Category: Blog

Self care is about the whole picture.

Of  both what you’re doing on the outside and what is driving you from the inside.

Free yourself from overthinking

Overthinking or worrying is taking one small thing and thinking about it beyond the facts that you actually know about it. When you are unsatisfied and unable to relax with or accept a situation, you think and think and think about it.

This is harmful. This is something we all do on a daily basis and it needs to stop.

Does overthinking ever help you?

Anyway we tend to use overthinking to avoid or get away from how we feel.

To use thinking in order to suppress or cover up how you really feel will ultimately do nothing but strengthen those feelings you’re trying to avoid.

Then the distress you generate through overthinking will add to the current stress you’re trying to avoid, which will lead to more overthinking and is how you get yourself stuck in an endless cycle.

I found over the years, that I was always worried, stressed or anxious for a good reason, so overthinking to avoid these feelings would be useless and do nothing but make me feel worse, so it was best just to let myself feel that way, without trying to avoid it or judge it.

Which was hard, sure, you never want to feel those feelings, but I found the longer I would avoid, and distract myself away from feeling those feelings the longer they would be drawn out. 

Coming back to just feeling them, the overthinking would fade away and the unnecessary worry that I brought into my life would decrease.

Try this out for yourself.

You can prove that you don’t have to harm yourself, just to avoid yourself.

Whenever you start to harm yourself by overthinking. Feel the disturbance behind that thinking; whether that is worry, stress or anxiety just let your overthinking go into the background where it will eventually fade away.

It won’t be easy at first but the more you do it the easier it’ll get. And persisting with this till you get it is really really worth it, believe me.

In doing so you will feel and know a true and real sense of you, away from the harm you and others cause you.

Then you will have a chance to truly care about yourself.

It is that simple.

Related article: How to stop overthinking

Breaking free from negative self-thoughts

Most of what we think about ourselves we pick up from the outside world, social media, our parents, friends, even society and assume these thoughts are our own.

So how do we discern our own thoughts from the ones that come from outside?

If a thought is coming from the outside; it will be putting you down, making you feel disturbed, angry or critical of yourself.

If a thought is coming from you, from inside; it will lift you up; it is guiding you, taking care of you, it is coming from a deeper felt sense of you.

Think about it, what is more related to you? A thought that comes from inside of you, the felt sense of you in the body.

Or a thought that comes from the outside, from someone else’s bias perception of you or how you should be.

There is no way, we as humans could think horrible things about ourselves unless we were taught to do so. We are who we are and unless we compare ourselves with something outside, there is no reason for us to hate who we are or think such thoughts.

Animals don’t hate who they are. You don’t see a dog sulking because the other dogs have prettier fur than it does.

We should be no different.

Be honest with yourself now, if you take all your comparison, criticism and nasty thoughts away and just come back to how you feel behind all those thoughts.

How does that feel?

However, it feels, is fine. Because that is how you feel, and there is no wrong way to feel.

And you know the most amazing thing! Unlike thinking, there is no way we can compare how we feel with anyone else, because we have no idea how other people feel.

Sure, they can describe it to us, but who knows what they actually mean. Their ‘happy’ could be your ‘depressed’, and visa versa…

So, if there is no way you can compare how you feel with anyone else. How do you know it’s wrong, or bad? You don’t, so let it go.

Stop thinking these nasty thoughts about yourself and come back to how it feels to be you in the body.

And if that feels gross, or disturbing or makes you want to run away from it, stay with it and feel it until that feeling fades.

Because unlike your nasty thoughts, feelings will come and go as they need to. Thoughts drag on forever if we keep repeating them.

So stop.

And finally, Allow yourself to heal the harm by feelin it

Don’t use this article as a list of rules to follow, use this as a guide to help you stop the harm you are causing yourself.  

This doesn’t mean that you have to stop eating ice cream forever. Eat the goddam ice cream, do the things that make you feel like shit. But once you’ve done them and you’re sitting there feeling like shit.

Feel how that feels. Don’t avoid it, because part of stopping the harm is feeling the harm that you’ve done to yourself.

In feeling that harm your able to see the impact it has on you, which will help you to stop it.

Stop the harm and your body will heal naturally by itself.

Here’s a great example:

We have been complaining about environmental crises and global warming for a long time now. Talking about all the things we could do to fix it, all the things we need to apply, to change, to stop.

Then about 3 billion people all around the world went into lockdown. And within 3 weeks of humans not going outside, not imposing themselves on the world, the world began to fix itself naturally.

The canals in Venice cleared up, cities in India saw the Himalayan mountains for the first time in 30 years, people in London saw the Eiffel tower from their homes.

The natural world fixed itself, simply because we stopped the harm. Because we left the planet alone.

So maybe… that’s what you need to do for yourself. Don’t you think.  And don’t forget, you too are also part of nature, and so you work the same way.

There is no fancy cure to all of this, to your pains, illnesses, distresses, it’s all up to you to stop harming yourself. And let nature – the body, do its thing. And it will if you let it.

You know when a certain situation, person or food makes you feel sick, disturbed or vulnerable. So stop putting yourself in harm’s way.

Take into consideration the self-care you’re neglecting. If you can sit on social media for an hour a day you can spend at least 30 minutes giving yourself the space and quite you need by meditating.

Don’t ignore your body when you feel disturbed around a person, you’re allowed to cut them out of your life. Nobody is worth causing yourself pain. No amount of pills are going to help you when the junk food you’re eating is making you sick.

You can just let yourself feel anxious, worried or distressed, and it will pass. But you will achieve nothing by overthinking and only cause yourself more anxiety, worry and distress.

Can you see now that any negative thoughts about yourself are coming from the outside. Therefore, they have nothing to do with you, so let them go and focus instead on how it feels, rather than what you’re thinking.

And finally feel the harm; even if you do fall into old habits, or harmful behaviours, that’s fine just feel the harm you’ve caused yourself without criticising and judging it. And move on without dwelling on it.

Only you can heal yourself, only you can stop the harm that is caused. Sure, you may have picked up certain thoughts, and behaviours from other people, but you can stop them now and only you know how.

Now that you know what the problem really is.

Leave yourself alone, which means, stop the harm.

This is the most natural and most intelligent solution. 

Just as the natural world in Venice, India and London fixed itself when we stopped harming it and left it alone, so to, when you leave yourself alone in this way, your body, which is also nature will take over the care and fix itself…every single time.

You just need you to get out of the way and stop the harm, and wherever or whenever you do, everything will just sort itself out.

Voila!

Part One.

Self-care for many is superficially indulging in luxuries or fantasies to escape the stress of everyday life. We even use it as an excuse for doing things we generally feel guilty for and in doing so trick ourselves into things we know are bad for us.

Whether that be with; self-pampering, overuse of healthy food and exercises or on the flipside eating ‘treat’ foods e.g. ice-cream, even though we know they’re bad for us.

And then complaining about it 5 minutes later.

This is not really self-care, but more like self-harm.

To self-care we need to consider the whole picture.

Doing skincare every morning, seeing a psychologist every week or going to the doctor every month doesn’t mean you’re taking care of yourself. These are often just band-aids covering up the real issues of harmful behaviours we ignore.

Then self-care becomes about trying to fix the damage you’ve done to yourself, rather than stopping doing the damage in the first place.

That’s like crawling into a doctor’s office with a bullet wound in your arm and the doctor giving you a band-aid to cover it up. You’ll have to come back tomorrow for another band-aid, because that won’t fix the problem.

Eventually, you have to dig deeper to find the bullet and remove it. Only then can you really heal. It’s the same with harmful behaviours, you have to dig deeper to the source of the behaviours and end it there.

For example;

Rather than just doing your daily skincare and assuming that’ll clear up your acne, go to the source of your problem and look at the bigger picture of your life. What food are you putting into your body? What thoughts are you thinking about yourself? Are these harming you? Or helping you?

I’m not saying don’t do your skincare or don’t go to the psychologist or the doctor. Just don’t try to cover up your harm with a so-called simple solution. Look at the full picture.

Our problems or issues, or illness cannot be changed or cured by us trying to cover them up or fix them. We need to stop the harm.

Make meditation a priority

How you feel inside affects your thinking, how you see things and how you behave that day, so this is where all the harm starts.

To meditate you are taking the time to stop everything and come back to what it is to be you. Without judgment or criticism or trying to change yourself in any way.

Because these are the basis of self harm.

This is why daily meditation is the most important thing to help you to self-care and stop the harm at its roots.

When we try to change how we feel, or how we are, this is also harming ourselves. Because we are overlooking who and how we actually are.

So to incorporate daily meditation into your life will help you return to a deeper sense of you in the body. Letting your thinking and daily stresses take a back seat for a while. Thus, letting any overreactions or thoughts about life and yourself decrease.

This allows you to purge and release the build up of daily tensions, taking you deeper and further into your meditation.

If you find yourself struggling with the motivation to meditate daily, you can use Undo’s guided meditations. These will not only help you stay focused whilst you get the hang of meditation, but will also deepen your understanding of meditation and therefore yourself.  

And using Undo’s natural meditation daily isn’t you trying to put a band-aid over a bullet wound.

Meditation isn’t about fixing a problem, applying a technique, medicine or effort to fix that problem. It isn’t about an end result or goal to strive for. It is taking all of that away and leaving you with the source of the problem itself and allowing you to feel it within you so it can dissolve naturally.

And this way, it will.

Once you allow yourself to just be you without those intentions to change yourself in any way, you will start to heal – naturally – without even knowing.

Until you notice how much better you actually feel, just being you.

And believe me, you will.

Listen to your body

Hear me out.

We spend our whole life listening to our thoughts, what we think we want, what other people tell us we want and we never really pay attention to how we feel, our so-called ‘gut feeling’, until it’s too late.

For a simple example:

We all know that ice cream is unhealthy and makes us feel sick, or that we eat it to escape what we don’t want to feel, but we still eat it because we think we want it.

And in eating it, we ignore our gut feeling which is telling us it’s not good for us, that it’ll make us feel sick.

Remember what I said above about ‘stopping the harm’. This is what I mean.

Rather than harming yourself – by eating the ice cream – and then complaining about the harm you just did, just stop listening to your thought processes and pay attention to your body, your gut feeling, and in doing so; you will stop the harm.

