimes, it was even possible to swipe between thoughts with eye movements, like someone would do it on Tinder. As I described in an article earlier, it is our brain’s default state to mind-wander. In the practice of meditation, we can catch our brain in the heat of the moment and interrupt the mind’s wandering, taking back driver’s seat. That can ultimately reduce the undeliberate drift-aways in our daily life. Besides that, some really recognizable changes to our brains occur, including the potential enlargement of gray matter fostering information processing. These changes are further accompanied by beneficial changes in how we can focus, feel present, manage our emotions, and make thoughtful decisions. Lastly, meditation can sustainably contribute to increased happiness and satisfaction. With that said, I hereby conclude the dry fact listing.

a transformative experience

Some cherry-red drops of the thick liquid made their way down from my beard to the star-shaped arrangement of candles on the floor. The figures in the circle around me piercingly watched me with their sinister gazes, as far as I could recognize them through their hoods pulled deeply into their faces. My first time drinking refreshing, delicious blood out of a skull standing in a circle of men changed everything. That’s how to introduce a travel story nowadays, right? Well, in any case it’s less exciting and totally exaggerated. Anyways, I don’t want to diminish the experience I had that finally led me to rethink and adapt my meditation practice. I resided in a yoga ashram for a couple of days. My initial motivation for the stay was to dive deeper into yoga as a whole – the philosophy, what’s behind it, and what it consists of. Yoga brought me back to the search for my own beliefs – not by giving me a religion to follow, but by giving me a philosophical framework through which I could explore questions of existence, consciousness, and the self. Much of what I believe today has been shaped by the ideas I encountered through yoga. But let me dedicate a separate post to that topic. Diving into that adventure excited, setting my expectations to almost zero, I left the ashram with a powerful tool that totally revolutionized my daily meditation practice.

My days essentially consisted of chanting mantras and doing karma yoga. Let me demystify that for you, before you think about stopping reading – I want to break it down to an abstract explanation. Most people surely use these activities and tools to deepen their beliefs, but I’d like to uncover the background and intentions behind them from my perspective. Mantra work, karma yoga and similar could be applied without any kind of religious belief – they can be incredibly powerful even if you consider yourself an atheist. That said, I intend to grant open-minded insights into religions and philosophical approaches. Karma yoga is, spoken simply, work being performed fully and responsibly while loosening the attachment to the outcome. Sounds peculiar, right? We’re not used to that. We tend to constantly ask “What will I get from doing this or that?” while focusing on external outcomes. That’s why it could appear pretty frustrating sweeping leaves in the ashram garden just to realize that the floor regains the same leaf-covered state just hours later. Acting selflessly and focusing on just what you do, letting the reasons and expectations go, fosters the reduction of the ego, resulting in the dissolution of anger, jealousy and envy. Intensifying karma yoga can finally effect that we’re perceiving work, relationships, fitness, creativity, or basically any area of life with fewer expectation and most importantly without making our happiness dependent on them.

I was taught to continuously repeat a single mantra while doing all my work. Mantras were part of my daily routines to overwrite useless and outdated convictions, but in that case, it showed me something completely unknown – using mantras as meditative practice. As I described earlier, I used to count my breaths to refocus my mind. Under these conditions it’s the mantra that brings you back to focus, stops your mind from drifting and conquers the driver’s seat of your consciousness. It enhanced my experience in such a way that I adapted my daily routine from breath to mantra meditation. Doing that between four and six hours daily in the ashram was a transformative experience – it is stunning how fast you can manipulate your mind. The first day was pretty comparable to my usual practice – there was a battle inside my head between rising thoughts and the mantra. On the second day the fight shifted. The mantras we chanted each morning and evening were the predominant opponent of the single mantra. It finally happened that day in the evening that I sat down and wondered what to think about. Seemingly, every thought was suppressed and expelled through the strict repetition. I initially intended to use the stay for deep thoughts about myself and so forth. Instead I found myself thoughtless, which was frankly really spooky at first, because I felt lost and didn’t know what to do with myself. From a second perspective, after an eye-opening conversation with the lovely hosts of the ashram, it was something beautiful – an unknown but completely peaceful state. Again, from a factual perspective it’s irrelevant what the mantra contains and expresses. What I consequently learned is, that I can reexperience that kind of state through practicing the repetition. In stressful or overwhelming situations I’ll be able to regain that condition at least partially by repeating the mantra. My brain will, in a figurative sense, create a reference between the thoughtless state and the mantra. I’m convinced that this is a powerful tool that can massively improve our daily lives.

That post was written with deep gratitude for the members of Haidakhandi Dharma Ashram in San José, Costa Rica, who welcomed me with loving hospitality.