4 Superpowers You Gain From Meditation

This week’s post is by guest blogger Giovanni Dienstmann, a fantastic meditation teacher with a lot of wisdom to share. Please enjoy his perspective.

There are countless ways a meditation practice can benefit you in your life, from physical and mental health to emotional life and performance. But the real point that meditation addresses, and that makes it widely relevant and universal, is this:

You have a mind, but you are not the boss of your mind.

Often, your mind is the boss of you.

Your mind is your most valuable asset. What’s going on in your mind can make you happy or miserable, successful or broken, energetic or lifeless. In short, the quality of your mind determines the quality of your life.

So, then, what is the value of meditation? It helps you to know your mind, and master your mind (gradually). And this affects everything else, in all spheres of your life.

Let’s dive into the four main skills that meditation will give you—they are so powerful, we can call them “superpowers.”

1. Zooming In

The first skill that you gain from meditation is improving your ability to focus. Focusing means that you can zoom in your attention on anything, and sustain it there, ignoring distractions. The length of time you can sustain your attention increases with practice.

It’s quite evident how the ability to focus is essential in all spheres of life: career, education, finances, and performance (be it in work, sports, or art). We live in times of continuous distraction—our attention span keeps getting shorter. We lack focus because so many things are auditioning for our attention, and as a result our mind easily gets dispersed everywhere.

There are also many other expressions of focusing in daily life. Focusing allows you to:

• Be more present in your daily activities, rather than getting lost in your mind
• Listen and communicate better, because you become more present
• Multi-task less, enabling you to become more time and energy efficient
• Enjoy more deeply the blessings of your life, however small (a good meal, time with your family, your favorite hobby, etc.)
• When there are competing voices in your head (such as the voice of fear and the voice of confidence) you can zoom in and focus on the voice that is most empowering to you.

In meditation, we are training this skill every time we zoom in our attention to the object of our focus (breath, mantra, etc.).

2. Zooming Out

If zooming in gives you focus, zooming out gives you perspective. It’s the ability to not get sucked into mental and emotional stuff. It’s the ability to see with clarity and serenity.

Oftentimes we don’t want to zoom into something, but we just can’t help it. Emotions are usually the driving force for this. They can get sticky and messy pretty quickly.

• Maybe it’s a traumatic incident from your past, or an addictive emotional pattern such as victimization or negative self-talk.
• Perhaps everything is going well with your day, until someone says something that triggers you to fall down a rabbit hole of confusion, anger, and doubt.
• Or maybe it’s just your thoughts bullying you into interpreting things through the lenses of fear and pessimism.

In situations like these, zooming out comes in handy. It frees your mind, allowing you to see the bigger picture.

It won’t stop those pesky thoughts and feelings—but it will make them be more like a cup of salt thrown into the ocean, rather than a cup of salt thrown into a small bucket.

In meditation, we train zooming out every time we realize that we’ve gotten sucked into a stream of thoughts, and reclaim our attention by removing it from that thought-funnel.

3. Pausing

This is the skill that most people associate with meditation.

When we live in an unconscious, automated way, we become the product of our environment. We react, rather than respond. In this mode, we are acting on the loudest impulse in our heads. We’re reproducing our past conditioning.

Living a creative and fulfilling life requires just the opposite. It means to be intelligently present in the moment. For that, the ability to pause is essential.

Pausing gives you the space to:

• Prevent you from acting on anger or other destructive impulses that ruin relationships and lives. (In a way we can say that when pausing is absent, regret takes its place.)
• Break bad habits
• Find clarity about what’s really going on
• Make wiser decisions based on the needs of the moment
• Re-align your actions in life to your core values
• Think less, worry less, and be more

Reacting without thinking is easy—it’s the path of least resistance. Pausing is harder—it’s a skill that needs to be trained, a virtue to be developed.

In meditation, we train pausing every time we notice that we’re distracted, and we interrupt that stream of thoughts. It’s a condition for you to be able to zoom out.

4. Changing The Channel

The powers of pausing, zooming out, and zooming in come together as the ability to “change channels.”

Think of your mental world as a TV with several channels. Some of them are informative, entertaining, or useful. Others are full of bad shows, even though you might find them addictive.

The problem is that this TV doesn’t obey you all the time. It randomly features shows from channels you dislike, and doesn’t even allow you to mute them. Sometimes you try to change the channel, but after five seconds you find yourself back to the old channel.

The more you develop the abilities to pause, zoom out, and zoom in, the more you fine-tune your remote control. As a result, your favorite channels get more screen time, and the crappy ones end up being discontinued due to lack of attention.

The formula for changing the channel is:

1. Notice that an unhelpful channel has come up. It could be fear, anxiety, self-hatred, etc. Sometimes labeling the feeling can be helpful.
2. Pause it. Breathe in and take a step back. Don’t fight with it, but rather realize that you don’t really need to be watching it.
3. Zoom out. See the bigger picture—your consciousness is larger than this thought/emotion. Let the thought be there, but realize that you don’t need to zoom into it.
4. Switch channels, and then powerfully zoom into a more helpful or enjoyable channel.

This is changing channels. It is a natural exercise of control over your attention—reclaiming the power to decide where it should be focused. It is not repression, and doesn’t involve any self-violence.

In meditation this ability is trained every time we gently return our attention back to our chosen object (breath, mantra, etc.).

Developing a Consistent Meditation Practice

These skills are all forms of mastery over your attention and over your mind. You don’t get these superpowers overnight, though. They’re muscles that develop with consistent practice. Every time you meditate, you are taking solid steps in increasing these natural superpowers.

If you need some help choosing a meditation technique and establishing a solid practice, check out Giovanni’s new course, Master Your Mind, which will teach you five different meditation styles over the course of five weeks, so you can begin to develop your skills and discover which style of meditation is best for you. Giovanni is offering 15% off for Mindful Minutes readers, so take advantage of his generous offer and the opportunity to learn how to meditate.

Sneak Peek: Master Your Mind Meditation Course Structure

Each week, for five weeks, you’ll learn a new style of meditation, and learn tools to keep you on track.

Sign Up for Master Your Mind, and begin meditating today. (Remember, you get 15% off!)

This article was originally published on LiveandDare.com.