And if it happens too quickly and you habitually start to harm yourself, as soon as you notice it,  stop it. Take a moment to feel the harm, and then stop it at its roots, by feeling the underlying urges for doing what can harm you.

The more you do this, the easier it’ll be until you stop it altogether.

Our body never lies. We just don’t listen to it. We listen to our clever thoughts, which manipulate us and trick us into harming ourselves.

Our body is what we are and therefore knows us better than our thought processes.

Our body isn’t influenced by outside ideas, social norms or advertisements like our thinking is, our body is smarter than that.

Our thought processes cannot feel, sense or understand what we are going through, or the harm we do, or what we really need.

If we feel sick, we feel sick in the body ­– this is how we know we’re sick, and all our thought process can do is complain about it or try to ignore it.

If we feel disturbed, the body feels disturbed, all our thought process does is suppress it.

Not only does the body know more than the thought process, but in feeling, sick, disturbed, tired, etc it is warning you of something.

If you feel sick because of something you ate, this is your body telling you to avoid eating it again.

If you feel disturbed when hanging around a certain person, this is your body telling you to avoid that person.

If you feel tired, this is the body telling you, you need to sleep …

It’s as simple and straightforward as that.

I have discovered this all from my own personal experience, from my own trials, errors and because I was ignoring my body and gut feelings, falling flat on my face too many times.

My gut feeling is always correct, and why I say that is because so far it always has been.

It took me years to work it out, but it wasn’t until I went travelling solo around Europe at the age of 20 that I realised how important it was to listen to my body.

I was going into an environment and situations that I had never come across before so my thinking was completely out of its depth. It had nothing to refer back to, just thoughts and ideas based on what I had heard about travelling or my dire need to not miss out on any situation. This therefore clouded my judgment of situations and people.  

So in the end it came down to how I felt, no matter the situation, person or environment. My ‘gut feeling’ was what I had to listen to and it was because of this that I managed to travel through Europe for two years with no issue.

However as I stated above, my thoughts about situations were tainted by what I had heard from other people, and in not realising this they would influence my decisions.

So I needed – and so do you – to tell the difference between my ‘gut feeling’ and my ‘thoughts’ over exaggeration and being influenced by ideas from others.

For example:

If you know of a friend that was mugged when travelling and you start to panic and worry that that will happen to you, and those panicked thoughts turn into a panicked feeling then this is your feelings being influenced by your thinking. 

Can you see how this is then a completely fabricated, imagined and false feeling?

Whereas the feelings that you physically feel in your body, any disturbances that pop up out of nowhere, are not caused by your thinking because they are from a deeper sense in your body.

This type of purely-sensed disturbance you need to listen to, because this is your body picking up on something and setting off alarm bells.

False feelings start from thinking.

True feelings begin as a sensation in your body.

Listen to your body, it is always right.

So self-care is about the full picture. You need to look at everything you’re doing in life and address each thing that could be causing you harm. Rather than just slapping on a ‘quick fix’ and wondering why you’re still so miserable.

Meditate daily, listen to your body and start responding to what you need, rather than what some viral trend says.

How can I deepen my meditation?

A very popular question at the moment. Probably because there is no answer out there that really satisfies the question.

Until now.

Usually when you meditate you begin by thinking of a part of or the whole body to try and redirect thoughts from the world and outside activities you generally are always thinking about, to go deeper into your body.

However you need to understand that this is only minimising your thinking to focus on your physical body. Once you are mentally aware of you physically sitting there, that is as far as you can go with thought. And as far or deep as mindfulness, body scanning or any other technique can take you.

All thought and thought based meditation techniques are once removed from what they meditate on. These are just memory and repetitions, which cannot connect you or integrate you with anything immediate or current and so prevent you going deeper, because you are too caught up in the thought processes, or thought based techniques to really feel your body.

To go deeper, you need to physically sense, and so feel your sense of being alive as you are sitting there, however that feels for you.

This simple return to feeling your physical sense of self, beneath the shallow surface of your thinking, is everything natural meditation is. Within this sense of you is merged everything about you, the understanding of which is only accessible at this depth of felt sensation.

This is the point at which the body-mind interconnection is revealed to you. This is where and how the unresolved and unconscious becomes conscious and resolvable for you. When you’re just sitting there, physically still, feeling all that there is to feel beneath the shallowness of thinking.

Immersed in this felt depth in the body is what will enable recovery from the effects of life and make you whole.

This is how you will go deeper in your meditation.

When you are actually meditating, you are as deep as you can go; the already felt, sensed and known body of you.

This fullness of sensing dominates, and the shallowness of thinking fades into insignificance.

When you’re using a technique, you are in a  thought process of trying to meditate. The repetition of a technique is therefore not yet meditation and will not become so.

In repeating a technique or manta you get stuck in trying to meditate, rather than actually meditating and this way you’ll never go any deeper. You will just keep trying forever, and at best satisfy yourself with hypnotically induced states which have some short-lived effect. But as these are also thought based they are still shallow and will in no way allow you to deepen your meditation.

The only way to get depth is to go beneath any thinking/techniques into the felt sensations within the body.

Undo Life Navigation app will teach you, guide you in all of this and more if you want to download it, there is heaps of information on the Undo website so you can have a look at the approach before you download it. But we have had a lot of success from this approach so we know that it works.

Comparing yourself is harming you.

Truly.

What happens when, say, you get injured and can’t lift as heavy or do as many reps as you could before you got injured?

Or when you realise you’re a bit greyer now than you were at the start of the year. Or a bit plumper. Or you had a great day yesterday, when everything went your way and you felt light and full of joy then today you feel crap and unmotivated. Or your partner doesn’t give you the appreciation you want.

What happens every single time we feel other than content? We start comparing.

We compare how we are now with how we were yesterday, or last week or maybe even last decade! Or we compare ourselves to someone else, either someone we know, someone completely random or someone we’ve been taught to admire, like celebrities. Or we compare ourselves to some ideal we have of how we should be, or want to be. How we wish we were.

Then what happens?

We feel worse than we did to start with! Because now we have two parallel universes going on – one that’s real and what’s actually going on, which is how we feel/look/performed etc, and one that’s imaginary, which is how we wish we felt/looked/performed etc.

Instead of just going with the flow of whatever’s actually going on, we make ourselves unhappy with that and unhappy overall by comparing it to something completely imagined! We’ve actually imagined our unhappiness into existence. It’s such a weird thing to do when you think about it but we all do it. We’re all even encouraged to do it.

It’s time to try something different

The next time you feel unhappy or dissatisfied with how you are or anything in your life, take a minute to see what it is you’re comparing it to. Coz you’ll be comparing it to something if you’re dissatisfied.

Guaranteed.

If you weren’t, you’d be fine with however you are or whatever’s going on. I don’t mean you’ll be happy about it, but you wont be opposed to it. And there’s a huge difference.

Comparison is what is causing your problems

Not comparing, you have no problem. You just have what you’ve got, and you’ll either respond to that in a way that takes care of that or you wont. But with comparing, you have what’s going on, which may or may not need a response from you, then on top of that you have the problem of being unhappy with it.

The sad thing about that is the original feeling or situation, which was all perfectly in proportion with reality, gets exaggerated and feels ten times worse than it really is. Which then makes you work ten times harder to try to ‘solve the problem’ and get ten times more drama and exhaustion, and distraction from everything else in your life, until it’s resolved. All completely unnecessarily!

So what’s the alternative?

This is what I’ve learned through experience. Many times.

Next time you find yourself in this never-ending circle, stop and recognise that you’re comparing. Then ask yourself how you’d feel about what’s going on if that was all you knew and you had nothing else to judge or measure it against.

Does it still feel so bad? Are you maybe even a bit curious or interested now in what you feel or what’s going on instead of being hard on it? Are you still in such a rush to have it over with?

Maybe none of that will be the case, but I can promise you that simply dropping the comparison and just taking things, and seeing things, as they are will be hugely relieving. You’ll get your perspective back. You won’t be so confused about what really needs to be done next. And you’ll have taken all the pressure off yourself to be anything other than what and how you are. And to me, that’s true freedom.

‘Mindful’ is our natural state.

But I have to start this article pointing out the irony that we can’t actually be mindful and be what the popular definition of mindful is – which is essentially self-aware.

I have issues with the belief in a ‘mind’ – I can’t find one anywhere in me and I haven’t ever come across anyone else who has found one in them, either. So I remain unconvinced. I definitely have thoughts, I just don’t believe they come from a ‘mind’.

In my experience, my thoughts come from sensations and can start anywhere in my body – my big toe, my nose, my tricep, literally anywhere. I know that’s a bit out there so for now, let’s just swap out ‘mind’ for the activity of thinking, or just plain thinking.

So, ‘mindful’ becomes ‘thinkingful’. It’s the same thing.

All we do with and in our supposed minds is think.

So to be mindful we must be thinking otherwise we would be nothingful or empty-ful. Blank. Quiet.

So then to be mindful, we have to be thinking. But if I am thinking, I’m not ‘present’.

Try it for yourself right now – wherever you are, however you are reading this article. Stop reading (once you know the next steps) and just BE.

So if you’re sitting, just sit – feel the contact of your skin with the chair. Feel yourself holding your torso upright or your head up. Feel where your feet are and what they’re making contact with. Same as if you’re standing. Feel yourself standing – the weight in your feet and up through your legs to your hips, shoulders and head. Just feel – for several seconds, maybe 10 or so.

Now start thinking about how you are sitting, think about the texture of seat underneath you, think about your feet and what they’re resting on. Same thing if you’re standing. Think about how you are standing.

What happens?

For me, and I’ll be surprised if it’s not the same for you, as soon as you start thinking two things happen (maybe more) – first, you can’t feel as much. It’s like somewhere or somehow you’ve taken a step back, a slight distance, from the raw and pure sensation you felt before you started thinking. Then second, you instantly also assessed how you were sitting or standing and felt the urge to change or correct it some way. You may have even done that.

Right?! Bizarre, isn’t it. Such a small and invisible thing as thinking exactly about the thing you are doing actually subtly disconnects you from the experience of it. You can imagine how much further the disconnection goes if you’re thinking about something else entirely – that’s when we can go through minutes, hours or even days at a time depending on how intense our thinking is, without really stopping the momentum and simply feeling.

