Meditation Isn't About Emptying Your Mind: The Ultimate Guide to Awareness & Manifestation

When I first started meditating, I was very frustrated with myself. I thought I was doing it completely wrong because

every time I started meditating, random thoughts started to pop up. I would think about my day. I would think about

all the things that I need to do, all the emails I need to answer, the conversation that I had with the guy at

the store yesterday, and what I should have said. And I was so frustrated with myself because I thought that

meditations are the absence of thoughts. I thought meditations are just not for me. That is just impossible for me to

calm my thoughts down, that it's impossible for me not to think about things, and I thought that was the whole

goal of meditating, not thinking about anything or visualizing the dream life that I want to have or having this like

therapeutic process, not thinking about my day. So, I stopped meditating for a while. I gave up on it until I started

doing therapy, and I realized that what I'm doing in therapy is actually the same thing. In therapy, we focus on

breathing, we focus on my thoughts, and we question them, and we observe them. So, after I started researching

meditation more, and I read and watched a lot of videos about practices by Joe Dispenza and Neville Goddard, Buddhism,

mindset practices, all of that, I realized that it actually comes from the same place, and it's not an absence of

thought. And what I was actually doing in therapy and my therapeutic process was in fact meditation. And that's when

I realized that I can be good at meditating, that meditation is a powerful tool because the goal of

meditation is not to think about everything that you have in your life. The goal of meditation is building

awareness and consciousness. The goal is for you to become higher than your thoughts and start observing them and

analyzing them. The goal is to become someone who is not completely controlled by their thoughts. Before you start

meditating, you're like a dog who runs after the ball. Every time you throw a ball at a dog, the dog runs and brings

you the ball back, no matter what happens. Your thoughts are like this ball. So, every time a thought appears,

before you meditate, before you bring awareness to your body, you're running after this ball. You catch the thought,

you start maybe you started thinking about possible consequences of something happening. You

start thinking about future you, you start thinking about past, and you're like a dog running after that ball.

After you throw another ball, the dog will run in another direction. Once you bring awareness into your life, once you

start meditating, you start having a choice, and you start having the power to choose not to run after that ball.

And that's what meditation teaches you. It grounds you, it gives you a choice whether to follow your thoughts, whether

to spiral or not, and it gives you the power and the tools not to do that. Hi guys, my name is Valeria, and in these

videos I talk about everything related to therapy, self-development, self-improvement, and ultimately I'm

here to help you become your best self. Welcome and welcome back. In this video, I want to share everything that I've

learned about meditations and the best meditation practices that I've researched and studied in the past 6

years. The thing is, I started researching meditation a lot because I started noticing how one thought can

influence and can shape your whole day. For example, a thought I failed at example, I failed a test. It would

create and set the mood for the whole day because I'll think, "Oh, I'm a failure. Oh, I'm not good enough." I

would start spiraling. I would start thinking about the future that I have to take the test again, that I have to do

something, and it will create the mood that I'll have throughout the day, and it will shape basically my whole

experience during the day. It will shape my whole day. So, once you started noticing that thoughts have such huge

power in my life, that thoughts have such a huge effect on my mood, thoughts have such a huge effect on my life

experience, I started wondering, "How can I stop them from controlling my mood, from controlling my experiences,

from controlling my actions?" That's where the meditation came in, and that's where therapy and other practices came

in. They brought awareness, and they gave me the power to have a conscious choice of what I want to focus on, where

I want to my energy to go, what I want to attract from the world, and all the teachings that you see in the world,

they teach you the the thing, the power of choice. Meditation is simply a tool. For example, studies in psychology

showed that simply labeling a thought as a thought, I'm thinking that I'm unsuccessful, not thinking I'm

unsuccessful, reduces its emotional intensity. Mindfulness studies consistently show that awareness creates

a gap between stimulus and response, so it reduces automatic reactions. It basically gives you space to make a

choice. Around 40 or 50% of our daily behavior is shaped by the thoughts or habits that are automatic that we never

actually chose, that are recorded on your brain, that you repeat over and over again. And the truth is, your brain

evolved to prioritize survival, not your happiness, so it will focus more on negative thoughts than happy thoughts or

positive thoughts. Thus, the things that you attract in your life and the experiences that you have in your life

will most likely be more negative than positive. And that's when I decided that I wanted to change it. I want to have

more positive experiences in my life. I want to have more opportunities. I want to attract the best people there are. Of

course, then I have to become a better person. I have to change internally first for the world to change

externally. That led to my discovery number one. The best first thing you can do is to reduce the mental noise, not to

add more meditation in your life. Your attention is the real resource. Where the attention goes, the energy flows.

