Advice Not Given summary

When given a choice of activities to do with your free time, you might not think meditation sounds all that exciting. However, while it may not have the same reputation as mountain climbing or windsurfing, meditation is a way to live your life to the fullest.

Still, the practice of meditation is misunderstood by many, who picture sitting with their eyes closed and avoiding life’s problems, which couldn’t be further from its true purpose.

These days, people all over the world are meditating, and the practice of mindfulness has become something of a fad, with public endorsements from celebrities like Emma Watson.

So, is there a difference between meditation and mindfulness? There is! You should think of mindfulness as one form of meditation, and one that is best used in moderation.

You don’t have to think of meditation as some spiritual, esoteric endeavor. Instead, you can think of it strictly as a concentration exercise.

With that in mind, try the following technique, known as a concentration meditation:

Meditation and psychotherapy aren’t traditionally thought of as similar practices, but they actually have a lot in common.

For starters, they both take the power of your thoughts very seriously.

Along with the misunderstanding that meditation is about avoiding problems, there’s also the erroneous idea that meditation teaches you to simply let go of any unwanted thought that enters your head.

The truth is, meditation provides you with some very practical tools to cope with life and its anxieties.

If you’ve been in an argument with a loved one, you know how it can feel like a matter of life and death when you’re in the middle of it. But if you were to reflect on these arguments later on, you would probably see that many were blown out of proportion, with no real reason for such heated emotions.

Take Kate, for example, another of Epstein’s clients who worked at an architectural firm and was in a relationship with a man who had retired early.

Along with misplacing our anger toward a loved one, we also often have a tendency to think that someone is angry with us when they’re just in a bad mood or not thinking about us at all. And what’s really sad is that these misunderstandings can last for years.

Thankfully, this is another issue that can be alleviated through meditation as it allows you to recognize when you’ve built up a story in your head that has little bearing on reality – such as the feeling that you’ve done something wrong when you haven’t. Since practicing meditation gives you the room to observe your thoughts more objectively, you can start to recognize when things don’t add up. This is also a benefit of making meditation a regular practice since the repetition is often key to allowing you to gradually begin to doubt a feeling that you’ve held for a great deal of time.