Mindfulness implies a way of being. But I would argue it’s our natural state.

Before we had so much to think about, and learned to rely on our thoughts and intellect so much, we were much more – I would even say constantly – aware of how we felt, of the sensations going on in our bodies. It would have been our default state.

But now we are all so tied up in knots with all the things we’ve been through along the way that we didn’t know how to resolve, all the things that are expected of us and that we expect of ourselves, our need to anticipate and plan, and our attempts to manipulate and control the outcome of everything yet to come that we never stop thinking. It’s got its own momentum.

So for me, to expect yourself (or for someone else to expect you) to be able to be mindful or stop thinking or stop the momentum of your thinking is completely unrealistic. Let alone without firstly understanding why and how that thinking is occurring in the first place.

It’s no wonder people find it hard to meditate or feel like failures trying to, when their thinking keeps going. It’s inevitable! It’s nature and it can’t be stopped, not by trying, anyway.

So please, hear me!

You are NOT a failure if you can’t meditate because you can’t stop thinking, and I guarantee that you CAN meditate and get the full benefits of meditation regardless of what happens with your thinking!

Mindfulness is an unsolvable conundrum, a contradiction.

You can’t be self-aware and thinking at the same time, you can only be self-aware while you are feeling because it’s while you are feeling that you are connected with all of you and everything around you. We all know from experience how far away from reality our thinking can be – there doesn’t need to be any connection at all between how I feel or where I am and my thinking!

So you can drop all the pressure to stop thinking. You wont be able to by trying to.

In my experience, what happens is that when I’m feeling – feeling the physical sensations in my body – my thinking usually quietens right down and drifts into the background. It’s as though the foghorn that it was can stop blowing once my attention is where it needs to be, which is in the sensation.

Sometimes if a sensation is really intense, the thinking that comes along with it can be intense too. Sometimes it can take half an hour of sitting (meditation) in super-loud white-noisy thinking, just letting it all go on while I just stay fully feeling all the sensations in my body, before it’s burned itself out and things inside of me quieten down.

So is that half hour of thinking-while-meditating a failure or a waste of time? No way! The fact it was there proves to me that it was an effect of something – I didn’t put it there. So if I was affected by something, and in half an hour of sitting quietly that effect burned out to the point that I was quiet inside again, to me that’s the best half hour I spent that day!

Because what would have happened if I hadn’t had that time to process, digest and purge that effect?

It would have been compounded by whatever else happened that day, it would very likely have driven over-reactions to situations or people that wouldn’t normally have happened, it would have burned up energy that I might have otherwise used in the gym after work… you see? Whatever happens while we are sitting – meditating – is our bodies processing and cleansing the effects of our daily lives!

The key though is to feel.

As long as you are feeling the physical sensations in your body while just letting whatever thinking is happening go on, you are purging and healing and resolving. If you’re completely disconnected from how it feels in your body and just imagining stuff then yeah, you will just be going ‘round in circles and that thinking wont end.

But this is something you can try and find out for yourself.

Meditate one day and just do what you normally would – daydream, use a mantra or technique, try to stop thinking. Then meditate for a while just feeling, not worrying about what your thinking is doing. Just feel. You don’t need to scan or do anything intentional – you are you so you don’t need to use a technique to be able to feel you. That’s just weird.

Today I will be talking about anxiety, the most effective meditation for recovering from anxiety and how and why it will work for you.

I am going to explain the two basic reasons for anxiety, and how to resolve each of these. I am also going to explain the purpose of anxiety in our lives, explaining the reason for it and the purpose it serves.

If you have been unsuccessful with resolving your anxiety, here is the solution which I am sure you have not yet tried.
It is unlikely you have ever heard of what I am about to tell you before, or really understood how to do it if you have. If you had, you would have had success already.

Your anxiety is actually a cry for help. Something inside you needs attention. The attention it needs is for you to simply feel it. If you give anxiety the attention it needs, anxiety will calm down.
The more often you do this the more often you will succeed and the more your fear of anxiety will lessen, and lessen.
But it will help you to understand the following article so that you can do this for yourself.

You can experiment with this alternative approach using the following tried and proven exercise for yourself.

Whenever you feel anxious:

• Do not try to stop, fix or avoid your anxiety.
• Do not try to change it.
• Do not analyse or bother yourself by thinking about it.
• Feel the physical sensations of anxiety wherever and however they exist within your body.

Ignore your thinking for now. That doesn’t matter. Thinking about it is only a shallow distraction from the feeling of anxiety as it is in your body. And you need to feel that to heal it.
Only by feeling it (not thinking about it) will the anxiety dissipate and eventually end.
Only give importance to the feeling of it in your body and not to the content of your thinking – just keep coming back into the raw physical feeling of it.

Understanding more common anxiety

A common misconception is that anxiety is a psychological condition and therefore will be resolved on that level.
However, there is a bit more to it than that.
Approaching it on that level means you analyse or think about it which doesn’t actually help much. It’s just too shallow an approach to get to the guts of it and resolve it.

With closer consideration, anyone suffering from anxiety will know it is very physical.

Anxiety is what you feel somewhere in your body. Usually it is felt right up through the central core of your torso and mostly centralised from your stomach, up through your chest, and into your throat.
Then as it intensifies, you feel it radiate from these areas out through your chest and arms, jaw and face, and then dissipate towards the outer edges of your body. You can often feel it all through your nervous system.

It can feel like – just being on edge or fearful, or as though you are in some undefinable danger – and as it increases it can feel a bit like an electrical scream within and throughout you.

Clearly, and the point is, anxiety is primarily a physical disturbance and so can only be resolved on that same physical level. If you break your leg you must set the bone, you don’t go to counselling and think about it.

What is anxiety?

As the distress of unresolved tensions accumulates over time, these tensions are held and felt in your body as a presence of underlying distress. This distress and its disruption to the chemistry of your body also contributes to how it feels inside of you.

These disruptions to your chemistry and the tensions of distress are the two basic combined forces making up your anxiety, and they keep one another going.

Underlying distress is held and is felt to varying levels of intensity in your body. This distress both stimulates and is part of the chemical responses that add to how you feel, and in turn, your chemistry alerts you to this underlying distress. There, you have anxiety.

Why does anxiety become so physical?

Because we ignore or deny it and basically pretended that something that does bother us, doesn’t, or is okay, or didn’t really happen.
Often others, like the perpetrator of our distress, have encouraged this confusion in us for their own ends.
And so, we fool ourselves by mentally ignoring whatever has disturbed us, either internally, externally, or both.

But the body isn’t fooled and the body doesn’t lie.
That’s why, regardless of our denials, the body remains distressed.
It doesn’t agree with our thinking. It knows the truth, and you feel it.
And what you feel doesn’t match up with the lies you tell yourself in order to cope, so this only adds to your underlying anxiety.

Our felt distress or anxiety is a result of whatever we ignore or deny or tell ourselves to. Then that build-up of the feeling of anxiety in our body drives all our thinking about it to try and resolve it. But any failure to resolve it adds to our distress, from which we develop all sorts of anxious reactions. Then projection of our distress onto the world and to other people just increases, which again only adds to our anxiety.

Listen to your body.

All this is the result of the wrong approach to anxiety – that of trying to fix it through thinking about it rather than just feeling it in our body and thereby enabling it to dissipate naturally.

So why is our body making such a drama over these tensions or stresses we hold or suppress deeper within our bodies?

Because over time, it’s going to make us mentally and physically sick, and in its own way, the body knows or senses this.

We forget that the body we are, is nature itself and so is very intelligent, and as the body is nature, so we too are nature.
And nature’s primary drive is to survive.
So the anxiety we feel in our bodies is a natural intelligent alert to help us survive. It is not our enemy but our protector.
Our anxiety is an alert from within ourselves – to prevent physical deterioration into disease and prolonged mental imbalance or illness.
If we know how to listen to and respond to this, we will be more able to maintain optimal health­ – and to recover from and evolve through life experiences and difficulties.

Pause, to let this resonate inside you – to consider for a moment.

There are also our deeper more persistent anxieties which are there to alert us to past, unresolved harm that still exists as distress held within our body. We are supposed to feel these sensations in order to heal these from our bodies and from our life, not react to these and fight these.

The body has no natural resistance to the presence of these felt sensations because we are not supposed to resist them. Our ongoing felt-sense of these in the body is the natural meditation our body does and this is how we process the effects of life experiences and stay mentally and physically healthy and whole.

Then there are our more immediate or spontaneous daily anxieties to alert us to what harm is currently happening – to when others are trying to influence or manipulate us, are lying to us or in any way are of some danger to our well-being. We are supposed to notice these feelings or sensations in our body – and then respond to these to avoid harm to us.

Any animal knows this – and depends on this to survive – but we have learned to avoid and ignore our anxieties and interpret these as somehow wrong or bad or a sign of weakness.

When they are not.

So, they have become louder, more extreme and overwhelming for us, to the point of causing madness or insanity unique to our species alone. We need to listen to ourselves, to our anxiety, and respond to it, not try to be rid of it.

Pause, take your time to consider this, don’t rush.

Anxiety and all this complex transference of information is what is happening in our bodies all the time, and all before our thinking even becomes involved.

Once our thinking becomes involved, it is too often in the form of misguided reactions to something or someone outside of us or to a state felt inside of us.
These mental or emotionalised reactions or analysis only exaggerate and prolong the anxiety, and you get stuck there.

That is why most of you have been unsuccessful with resolving your anxiety. It is unlikely you have ever heard of doing this before, or know how to, or known that it is truly safe to feel your anxiety. Or that it is actually the correct thing to do.
If you want to heal it, which you do:
here again is the solution which most of you have yet to try.

• Do not try to stop, fix or avoid your anxiety.
• Do not try to change it.
• Do not analyse or bother yourself by thinking about it.
• Feel the physical sensations of anxiety wherever and however they exist within the body of you.

Ignore the contents of your thinking for now. That doesn’t matter. Consider it as just noise. Thinking about it will only distract you from feeling the anxiety as it is in your body. And you need to feel that to heal it.