And the studies showed that the average person consumes 20 times more information in a single day than all the

previous generations. We have pop-up notifications. We have social media. We have news in our phones. We consume so

much information. Of course, our attention span and our attention gets scattered. Our brain becomes more

anxious. We have trouble visualizing. We have trouble manifesting because we cannot keep our attention on one single

thing for too long. And that's where meditation comes in because it's a tool for you to learn focus back. Based on

studies, usually it takes 20 minutes to bring your focus back. So, if you're, for example, in your deep focus state,

you're working on something, if you see a pop-up notification from Instagram or somebody comes in to the room and

distracts you. You need 20 minutes to bring your focus and your attention back to your work. And imagine if you have

these distractions every 10 minutes. You wouldn't be able to focus on one thing. You wouldn't be able to achieve things,

to build things because your attention is all over the place. And the thing that scared me the most is that with

that many distractions, avoidance is very easy. It's very easy to avoid your thoughts. It's very easy to avoid

uncomfortable experience. You can simply get distracted by your phone or by social media or by messaging people. My

discovery two and one thing I wasn't conscious of is that when I went to bed, what I did, I kept replaying the

arguments, the conversations that I had this day, what happened or didn't happen. And when you're asleep, it's the

best state for you to visualize things, for you to manifest things, for you to attract things. So, what I did, I was

replaying the whole day. If you replay the same experience that you had throughout the day every single night,

the next day will look the same because you're manifesting the same things, probably mostly negative things, the

arguments that you had during the night. You create the same personality daily. And neuroscience shows that repeated

thoughts strengthen neural pathways. So, basically, you're recreating the identity that you had in your past, that

you had throughout the day, instead of thinking about the future, the identity that you want to have, the dreams that

you want to have. And your brain becomes very efficient at reproducing and recreating patterns that you had

throughout this day, throughout your past because you frequently practice it instead of practicing visualizing

something else, instead of practicing focusing on better things for yourself. So, that's when I implemented tool

number one, daily gratitude before I go to sleep. Gratitude is very powerful tool because based on what I've just

explained, you focus on good things in your life. You focus on abundance instead of lack. So, your brain

naturally starts repeating and reproducing good things, good thoughts, good experiences in your life. And your

brain likes repetition. So, the more you focus on good things, the more good things you will notice and you would

think that it's magic that you somehow attract great things, that you manifest great things. Well, it's very

psychology-based. As I explained, based on neuroscience, your brain will simply be repeating the same experiences. The

more you will practice gratitude, the more your brain will start believing that there are a lot of good things in

your life. And brain, every single day, reaches for evidence that already support your current beliefs. So, if

every day you write a gratitude for all the abundant financial, relationship-wise, emotional you have in

your life, the more your brain will focus the next day to look for those things. If you constantly focus on the

things that are wrong, you'll find more things that will confirm it. And as I mentioned, state akin to sleep, so

before you go to bed, is the best time to practice meditation and your awareness and to focus on things.

Because first, if you do daily gratitude, it's already proven that it decreases the depression, it improves

your mood, and improves your sleep. It actually calms you down a lot. And before you go to sleep, and that was my

discovery number three or something, your brain activity naturally shifts towards alpha and theta states.

Basically, states that are associated with relaxation, calming down, winding down, and reduced critical thinking.

Neville Goddard believed that it is a state akin to sleep, so before you fall asleep, is the most powerful time to

impress a new idea onto your subconscious mind. And your subconscious rules your experience. It's 80% of the

experiences that you have throughout your day. And the most powerful thing that you can do is to focus not only on

the outcomes, but your states. Before sleep meditation is one of the best things, honestly, I did. And the point

of that meditation is that you visualize the future self, the future goal that you want to have, but not just like the

actions, for example, earning a sum of money, but more of how you would feel. How would that feel? What would that

mean? What emotions arise in your body? Because your body, your subconscious, will memorize that state, not just the

vision that you envision before you go to sleep and then your subconscious during the next day will work tirelessly

to create that state to create that experience in your life. The goal isn't watching yourself succeed. The goal is

experience and feel before you fall asleep yourself succeeding and how that would feel in your body. So before you

