Meditation, what is it? Why do it? So just what is meditation? one definition I like is, meditation is a way for nourishing and blossoming, the divine within you. Welcome back to this, but first I want to start by citing two studies that will help explain what meditation can do for us. Several years ago, the National Science Foundation estimated that our brains think up to 50,000 thoughts each day, and 90% are the same as yesterday.

There's some dispute as to the accuracy of this statistic. But even if the number is half that that's a heck of a lot of thoughts. Another study published in 2010 issue of science matters. Xen reported that the average American adult spends 47% of their waking life, mind wandering, that is not attending to the task at hand. Moreover, these periods of mind wandering were accomplished by reports of unhappiness. So what does meditation do?

Very simply, meditation helps shut out or at least slow down the 50,000 random thoughts and quiet both the mind and the body. Meditation helps us pay attention and focus and help stop our minds from wandering. And learning to control our random thoughts helps us achieve a deep state of peace. When the mind is calm and silent. In today's world, we have a lot working against us. One thing is the time is speeding up.

There are still 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day. But the amount of activity and change that happens in a day is increasing. Currently, there are more world changing events happening in any given period of time than ever happened before. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google said, we human beings currently create as much information in two days, as we did from the dawn of civilization up through 2003. Well, no wonder we're overwhelmed. Our minds can't keep up.

So we tend to shut down and go numb. Our minds we're not built for such speed. We evolved when things were much slower. 400 years ago, people had a lot of time to ponder things before they had to change. Our bodies were and still are designed to be in tune with the sun. The moon The stars, the seasons, and the cycles of nature.

That simplicity is what our souls long for. Meditation is a way to help us slow down and return to the sacred and our relationship with the natural world. To quote Deepak Chopra, meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It's a way of entering into the quiet that's already there. buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day, or put another way by Elon to generous. It feels good.

Kinda like when you have to shut your computer down. Just sometimes when it goes crazy. You just shut it down and when you turn it on, it's okay again. That's what meditation is for me. Let's move on to lesson two meditation myths.