Only by feeling it (not thinking about it) will the anxiety dissipate and eventually end.

Your main mistake is you have been trying not to be anxious when the truth is, you are.
You cannot be what you are not, so stop distressing yourself trying to be.
That will only increase your anxiety.
The solution or trick is to be exactly as you are. You need to give into that and feel the way you already feel. Only then will you begin to process the anxiety and enable it to change. And in this way, it will change but only in its own time and in its own way.

All you have to do is feel the sensations of it in your body. Nothing more, and your body will do the rest. Continue to try this for yourself. Try it again and again, and also listen to or read this article again and again, until you really start to get it. When you do get it, you will be amazed at how at ease you will become with anxiety and you will come to understand it, listen to it, and be guided by the intelligence of it in your life.  

The more often you respond by feeling your anxiety rather than thinking about it, the more you will enable your body to absorb it and the more easily you will find calm in your anxiety.

Now if you want to fully heal your anxiety and any deeper reasons for it being there, I only recommend a meditation that is not using techniques or any thinking process to meditate. If you meditate using a technique it will distract you from what you need to be feeling and will only suppress or modify your anxiety or numb you to it for a while. Which is the opposite to what you really need.

Just as the numbing effects of drug therapy has been historically proven to postpone and so prolong the healing process, techniques applied to meditate are also designed to change how you are or feel. So again, they are diversions from or suppression of the anxiety which you need to feel in order to heal or resolve it. Like drug therapy, their use only puts off the inevitable.

Eventually we need to enable the body’s natural healing process of any condition suffered to occur. And this natural process is accessed or triggered by you purely feeling however you feel within the body of you.

Now some of you will need to dig deeper, into understanding trauma-based anxiety.

So far, I have talked about the type of anxiety experienced by most people some of the time.
But there is a more severe form of anxiety, and when you have it you suffer it most of the time. It is always just there, in the background, felt deep down inside your body. It regularly inflames into overwhelming levels of anxiety, like panic, paranoia and terror and various other conditions such as allergies, phobias or overthinking.

This type of anxiety is the result of deeply suppressed trauma held in the body. This is often from childhood disassociations from abusive events. It is where, although you have no known reason for the level of distress experienced or the mental disorders suffered, there is however, the deeper feelings remembered by the body – as though some horrific event must have occurred.
Such feelings suggest it has.
You just don’t have the descriptive memorised details, but you do have the felt memory in the way it had affected you and in the way it has left you traumatised or feeling a bit crazy at times, if not, secretly crazy all the time.

Fortunately, throughout the last 35 years of my work I have discovered how you can heal from the more severe anxieties of trauma. Clients and students of my approach, who had suffered traumatic anxiety, achieved unprecedented success in recovering from and healing the effects of their traumas and therefore from their anxiety.

I also discovered how the healing process is the same for common anxiety as it is for trauma-based anxiety. For trauma-based anxiety it is certainly tougher going and takes more time and persistence and requires more support. There are more tendencies to block out, ignore, fear and avoid the pain which you actually need to feel in order to heal. And the feelings that emerge during your healing of anxiety will be the last thing you want to feel.

But learning how to feel these in your body will be what inevitably heals you.

Therefore, even though these two levels of anxiety are very different in their intensities, it is more your deeper, unknown reasons for resisting certain feelings or sensations of distress that are making it harder to embrace the healing process, and to persist with just feeling your underlying anxieties when they erupt or occur.

These anxieties can seem irrational, though they are not. You just don’t know their cause yet. The underlying presence of these make your thought-reactions more complex, and tricky, offering lots of reasons to stop, to give up or avoid your distress or pain, and therefore cease further processing or healing of these.
If it is deeper trauma you are healing, you can expect incomprehensible distress and confusion to arise during your life and during your healing. But eventually it will pass. Each time you feel it in your body you decrease the amount of stress held there. Each time, the energy of it will decrease until eventually it will end.

Whenever anxiety arises, the sooner you settle into the deeper feelings of it in your body, the sooner you will ease your pain each and every time, and the more you will heal what is within you.

No matter how hard it is to continue your healing process, it is feeling how it feels to be you, (not thinking about it) that has been proven to work and again and again. Both with many thousands of clients attending my clinics and for others during more than 200 meditation retreats which I have run over these past 35 years.

Giving in to and feeling the anxiety itself has been proven again and again to enable the body’s natural purge of the effects of trauma-based anxiety. Purely feeling any distress or pain that arises triggers the body’s natural healing process. Your body, which is nature itself, has the only complete healing process there is operating within it. That’s why it works. And as you are the body, as you are in fact nature, that is why it will work for you as well.

Where you can go to learn more on this for yourself.

The Undo app has been developed to educate and guide you in how to access or trigger this natural process.

Undo will introduce you to the uniquely physical meditation which the body does naturally, as the basis of the healing process. Undo also provides a specific exercise and real to life information under the title of ‘The Significance of Illness’ that will take you further into applying what you have begun to learn from this article.

So you can take this further for yourself now.

The Undo approach has resulted from carefully following and learning from what the body does whenever it needs to recover. This is why, this meditation is so effective with helping to resolve anxiety.

You will learn how and why you need to embrace and resolve anxiety at its source of origin in the body in order to heal. The Undo approach explains and guides you through this healing process and actually triggers the body’s natural way of resolving it. And so it works.

It works by taking you deeper – beyond all techniques to change it and beneath all thinking about your anxiety – into the underlying and quiet feeling of anxiety within your body. This immediately reduces the distress associated with anxiety which you cause yourself by your thoughts about it and your efforts to change it. Feeling it in this way continues to disperses its intensity until it eventually dissolves completely.

This approach and knowledge is so important because …

It has been completely overlooked and therefore has been unavailable until now. And so you and so many others have continued to suffer unnecessarily.

When the healing of anxiety, distress or deeply penetrating trauma is required, all our applications of therapy are too shallow. Relying too heavily on thinking, overrating its use and purpose as a problem solver or healer, they only touch the surface of our pain and distress and are unable to achieve complete recovery.

Traditionally, and due to overthinking we have overlooked the natural healer we all are, within and for ourselves, and have not understood how it is triggered into action by the natural act of simply feeling the pain or anxiety within our bodies.

By experimenting with this unique approach for yourself you can now begin to access and trigger the healing force of nature within your body. Your body is fully equipped for you to do this for yourself.
You can trust your own body. It never lies or misguides you. However it feels inside of you is how it should feel and be. The presence of anxiety also indicates your body is going through its own healing process. So stop fighting it and go along with. And give it a chance to recover, and you will.

In this article we will be discussing the five most common benefits of meditation.

Now meditation, unlike most activities is not a set routine, which means it does not have a set outcome and therefore no set result to strive for.

When you exercise, for example – whether that be cardio or lifting weights – you are doing a similar activity every time and in doing so you will get the same result every single time you do that activity – in this example; sweating, weight loss, and/or muscle gain.

Also, you usually have a goal or result, which you strive for.

However, when you meditate each time is different. Each time is a discovery of your uniqueness rather than an effort to improve on that – you.

Sure, on the outside you will be doing the same thing, – simply sitting very still. But on the inside you will often be feeling different pains or disturbances as the build-up of daily or life-long tensions leave your body – which is often followed by insights and relief.

And then of course the very fulfilling feelings of going into a deeper quieter sense of yourself follows each time.

Because each time you meditate will be affected by what you are feeling that day, whatever you are going through that day and where you are coming from in wanting to meditate in the first place will uniquely determine your meditation experience.

So this article is not about things that you need to strive for or look for in your meditation.

This article is to help explain for you, the experiences and changes that can come out of meditation. These experiences and changes in you can occur over a long period of time, or they can happen straight away.

But these benefits are not set in stone. They vary from person to person.

And unlike exercise there is no goal to be reached. You are just sitting down and experiencing yourself exactly how you are, in order to more deeply understand and appreciate being you.

And unique to all other activities – in which you are trying to improve yourself somehow – the benefits that come from the activity of meditating is you experience yourself more deeply than ever – from which you discover – you are perfectly fine with yourself as you are.

And believe me, that’s a huge and very real relief.

Now enough of the explanation, let’s get into it…

Number One:
The most common and simple benefit is the quiet time.

I know that sounds very basic and straight forward and you might be thinking –

‘Well I can get quiet time whenever I want, why do I need to meditate to get that?’

Well that’s it.

We don’t get real quiet time. We get semi-quiet time like sitting reading a book, or going on our phone or sleeping. We don’t get real quiet time where we can just experience how we are feeling, to experience and discover what is really going on in our body – Not without getting distracted by the activity of unrelated thinking or things going on around us.

We – the body – need quiet time every day, to experience, digest and relieve ourselves of the effects that life has on us.

Because – when we meditate we are able to release the disturbing or annoying effects of excessive or unwanted thinking and return to a deeper quieter sense of feeling in our body. Doing this is how we respond to ourselves fully.

This way we are able to cope more easily with what people and life throw at us relatively easily.

The more you do this – the more real quiet time you give yourself – the more you will see and experience the beneficial changes in both your mental and physical health.

By giving yourself the time and attention to heal, resolve and dissolve any stress, disturbances or just life experiences that have affected you, both mentally and physically, any needed recovery or changes get a chance to happen naturally. It’s what your body will do if you just give it some real quiet time.

This meditation, this quiet time is the highest quality of ‘me’ time.

You are giving yourself 10 minutes or 30 minutes or 2 hours a day, to just come back to yourself and give yourself the attention you need. Away from the distractions of thinking or socialising or technology. 

Just by doing this at least once a day you will start to see changes within your life without even trying to change things.  Because you are finally giving yourself the attention and ‘self-love’ that you – the body – needs, a natural and automatic correction kicks in. This is because your body knows exactly what is needed and what to do. Real quiet time gives this a chance to happen within you. Try it for yourself. You might be surprised.

Number Two:
Understanding and resolving the stresses and behaviours that make up you.

Now I know that may sound weird, but hear me out.

In our day-to-day life we have stresses, pains and disturbances that occur within us throughout the day. And because of these we react in certain ways and have certain behaviours that often we don’t even understand.

These will vary depending on the day, situation and/or mood we are in. But they appear within us regularly in our everyday life, and they are so normal that usually we don’t even notice them.