fall asleep either than observing the thoughts that appear. So for example, if you think about the conversation that

you had throughout the day, you become that observer who watches the thoughts flow by and after that you can

intentionally visualize yourself in the future and the future you want to have but not just observe her. You're

stepping away from the observer moment in this minute. You need to become that person. You need to feel the things that

she feels. You need to think the thoughts that she has. You need to think about the actions that she does. You

need to be inside her. You need to watch and observe through her eyes. You can ask how would I feel? How would I walk

into the room? What are the things that I would do? What are the habits that I have? You need to have a full experience

from that perspective. one of the most powerful things I ever did. So you focus not only on the process but also the

results. How did getting that sum of money made you feel? What are the emotions that arise? You live through

that experience. So let's recap a little bit. The best time to meditate for me personally is before I go to bed or

early in the morning to set the intention for the day, to set my mood for the day. The first thing that you do

is you start observing your thoughts and then you make a conscious choice to let go of them. Then you do your daily

gratitude, so things that you are grateful for and then you go to the visualization of the things that you

want in life. So basically the hidden connection behind all the practices that I watched and I've studied. For example,

Neville Goddard teaches imagining things, feeling it happening and falling asleep with that feeling. Joe Dispenza

teaches becoming the person who already has whatever you want to have, then feeling the emotions, then acting and

doing things from that identity. And gratitude works basically the same way. You are thankful for what's already

yours and you attract more of that. And instead of thinking that meditation helps you attract more things from the

universe from psychological perspective, it changes your reactions. It changes and shifts your attention. So your

expectations change, your confidence changes, your mental state changes and thus your decisions and behaviors change

as well. So the things that you have in your life naturally align with the things that you do. What I found out and

what I researched can be simply put into this. Meditation at its core is simply becoming more aware of your thoughts

instead of getting lost in them. You can do it by sitting or lying down and start by focusing on your breath because when

you focus on your breath, your brain will have no choice but to focus on your breath too because your breath is the

most vital and important thing in your body. And when you bring consciousness to your breath, the one thing that

you're doing on autopilot every single day, it brings you in this conscious state. When your random thoughts,

worries, conversations start to appear in your head, which they inevitably will, you simply observe them. You

become an observer who watches these thoughts, not get entangled into them and runs after them. Don't try to stop

them, judge them or follow them. Just let them pass like clouds in the sky. Once you're settled, once you're

grounded, release of all the negative emotions that you have throughout your day. You can do that by being grateful

for the good things that already happened to you throughout the day. From that, if your intention in the

meditation is to attract things, is to manifest things, you can visualize the future self that you want to be, the

things that you want to have, the goals that you want to achieve and focus on that. Focus on the state that you're in,

the emotions that you're feeling, the thoughts that you have. But the thing about meditation is your goal can be

completely different. Your goal can be to process an emotion from the past, to understand your patterns, to release the

negative emotions. That's the beautiful thing about meditation. Everything that you want to heal in your life,

everything that you want to do, you can do by yourself. It is already inside you. You already have the power and the

energy to change whatever you want inside you, to change anything you want in your life. Meditation is simply a

tool that is guiding you towards that, that is making it easier. There are a lot of guided meditations, and my

thoughts on guided meditations, I'm not against them. You are kind of borrowing the state of another person and like

their thought and their process, and it is useful sometimes if you have no idea how to guide you. But the more you do

it, the more you teach yourself and you understand what kind of flow you want to get in. And when you meditate by

yourself, you're basically, when you're strong enough and you're experienced enough, started to guide yourself, start

to understand how you process emotion, what the best visualization is for you, what's working or what's not. It's hard

to understand the concept before you meditate. So, if I was starting meditation right now, I would start with

guided meditation first. I would observe what kind of things they do. Is it visualization? Is it mindfulness? Is it

like thought processing? Is it working through your body? Is it working through your breath? And trying to understand

what works for you, and then you can try to start practicing meditation for yourself. That is basically the concept,

and that is all I have for you guys today. And then small announcement, right now I'm currently recording

meditations for my 21-day challenge, a challenge to become your future self that you dream to be through internal

and external work. And there will be meditations like quantum leap meditations, stations for your future

self, guided affirmations as well. So, if you're looking for a place to start, check out the link in the description

below. It will be guided, and that's why the doors will close as soon as the challenge starts. You can join the wait

list, and I'll send you an email when the challenge starts. Thank you so much for joining, and I hope I'll see you on

the next one.