How breath meditation helps connect to your innate intelligence
From the discussion on the Mind System, we understand we can choose to live in one of the three states of living – living ‘mindfully’ from our conscious mind, living ‘pre-programmed’ (or ‘conditioned’) driven by our subconscious mind or living ‘magnificently’ from our superconscious or intuitive mind.
Due to our culture, environment, and society, all of us have been habituated to live mostly from our ‘conditioned’(subconscious) mind. Due to our programmed beliefs, attitudes, and thought patterns and due to constraining societal systems, our minds have always kept us in ‘survival’ or ‘fight or flight’ mode causing stress, discomfort, and pain to our bodies. Mindfulness practices enable us to step out of the autopilot mode of ‘survival’ into more conscious moments. When we become conscious and mindful in more and more of our activities, thoughts, and behavior, we tend to disengage the subconscious mind and spend more time determining and consciously choosing what is best for that situation or context. This is living in the ‘present moment’ or living ‘mindfully’.
Meditation naturally CALMS the mind of all excess thoughts. It helps us stay alert but peaceful awareness that allows us to ‘respond’ consciously rather than allow the subconscious mind to provide a ‘reaction’ (based on stored patterns). When we live ‘mindfully’ with full attention and awareness in each moment, then there is little chance for our sub-programmed thought patterns to drive our behavior. When these patterns do not get used, they slowly get erased from the hard drive of our subconscious mind. This is how subconscious beliefs and attitudes get uprooted from our psyche. Meditation also accelerates this process of cleansing or ‘purification’ of the subconscious mind. When the mind is still, during meditation, deeply embedded emotions come to the surface and we experience them as tears, laughter, joy, and pain. This is another way that meditation helps - in CLEANSING our mind of conditioning.
As our mind becomes less crowded with pre-programmed thoughts and emotions and we start to think, speak and act more clearly and consciously, we tend to become increasingly aware of insights and intuitions. We become more CONNECTED to our intuitive or superconscious mind. We start responding and doing things more spontaneously in alignment with what we genuinely feel instead of being pushed to act by our earlier programmed minds. This brings out the ingenuity and creativity in each one of us. This improves our confidence and keeps our body in ‘creation’ mode which allows all physiological healing, rejuvenation, and growth to happen (in contrast to the ‘survival’ or ‘fight or flight’ mode that consumed our energies to fight stress).
When we start living in this conscious, creative, stress-free state, our energy starts flowing vibrantly. And these positive vibrations of joy, authenticity, and love start impacting others we live with or work with. These authentic vibrations also resonate well with the collective consciousness/universe and you will soon find ‘meaningful coincidences’ (synchronicities) happening that will lead you down the path of living a meaningful, magnificent life.
This is how meditation helps us, to live consciously and magnificently, through its functions of ‘Calming’, ‘Cleansing’, and ‘Connecting’.