Sometimes, we will do something or react a certain way and in that moment we will question ourselves, – ‘oh why did I react like that’ OR ‘why do I feel this way now’ – these are some of the things that we will start to discover and recover from, as other benefits of meditation. 

When you’re sitting physically still – while meditating – you are able to get in touch with and be more aware of certain behaviours, feelings, reactions etc. that you wouldn’t normally notice just living your life.

Some of these feelings you may even recognise from your day-to-day life.

Let’s say a certain ‘stress’ you are used to and regularly notice from work.

The longer and more often you sit still, giving yourself real quiet time, the more you will be able to see or sense this feeling – of stress – popping up in many areas of your life. You will soon see the exact same feeling just duplicating itself in different parts of your life.

This is because, when we create a certain behaviour in a certain part of our life, until we resolve that behaviour, it will continue to pop up again and again in other areas of our life for the rest of our lives.

For example, if you create a stressful feeling and behaviour around say, school-work when you’re a child, and you never resolve that feeling, later down the track in adult working-life, your learned association with that feeling, will repeat as an exaggerated reaction to the feeling of stress and generate a similar behaviour as an adult. This is usually because you have unconsciously associated the current environment of ‘work’ with the past environment of ‘school’ because of the underlying feeling of stress being the same. That unresolved and familiar feeling of stress from school is the common denominator linking these two environments. So your reaction at work now is irrationally a stressful one. Then it is common for all work-related things to become stressful for you, even if, as an adult they really aren’t.

In order to resolve this you need to stay with the feeling – the stress – however that feels in your body, and feel it to its end.

Often the longer you sit with this feeling the stronger it will become, until it gets to a breaking point and from there that feeling will start to fade. In turn, and once this old feeling dissipates from within your body, how you feel about your work or any work-related environments will change and will no longer be a cause of irrational or overwhelming distress for you.

Because you have finally given that feeling or sensation the attention it needs, it is able to resolve and dissipate naturally, rather than remain suppressed and then erupting in reaction to your work from time to time.

So overwhelming distress in adult situations are generally due to behaviours learned in childhood which we haven’t grown out of yet. Being a child under adult pressure is very difficult but being an adult under adult pressures is pretty easy.

It is important to understand that we cannot force change on these behaviours or feelings that we don’t like, but the longer and more we sit with them, feeling their presence within us the more they will dissipate. Or in daily life, whenever they show up as reactions to our life, the more you just feel these within your body rather than act on these, the more they will dissolve. In this way, you will allow your feelings and the behaviours they drive to change organically, on their own and in their own time, and they will change this way.

Number Three:
Self-acceptance comes from understanding you.

Now obviously we live with ourselves.

Every. Single. Day.

We know all our ins and outs.  We know that we hate tomatoes and love cheese, that we prefer bread over pasta and so on and so forth.

But there are certain things about ourselves that we don’t understand.

So when we are able to sit quietly with ourselves, and really feel everything that is going on for us, whether it be good, or bad, or ugly, or beautiful, if we can sit with this and just experience it as it is, we will come to discover and accept everything about us, which on its own is another one of the benefits of meditation.

Real meditation is about understanding. It is about understanding yourself and what is going on for you. It’s not about understanding the universe or finding out about an imagined bigger picture, or striving for mythical goals like becoming enlightened. It is purely and simply about finding out about you, from being you and so the result is – understanding YOU.

Little old you.

Now when I say ‘understanding’, what I mean is more of a deeper felt-sense of understanding rather than an intellectual one.

While sitting with, or experiencing these emotions, sensations, feelings etc. that go on in your body, you will come to a deeper understanding of yourself this way. Whether you understand it intellectually or you just feel clarity and understanding from within it, doesn’t matter. Both can and will happen. But the intellectual understanding will come after your sensed or felt understanding. Your intellectual understanding – what you think – is only the description of – what you already know in your experienced discovery of what it is to be you.

So as you sit physically still and feel all the sensations, feelings, itches, aches and pains throughout your body, you become aware of so much more from within these pains.

Over the years I have been meditating there are things that I have discovered about myself that I never would have if I didn’t meditate.

For example…

Say one day I’m feeling particularly shitty. My mood is low, everything around me sucks because of it and so my work sucks, my food sucks, basically everything sucks.

You get my point.

So instead of sitting around getting annoyed by my mood or trying to figure it out. I’ll sit down and meditate. Which means I will sit down and go deeper than my thinking, beneath all that background noise and into just the feeling of me in my body. That’s it! I won’t try to change it. I will just feel however it feels inside me, the body. It may take 10 minutes, it may even take an hour, but soon that shitty feeling will start to fade.

As far as benefits of meditation go this is huge.

Now sometimes I won’t know why I felt shitty or what was causing my bad mood and that’s perfectly fine, there is no need to always intellectually KNOW every little detail. That’s the brilliant part, that’s the brilliance of the body – you are just able to experience the feeling in there and in that moment, you understand it physically as a deeper felt understanding rather than a superficial or intellectual one.

Because that’s most of it. The intellectual part is just the last part of putting understanding into words. The first part, or the first 9/10ths of it, exists inside the body as all the sensations in there. And without that felt-understanding you will never understand you.

Sure thinking is a big part of our life. It is this little voice yabbering away in our head 24/7. But our physical sensations and feelings are a whole other level of understanding.

And THAT is the understanding I’m talking about here.

So in sitting with that shitty feeling, I’m able to resolve whatever it was, and feel ‘better’ in myself.

The bonus of understanding on this level – our deeper body sense – is that sitting with and processing a distressful feeling in this way, is the distress or shitty part attached to any feeling eventually drops away. So what was the ‘shitty’ feeling changes and is then felt, understood and becomes acceptable.

The second bonus is, any fear or dislike of the possibility of that or other disturbing feelings coming up again in the future is also lessened because you have a new understanding of how to resolve your disturbances. This proves to you how you are able to resolve any future distress for yourself.

This is one of the hugely practical benefits of meditation that changes your fear of any feelings that you have struggled with in life.

So we don’t need to always understand ourselves on an intellectual level. If we are just able to sit for 10, 20, 60 minutes a day with ourselves and experience how we are feeling that day, without judgment or criticism, we will fully get it, we will get what it is to be ourselves and also, be okay with that. How cool is that!

Now this is understanding ourselves. This is accepting yourself.

Then as life goes on, things you do start to become more clear for you, and your annoying behaviours, disturbing feelings or upsetting reactions to certain things will fade and you, without even realising it will start to change into really being you.

Number Four:
How you treat yourself determines how you treat others.

Because how we treat others will always reflect in some way how we treat and/or think about ourselves.

The treatment of yourself is so important, and if you’re treating yourself badly or thinking about yourself in a bad way it can affect you both mentally and physically.

I know there are a lot of people out there who feel great hatred for themselves and no matter what the facts are, or what people tell them, they cannot see any other view of themselves.

And I can vouch for this. I use to hate myself deeply and no matter what people told me I couldn’t seem to like myself. Sometimes this hatred would build up so much inside me that I’d end up lashing out at people, my parents, friends, anybody.

Even though I didn’t want to and knew it was wrong, I couldn’t help myself.

But once I started meditating I found my self-hatred became less and my outbursts at others were less frequent.

I started to sit longer with the anger and the self-hatred and the longer I sat with it, the more it would fade and I was soon left with just sadness.

This overwhelming sadness.

And the more my anger faded the more it revealed that underneath it I was actually very sad.

So I would just stay with that.

Without judgment or reaction, just sitting physically still and feeling the sadness throughout my whole body.

Sometimes when I was in distress or vulnerable the anger and frustration at myself and the world would come back and all the thoughts and feelings would come screaming back and I’d hate myself or my parents or the world.

But as these feelings were lessening, I wasn’t feeling like this all the time any more, and it would only come in bursts.

And I found that if I didn’t go along with the thoughts, didn’t play their little game and agree with them, they wouldn’t be so loud or have so much effect on me. I did this by coming back to my feelings that were behind or beneath those thoughts, and just feeling them.

This I found worked the best.

Because if you ignore a bully, if you don’t play their little game and agree with what they’re saying, they’ll get bored and move on, or in the case of your thoughts, they’ll eventually fade away.

It’s the same with these thoughts about yourself, which are often like bullies, the more you just keep living, keep meditating, keep going about your life and just let those thoughts go on in the background, unattended, the quieter they will become until eventually they fade away completely.

So…

Do not go along with the thoughts.

Do not agree with the thoughts.

Do not indulge in the feelings.

But, do not suppress them either. If you are just feeling them, without indulging in them by thinking about them, or acting them out, then you are not suppressing them, you are resolving them.

Then you will no longer give them any power or relevance in your life. The thoughts or feelings you stop thinking about and indulging in, just stop. How you do this is you go deeper into the feelings that drive them, in however you feel in your body.

And the longer and more often you sit with the feelings, of anger, frustration, hatred or sadness, the quicker you will heal, resolve and dissolve these feelings altogether.

As the feelings are healed and resolved, so the thoughts which they drive or express will also go.

But the most important thing to remember, while going through this, while feeling and experiencing these feelings in meditation or in every-day life –

– is that these feelings are not wrong.

Just because you don’t like feeling this way doesn’t mean there is something wrong with feeling this way. You just don’t like it. But this is just how you feel in this moment. Whether you are feeling happy, or sad, or excited. They are all just another feeling which will change in time and without all the fuss and distress, if you just feel it.

So in the process of healing them. Do not judge them, do not hate them. Because in doing so you are playing their game, you are agreeing with them, and you are not helping yourself in anyway.

None of these feelings are wrong anyway. You should be this way. You are this way because of whatever has happened to you. You are only the way you are because something has made you that way and the way you are is a natural reaction to that.

The horrible feelings of being you are there so that you can know what you need. They make you feel them, they make you feel that way to heal you, not to hurt you. They are not wrong. They are what is going to heal you, and in the end, feeling them will be what causes all the changes you want. Nothing else will.

