Fortunately your mind can be trained to a degree that was unknown to us. Until recently we thought that our mind remains largely rigid. It is not. Our mind can be shaped in ways we never thought possible.
The science of this paradigm shift of our mind’s ability to change is called neuroplasticity. Plasticity is a fancy way of saying we can significantly change the fabric of our perception and wellbeing. In the same way that we can train a muscle we can train and change our minds.
The most effective way to train your mind is through meditation. Think of meditation as sport for the mind. Meditation = mental training with the aim to familiarize yourself with specific mental processes for mental wellbeing.
Meditation is not one practice - it is a term that explains different ways to train your mind to live a reflected and happier life.
Most intermediate and beginning meditators are not aware that there are multiple ways you can train your mind, they should be.
Most advanced meditators (3000 hours of experience) already train their mind with different meditations. This is mostly because their training is rooted in a meditation tradition that has intuitively included all aspects of mental fitness.
Many meditation teachers will tell you to train only one technique. They are wrong; you wouldn't go into the gym to only train your arms. In the same way, only training one form of meditation will only train one part of your mental fitness: only training your focus won't make you more compassionate. Training your compassion won't make you have more perspective and wisdom. Training your perspective won’t necessarily help you to align your life with purpose.
When we don’t know what we are training how can we then gain mastery? This is why it is important to be more specific. This is why just training “mindfulness” is a tricky affair. If we train mindfulness it is difficult to know if we are training our focus, our empathy, our self-reflection or purpose (science).
I created a model to show you the various mental processes that can be trained through meditation. I chose the four categories by looking at the research of neuroscientist mavericks like Richard Davidson, Tanja Singer and Cortland Dahl. But also by training and teaching meditation in different meditation traditions. I want you to be able to apply the model in everyday life, so instead of using scientific names I named the categories mindfulness, resonance, self-reflection and purpose to make it easier for you to understand and train them.
Many meditation teachers will tell you to train only one technique. They are wrong; you wouldn't go into the gym to only train your arms. In the same way, only training one form of meditation will only train one part of your mental fitness: only training your focus won't make you more compassionate. Training your compassion won't make you have more perspective and wisdom. Training your perspective won’t necessarily help you to align your life with purpose.
To get a better understanding of the different ways to train your mind you need to understand the different categories of mental fitness you can train. Looking at meditation from a neuro-scientific and an advanced meditators point of view we can distill four main qualities we can train:
By this point, we've understood that meditation is like sport for the mind. And we've introduced a framework to train the different mental capacities that lead to mental wellbeing.
On the next page, we introduce mindfulness and the best ways to train it: we are on the path to becoming an expert in meditation.