Finally, in doing all of this. Your treatment of others will change naturally as your treatment of yourself improves. And it will improve as your understanding of the above, and of yourself deepens. Try holding the sense of this new understanding for a while, let it resonate for you, see how it feels in your body, this is your meditation, to feel the sense of this for a while. This is your own personal meditation, to feel the sense of however you are feeling. Make sure you come back to this again and again until you see your way clear of the harmful mistake of self-judgement. And eventually you won’t judge yourself anymore. And then wherever your system needs to change itself, it can and it will.

Number Five:
Healing – one of the most underestimated benefits of meditation.

Now this is for me the most basic and obvious benefit of meditation. Because this is the benefit that ties all benefits together.

Because you are meditating, you are willingly going through or feeling the presence and effects of these behaviours, these feelings, these pains and thoughts. That is why and how you are healing them, that is why and how you are healing yourself.

No matter if it is a small thing or a large thing, known or unknown to you, while meditating you are healing.

Simply because you are sitting physically still with yourself, without judgment or criticism or any ideas of how you should be, (although these will come up at times) by just being as you are for now, your body gets a chance to heal everything that needs healing. You don’t need to try to achieve anything yourself. That’s not how nature cures itself. As you are the body and the body is nature, you should let it do what it needs to and it will. And now you know how to, you can.

And in doing this you are unconsciously and unintentionally healing yourself from what life has put on you, what others have put on you, but most importantly from what you yourself have learned to put on you.

It is that simple. It is that straightforward. Feel it and you will heal. Ignore or deny it and you won’t heal.

All you need to do is be with yourself, really be with yourself, for all the real quiet time you need. And then you will receive all the healing benefits you need from just doing that. During your quiet time you simply need to stop thinking about yourself or others by going deeper into feeling all the most–obvious and, just as importantly, the most–subtle sensations in your body. This is the greatest benefit of meditation, this real and natural meditation of the body we are. It’s all the body wants and needs to take care of itself as only nature – the body can. And if you let it, in this way, it will.

In this article we will be discussing how to meditate and why meditating without techniques and methods is preferable.

I will be helping you learn:

• The vast difference between using meditation techniques, mantras and other methods to try to meditate and simply experiencing and understanding yourself in meditation.
• How to experience and understand yourself without using techniques and methods to meditate
• What goes on while you are meditating and how to approach it

I use the term ‘learn’ loosely, for learning meditation is very different to learning any other mechanical activity. Real meditation is more a discovery of yourself that expands and deepens as you go, rather than a method you learn and then apply to yourself.

So let’s begin…

The differences between trying to meditate and actually meditating.

Meditation is seen in society as a technique-based activity. You sit down cross-legged and start saying a mantra or use your thinking to create a certain state that this technique says is the desired state. A state that is the result of that mantra or that thinking…

This technique is proposing that the current state you are in right now is somehow wrong or bad and needs to be fixed or changed.

So the focus becomes so much about achieving this certain state in order for us to be ‘meditating’, that we overlook and squash what we already are, and also completely lose touch with what we are actually doing; the physical act of meditation.

We become fascinated by the technique we have been told we need to be using, focusing on what we need to be thinking, trying to feel how we need to be feeling and pushing down or getting rid of our current state because it is seen as wrong or ‘unenlightened’.  

So by using these techniques we are escaping or losing touch with how we actually feel by applying all these thoughts and ideas and goals, to the point where we are no longer experiencing the meditation itself. In fact we are no longer experiencing ourselves, which is what meditation is all about. We are trapped in the repetition of the technique.

Real meditation is really about experiencing the physical sense of you, not imposing ideas or ways of being on yourself.

While using a technique or mantra, we are experiencing the effect of that technique or that mantra and we are distracting ourselves from the real experience of us.

So if these techniques take us away from the physical experience of ourselves into an idea or goal of how we think we should be feeling….

And meditation is about experiencing the sense of ourselves…

Then these techniques are not meditation.

These techniques are thinking about meditation.

It may seem the same, but like thinking about driving a car or thinking about having sex…  

It’s very different to the actual activity, isn’t it?

And that’s the problem; you are thinking, when you need to be feeling, sensing, experiencing.

And here’s the kicker…

These techniques to meditate, these mantras or whatever you’ve been told to do, is as far away from actually meditating, actually experiencing yourself, as watching a movie is from you being the character in the movie.

Or driving a car is from pretending to.

Or having sex is from imagining it.

Or sitting in a hot bath but not truly feeling it is because you are lost in thought about something else.

You could be sitting in a nice hot bath. You start out feeling the soothing heat of the bathwater, sensing the smell of the bubbles, the sound of the water… when suddenly, returning from some distraction, you feel how now the water is cold, the bubbles are gone. You have lost time thinking and forgotten where you were, and forgotten to actually experience it.

This is exactly the same with meditation techniques – you spend the whole meditation trying to meditate, trying to experience yourself, trying to achieve a certain state, you forget about the actual physical act of meditation.

So rather than trying so hard to meditate, to achieve some state or goal. Come back to the physically felt sense of yourself in your body, and there you have it.

Meditation isn’t about achieving anything or trying to be a certain way. It is about feeling however you are feeling in that moment. And your understanding of yourself comes out of that.

So how do we meditate?

In order to understand ‘how to meditate’ we must understand that ‘meditation’ has to be separated from the techniques to meditate. Separate from the mantras, the humming, the thinking, all the imagining. That should be left at the door.

And if you haven’t got that by now maybe you should re-read the above…

Got it?

So as I said, learning ‘how to’ meditate, is very different to learning any other mechanical activity.

It’s different to learning ‘how to’ drive a car or ‘how to’ clean your teeth, etc.

This is because with any normal mechanical activity you are adding information to yourself that you need and didn’t already know. Before you start learning how to drive a car you don’t know how to use the gears or the side mirrors, this is all new information that is being added to all the information you already know.

Are you still with me..?

BUT with meditation, you are actually subtracting that type of information. Not in a bad way, not in a ‘I knocked my head and now I can’t remember my times tables’ way.

Meditation is more; we take something we do every single day of our life and we subtract the complications.

For example; basically half our life we are sitting – however that maybe – but we will be fidgeting or on our phones or watching TV or writing. In so many ways we will be distracting ourselves from ourselves by constantly doing things as well.  

When you meditate, you take the sitting and subtract the doing – the distracting – and you just sit physically still.

That’s it, simple.

We take away the distractions of constantly doing things and thinking about other things and we stay with what is left. The physically felt sense of yourself in the body.

Now what is that, felt sense of yourself, you’re probably asking yourself.

The physically felt sense of yourself, or the sense of yourself in the body, is basically that.

It is how you are feeling in every moment.

Whether it’s; sad or happy, sick or nervous, or a mixture. How you are feeling in this exact moment, that is the physically felt sense of yourself. And that is all you feel when you’re really meditating.

So what happens when you’re sitting physically still?

There is a lot more to meditation then people realise. It goes deep without you trying to. This goes deeper than any traditional, technique-based meditations ever have or can.

It’s about understanding and accepting. Fully understanding what is going on, right there as it is going on, is what naturally happens in the deeper sensory – feeling – level of you. And when you have understanding, acceptance is inevitable.

Why? Because your feeling, sensory level goes deeper than your thinking and complaints about how you are. It goes deep into how you really feel, without those complaints.

And that’s really cool because at that depth you discover you are fine with yourself as you are and that your complaints were just stopping you from finding that out.

Truly feeling your physical sense of yourself leads to accepting what is going on inside you, rather than slapping on a technique and hoping for the best or trying to change.

So you sit physically still.

Feeling the physically felt sense of yourself in the body.

Your thinking will go on, just let it.

Your thinking is just the smoke from the fire of your feelings. Just the off-gassing from how you feel and the healing that’s happening by you being in the physical sense of yourself in the body. The release of energy or distress from the purging of unresolved feelings.

And as you sit, the longer you sit physically still, more sensations will start to arise as they release from deeper inside you. Such as pain, disturbance, annoyance, resistance, numbness.

These are normal. These are just part of your meditation. These are the feelings that we have ignored in day-to-day life, that are now having the opportunity to come and have their say.

Let me explain;

For years I used to get frustrated with the feelings that would come up when I meditated, these annoying feelings that I recognised from day-to-day life that I had avoided on purpose because they felt horrible.

Feelings like; anxiety, fear, sadness. Feelings I had purposely squashed because I didn’t like or want the feelings.

It wasn’t until I got older (currently I am 21…started sitting on meditation retreats at 13) that I realised that these feelings are part of me, and in trying to ignore them or squish them down, I in turn was ignoring and squishing down a part of me. Which I can’t do, these sensations will always be there with me because they are me.

I can’t avoid myself, I can’t squish myself down, I am myself, I am always here. So these sensations were always going to be there until I took notice of them.

And so I started to understand the benefit of staying with these sensations. The longer I sat with them, the more they would dissipate and I soon realised that in day-to-day life, these feelings were no longer there, no longer prominent in my life, no longer inhibiting parts of my life.  

Would you like an example?

Of course you would…

So for years I struggled with anxiety, which unfortunately was making it harder for me to do certain things, socialising, meeting new people, going out in public alone, travelling, clubbing; the whole ordeal.

So one day I was mediating, I was about 18 at the time and this feeling came up, this feeling of absolute terror, pressing down on my chest, I felt like I couldn’t breath and my first instinct was to jump up and get as far away from that feeling as possible.

But I couldn’t, because that feeling was me, there was no escaping it.

So I decided to stay with it, I was curious to see what that feeling was, where it was coming from and although it was scary, I wanted to know why I was so scared of it and more importantly I was sick of being anxious.

So I stayed with the feeling. I sat physically still and felt this terror inside of me and soon, after a while the feeling started to fade. And then back in my daily life, and as time went on, the more I sat with this feeling it soon/eventually vanished altogether, and I noticed that my fear to meet new people, talk to strangers, travelling, clubbing, all seem to fade. And other fears dropped away as well. All these changes were showing up in me in my daily life. It was great.

So in turn I realised that not only was this fear attached to my anxiety, it was also attached to other issues I had in life. The fear of being alone, the fear of death, my claustrophobia.

All these feelings wanted was a chance to have their say, a chance for me to accept and understand them, without judgment or fear. I needed to understand that they are just another part of me, like the feeling of happiness or joy or nervousness, they are all just feelings.

I’m not saying I was completely fearless. No, not at all.

What I’m trying to share with you is that these feelings; these feelings that we avoid in day-to-day life, just want to be heard.

We judge these feelings/our feelings too hard, we label them; terrible, horrible, gross, depressing, because we don’t like how they feel or how they make us act, so we push them down. We judge them and we think there is something wrong with us because of them.

This is also why using meditation techniques never work. Because in using techniques we are viewing these feelings as bad and wrong and that we need to treat them with mantras and techniques in order to change them. When really we just need to feel them and acknowledge that they are just another sensation that’s a part of us. In doing so they will fade and stop holding us back in our lives.

As it did for me.

Why would I be encouraging you to sit through these feelings that come up for you, if it wouldn’t help you?

I guarantee, that you sitting with these feelings, whether they’re small or medium or big, will have a drastic change in your life.

Meditation is about understanding. By this I mean…

Once you understand that these feelings are just a part of you wanting to have a little chat, your resistance to them will also fade and in turn you will be able to heal them for good.

Okay, now it’s your turn.

Now it’s your turn to take this information and use it to your advantage.

Sit down, every day for at least ten minutes, sit with any feelings that arise within you.

If you don’t feel anything at first, that is fine. You are just feeling the numbness from every time you have pushed down these feelings.

Soon the numbness will fade and you will be able to experience yourself, without the distractions, without the judgment, without you trying to change how it feels to be you. This is how your understanding will grow and this understanding will come from what I am asking you to do for yourself. You won’t get it from others, or from anywhere else. It has to be from you, from your feelings.

This is not some technique, or spiritual cliché. This is you discovering and then understanding and accepting every part of you without judging it to be wrong and trying to change it. This will only happen from feeling your feelings wherever they are inside your body. But don’t try to get rid of them. They will fade, but only by feeling them like they are now. If it gets too much just have a slow quiet walk or pat your dog, but stay quiet and slow while you are feeling this way, at least for a while.

This is extremely beneficial.

It won’t always be easy to be with the sensations that you feel inside of yourself, sometimes it will be difficult, or even painful.

But the important thing when this happens, is to recognise your resistance to that pain, to that disturbance and come back to the feeling without judging it OR the resistance to it.

And understand that this resistance too, is an important part of your meditation. And treat your resistance as just another sensation by understanding it is just a sensation, and accepting it.

The more you feel this as a sensation in the body, you will actually experience dramatic changes in that and that will bring about dramatic changes in your life and your capacity to be way more at ease with all that life throws at you.

Whatever is going on in you while you meditate is going on for good reason. Whether it be pain, happiness, resistance, disturbance. Understand and accept it by feeling it as it is without judgment.

And this is the massive difference between you really meditating and you using techniques, mantras and methods to meditate. This is just our natural ordinary way to heal and accept and really understand ourselves.

Using Undo App with your meditation.

Throughout the foundations of Undo are guided meditations that are based on topics of that foundation.

For example; Foundation 2 is Reactions, so the guided meditations are based on your reactions to meditation, pain, life, etc.

In these guided meditations you are able to pick times from 5-minute meditations to 40 minutes and in Foundation 8 (Meditation) there is even an hour-long meditation.

I have found these guided meditations extremely helpful throughout my meditations. Even though I have been meditating for 8 years now, I still sometimes find it hard to feel motivated to meditate, so these guided meditations help me just stay with how I feel in the body rather than drift off into thinking and moving around etc.

So if you are having trouble starting or getting motivated to meditate, I would 100% recommend checking them out.

I sometimes even listen to them on the plane or on public transport if I am feeling a little stressed or all over the place and I just need a little help coming back to the sense of myself.

In this article, we will be discussing both broad and specific views on what is meditation and how it works.

I’m going to introduce you to the only meditation I know of that is not based in or somehow connected to religion, tradition or spirituality. It comes from my own discovery of how nature and the body that we are self corrects, heals itself and generally works. It is the meditation our body does naturally whenever it needs to recover, repair or change in some way.

I have held over 200 meditation retreats and discovered cures for the most complex mental and physical problems. Approaching mental and physical health as one integral issue I have treated over 30,000 people, with unprecedented success over the last 35 years.

It is due to my unique discoveries that I can offer a very useful and unique approach to meditation and to your own healing and understanding of yourself. This includes my discoveries of the significance of pain, illness and distress to be nature’s (the bodies) indicators of our need to evolve and develop.

From this article, you will gain an understanding of:

• How the meditation our body does naturally has the ability to trigger profound, life-altering changes, whenever we need it, because it directly affects the foundation of us as living organisms.
• How traditional meditation skims the surface of what we are, and relying so heavily on thinking, it can never penetrate deeper than that. 
• Sensing, feeling, thinking, meditation without thinking, and what is required for change to occur.

Some of this may come as a surprise and will be challenging at times, but this is often so when what we have come to trust and believe is exposed as flawed…

For thousands of years, we (humans) have been misled by the mysticism of religious and traditional meditation and the goal of self-improvement or enlightenment.

It’s been a part of my life’s work to demystify this ideal and expose the evidence discovered.

And in this article, I’ll be sharing some of these discoveries with you.

So firstly you’ll need some understanding of…

What is traditional meditation?

And why it can’t deliver what meditation really can and should.

So let’s dig in…    

As the traditional meditations are rooted in religious or spiritual beliefs, by design, they are very effective for unconsciously instilling their particular values, just by your regular practice of them.

Which is great if you are a believer but an unwanted imposition and side effect if you are not.

By applying meditation techniques, traditions have unknowingly modified meditation by turning it into a technique to achieve something or gain something, either aligned with that tradition or with a personal goal.

And that desired achievement or gain is either a state of ‘enlightenment’ or a way to better or improve yourself, which is (perhaps unintentionally or by default) based on the belief or view that you are somehow lacking and need to improve, which I will go into later.

Due to the underlying belief of needing to improve, the primary problem becomes the same for everyone.

Traditionally, spiritual goals of self-improvement or enlightenment have been viewed as more respectable pursuits than material or financial pursuits.

The spiritualist viewed material pursuits as unimportant, trivial desires, unworthy of their attention and even beneath them.  

On the flip side, and until recently, the down to earth materialist tended to frown upon and disregard these spiritual pursuits as meaningless woo-woo, and possibly overlooked the massive benefits of looking within and bringing these two worlds together.

But when you go into the deeper motivation behind both spiritual and material pursuits you discover they are, in fact, one and the same.

Superficially, the final goals may seem different, one spiritual and the other material, but the motivational urge driving both is the same – to feel better about yourself and to improve upon yourself according to your view of improvement. Both the spiritualist and the materialist have the same urge to be better and different to what they are, based on what they have been taught to believe is worthwhile or important.

However, for both the spiritualist and the materialist this is an insatiable struggle.

So, whether you meditate on becoming enlightened or aspire to becoming a millionaire, it is essentially the same.

In both instances you have the goal of becoming something different to what you are,revealing the spiritual goal as no more lofty than the material one.

Both are driven by a sense of something lacking and a self-orientated ambition.

But fulfilment from trying to improve upon yourself is impossible, because driving this is your deeper belief that you are not enough as you are. This belief is all that is making you feel lacking. So this belief must end for your feeling of lack to end.

When you have a deeper sense of appreciation for yourself, as you are, this feeling or felt sense of you fulfils you and then forms the basis and quality of your thoughts, words and actions, and a very different quality of life emerges from this.

It is important to realise, how this alternative is unique. It’s not to achieve something you don’t already have inside, or an improvement on what you are. But a deeper sensed recognition and appreciation of what you alreadyare on the inside. And then, this is what determines your life on the outside.

How do you know you even need to improve?

The truth is, you cannot even know whether you need improvement until you first know yourself as you truly are.

Because you have been taught to not like things about yourself as you already are you feel dissatisfied and want to be different. The problem is, if what you have been told about yourself is not true, you will still unconsciously agree with what you have been taught and that will be causing your skewed experience and dislike of yourself.

So before you unintentionally pass judgement and undermine yourself by applying meditation techniques to improve, it is firstly essential to experience and know yourself as you are.

But when you apply a meditation technique, this prevents you from experiencing and knowing yourself as you already are. So if you simply don’t add this in to start with, you’ll already be way ahead, and ready to begin experiencing and knowing yourself as you are.

Know that when using a technique, you’re thinking about meditating. You are trying to meditate. But you’re not meditating.

So where does it go wrong?

People use meditation to make themselves feel ‘better’. Which is understandable when feeling distressed in everyday life. But usually, you don’t really know why you feel bad or whether you should be changing that.

What if you have been conditioned into disliking things about yourself?

What if you are supposed to feel these different ways and for good reason?

Should you be trying to change the way you feel into something better, and does that ever last? What if the way you feel is important and for a really good reason? And you just don’t know that yet.

You don’t change by avoiding how you feel.

To avoid how you feel, you can smoke a joint and get high, but after a while the effect wears off and you’re back to feeling the way you felt before, or even worse now, due to the after-effects from damage to your system, and also due to the comparison between being high, and then being how you really are when the high wears off.

And it’s the same with a meditation technique.

To avoid the way you really feel, you can repeat a meditation technique and feel better in that moment. But underneath, you are still the same and so it will soon wear off. And then you’re back to feeling the way you felt before, or even worse, due to the comparison between your meditation high and how you really are – the way you actually feel.

It’s a trap.

Soon you’ll be relying so much on that technique and the way that technique makes you feel, that how it really feels to be you becomes more disturbing or less fulfilling than it originally was.

This is the dilemma, the paradox, and the result of unintentionally judging yourself by trying to improve. It only compounds your mistaken dislike of yourself and how that then feels to be you.

And when the technique inevitably fails to deliver, you blame yourself and keep repeating the meditation technique…and the cycle continues.

But it is the techniques that are flawed, not you.

So what’s the solution?

To understand what meditation really is…

And what is meditation without tradition.

Real meditation is purely physical.

Meditation is to experience yourself, as you are, without the burden of thought or judgement (which is just another form of thinking), and without the goal or desire to change or improve yourself.

It’s just you – feeling how you feel in your body each day.

Because a body is all that you really are, all you can ever know of yourself is already there to be found in your deeper sense of that.

It is essential that you are not trying to get anything more out of whatever makes up your meditation – which is all the naturally occurring activities of your body, like breathing, sensing or feelings, from emptiness through to fulfilment, pain or pleasure.

Even feeling sick from illness or hurt from injury is simply to be felt, rather than resisted.

Whatever your body is already doing is how you already are and need to be, it is already happening. You don’t need to then deliberately focus in on it or think about it. You don’t then need to meditate on it. Leave it alone and just feel what is naturally occurring in your body already.

You only focus on it or think about it to try and change it or to try to get something more out of it. But you don’t need to. It’s enough as it is. You just don’t know that yet.

If you stop trying to do it right or better or get something more out of it than you are already feeling, your thinking will decrease dramatically and eventually fade away entirely.

Thinking only increases when you want an achievement from your meditation. This is why techniques to improve increase thinking and make thinking the problem it does not need to be.

Give yourself a chance to find out for yourself that what is already happening ordinarily and already felt in your body, can totally fulfil you.

Techniques to focus on or do what is already happening and known to you naturally don’t make sense. Does it help you to taste, see, feel, smell, hear, or breathe by thinking about it? It doesn’t. In fact, it distracts you from it and lessens it.

Try feeling something and thinking about it at the same time.

So if you just sit still, and do nothing more, after a while however you feel in the body will become apparent and known to you. Either as pain or comfort, warmth, or cold, itching or agitation, as sadness, hunger or fulfilment, or sounds, smells, tastes and so on. Any of these sensations that are happening will automatically become apparent to you just by you sitting still and nothing more.

And all of this happens before thinking becomes involved and without any technique to make you aware of it. You are naturally aware of these as a bodily sensation or feeling.

If you do not try to get more out of it, or make it better or different to what it is, then you won’t be adding extra unnecessary additional thinking in trying to do so and your meditation will continue to deepen.

You will then discover all there is to you. You will begin to discover the deeper meditation of the body. And eventually, you won’t want for anything else.

In this you will discover fulfilment.

And you are going to discover all this from yourself, just from sitting still.  

This physically felt, real and existing experience of you differs from the false experience caused by learned views about yourself.

To purely feel this felt sense of yourself deeply disproves and ends your self-dislike and leaves you fulfilled with how you really and already are.

It is this bias of learned views that changes, not you as you really are, for you are actually complete as you are. But you need an end to your bias to feel and know that.

Thinking about yourself doesn’t tell you about yourself.

Because your thoughts about yourself are influenced by what other people have told you or taught you to think about yourself throughout your life, they are not accurate descriptions of you at all. They are just ideas from others. They are not truly about you.

But we rely so heavily on what others have told us that we don’t really know who we are anymore.

We’re out of touch with ourselves because we try to find ourselves through these ideas. We believe that what we or others think about us is how we will know who we are. But it isn’t who we are.

So we need meditation…which is going beneath all the thinking, and influences, and bias, and finding out by experiencing who you are from the deeper felt sense of yourself, in your body. The body that you are.

Sensing is our primary knowing, thinking is a secondary interpretation of that.

Because life is fully experienced through our bodily senses. It’s a completely physical experience. We see, we taste, we smell, we touch, we hear… We don’t need to question what we physically experience. It’s known to us.

Everything you can experience in any moment is experienced through your bodily senses and not without these. This is part of the natural meditation of the body.

Anything other than that is thinking, imagination and conjecture. Which is only an interpretation of what we sense and then a description of that interpretation.

Our thinking is not the experience itself, and it’s not how we really know it.

For example: When you are in a hot bath, you’re already feeling it, sensing it in your body. Your experience is real and physical, which is how you already know it. So you don’t need to think about it, you know it. In fact, if you think about it, you lessen your direct sense experience of it.

In this same way using techniques actually decreases your living in the moment experience, by unnecessarily thinking or being mindful of what you already physically sense.

First there is physical sensing and then you become mindful – thoughtful of that which has just been sensed.

To be mindful, or aware, is achieved by thinking about the moment, which you cannot do until it passes. You can only sense it whilst it exists. You do not and cannot think in the same instant of sensing something, only after you have sensed it.

Thinking is too slow to capture the sensory experience of each moment of life. That is not what thinking is for.

Try it for yourself. Feel something and try to think about it at the same time, and see how the feeling lessens or slips away. Or just listen, and try to think about it (what you are hearing) at the same time without decreasing or losing your sense of it.

Words or thoughts cannot capture, contain or become the deeper feelings they describe, and neither can meditation techniques contain or become the deeper sense of meditation which they aspire to.  

Use your senses more and you won’t need to think so much.

When you simply use your primary bodily senses to experience life – which is the only way you can experience life – you are immediately and fully connected to life, to reality and to you. When involved in the secondary process of thinking, you are engaged in ‘memory about these’, which is imagination, and so you can be distracted from your own immediate reality. So that’s when life can get really confusing.

This direct sensory experience of life removes your perceived need to think about what you’re experiencing and leaves you in direct contact with the experience itself. This makes life way less confusing and you don’t need to think so much because – you just know it.

This is what it really means to be ‘present’ or to be ‘in the moment’. Only the body is in the moment. Thinking cannot be in the moment it describes, it only describes something after the fact, which it then recognises and describes. But don’t think too much about this.

The difference between feeling and thinking.

So the simplest way to define this (Undo) approach to meditation from techniques is – it’s the difference between feeling (which is primary and in the moment) and thinking (which is secondary and after the moment, in memory of it).

It is important to understand that feeling and thinking are two separate functions with separate purposes.  

The words happiness, or sadness, or grief, or cold describe the feelings, but words do not contain the feeling. Words are just a description.

When you think about being cold, you don’t really feel cold. It’s just a thought-description of the cold.

But when you’re feeling…

And I mean really and only feeling; there are no thoughts or words to go with these feelings. The feelings are enough. They’re complete, and you understand them fully as the feelings they are.

The only thing that can cause you to misunderstand your feelings is when you start thinking about them – placing importance on one feeling over another, or describing one feeling as incorrect and another as correct, or better or worse… 

But this causes your experience of your feelings to morph into emotion.

Emotion is a feeling that you’ve tainted by thinking about it (whether you’re aware of it or not) and thinking exaggerates feeling or causes it to feel uncomfortable or disturbing. It’s a reaction to the feeling, and is not the pure feeling itself. Emotion is this confusing mix of thinking and feeling.

A feeling is your physical response to something real in your life.

A feeling is in your body and exists whether you think or not.

And so with this approach to meditation…

When you meditate, and you’re feeling the sense of yourself, as time goes on this takes you deeper than your thinking, deeper than your thoughts about yourself or things, into how you really feel in the body.

Go deep into the felt sense of your body.

This is your direct experience of yourself, which is life itself.

In the direct experience of yourself you have immediate contact with life as it’s happening. And with this you’re able to navigate life more intelligently, with more clarity, in every area of your life.

From this sense of yourself, you’re able to resolve problems with ease, simply because you’re able to see (sense) any situation for what it is before your thought-reactions distort or confuse you.

It is from your body’s response to life, from this deeper sensing, that you will know how to respond to all life’s various challenges, immediately and without the need to think so much about it. And you can act with confidence, with a knowing sense of all the facts.

This is the inherent intelligence of the living organisms that we are. This intelligence, this deeper knowing is often referred to as ‘gut feeling’ or ‘instinct’. And there is a lot more to this than we at first realise.

Compare this to our attempts to navigate life through the use of ‘thinking’ – which is the default of nearly all humans – you are constantly thinking about and describing everything that’s happening and comparing it to other experiences that you’ve had, weighing up and analysing all the options…in an ongoing struggle to work-life out.

Is it any wonder people become overwhelmed with life!

And then we avoid the way we feel.

So why do we avoid our feelings?

It’s a good question so let’s answer it.

We have been taught to avoid discomfort or painful feelings, and taught to disregard all our physical sensations and to rely on thinking to explain or fix everything. But thinking is not for fixing feelings. Thinking is only for simple things, mechanical daily things.

When once you begin to realise how your feelings are the key to unlocking your deepest intelligence and understanding of yourself and life, the desire to avoid or ignore them no longer makes sense.

The beliefs we hold about ourselves or about the world distort our view of ourselves and the world, making it feel uncomfortable for us. Because they are often tied to disturbing life experiences and traumas, these feelings can be extreme and overwhelming.

For this reason we develop an aversion to feeling them. And we try to avoid them altogether, wherever they come up or activate within us.

This keeps us from ever going deep into ourselves, and from healing them and so we don’t get to unlock our true potential in life.

Feelings are meant to be felt, not thought about or analysed. Feeling is how you will understand yourself or know yourself as you are, day by day. Feelings are the active internal process you feel in your body all the time.

This process of feeling is important. It is the ongoing healing from the effects life has on you each day. If you think about this or react to these different feelings by trying to change or improve them, you interfere with and massively inhibit this natural healing process and prevent change.

What stops us from changing?

It doesn’t matter what you think about yourself or what you want to change about yourself, there is no way to change who you actually are. Not intentionally and not through thinking.

Change will happen, but only if it really needs to and only of its own volition.

Our problem and the correct question is not how to change but how to get out of our own way and allow change to happen.

Ironically, these thoughts or ideas about wanting to change yourself are the thing that prevents change. These ideas and techniques resist the natural process of change, but change is inherently active and going on inside the body of you all the time.

When you attempt to enforce change, you are resisting the way you are and feel, which is already in a natural process of change and correction. That’s why it hurts, why it is uncomfortable or disturbing. You are going through a change. Your need is to get in touch with that. And feeling that is how you will.

Then there are these things people have told you over the years, about how you should or shouldn’t be, what you should or shouldn’t feel – these ideals have made you feel uncomfortable with how you naturally are, and this misunderstanding has caused you to interfere with change. Because of this you have tried to force change upon yourself.

This is not how change happens and this is not how nature works.

The body is nature and therefore you are nature.

The only unnatural thing is what you have been taught to think, to believe and to impose upon yourself.

So be as you are for a while. Just try it, for a little while.

Leave yourself alone.

That means don’t think about yourself but go deeper into the physical and living sense of yourself as you are in the body, however that feels, and let nature – the body – take care of things, and it will.

And that is the only meditation there is that will heal and truly relieve you.