First off, what is meditation? Meditation is mindfulness practice. It is not a relaxation technique. It cultivates understanding of reality by confronting reality. It is not an escape from reality. It is about focus, not emptying of one's thoughts. If I have you intrigued already, feel free to skip the rest of my rambling and watch this playlist to learn about meditation and start your practice. The first 3 parts of the series are essential and takes only half an hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLvU7ppM4vE&list=PL603BD0B03E12F5A1

I've only taken on meditation for slightly more than a month, but it has already reaped tremendous benefits for me and has resulted in some major lifestyle changes. The most obvious externally visible ones are that I've quit my 21 year old alcohol habit and who-knows-how-long coffee habit. Internally, my thought processes seem to go down a different neural pathway - instead of always having an instant reaction to everything, I am slowly developing a more mindful processing of external stimuli. This results in me speaking slower sometimes, not because I'm more dull, on the contrary, it's due to me processing my responses more. And if I skip meditation, I go back to my typical too-fast-talking mode where I sometimes have no idea when to shut up.

For us ENTPs, we can get caught in an almost constant theorizing loop. And I think this is how my drinking habit took hold. At first, it was just a social lubricant, but as the years went by, it became a way to dull my consciousness to escape from myself and feel this false sense of "calm" and fun. Even later, it became a way to drug myself out of having to think about, and therefore, deal, with my processing of negative events or just negative aspects of myself.

My use of caffeine started very early in life and I can't even remember when it started now. I would drink Red Bulls or coffee to amp myself up for late night studying, gaming and later, programming. With my meditative practice, I have now become very sensitive to the effects of caffeine and I can now see that drinking coffee regularly for the last few years contributed a lot to the anxiety that I feel. Coffee creates this fight-or-flight response, which is why we stay awake.

It's interesting to notice how the sense of calm in meditators arise. The calmness doesn't stem from dullness, it's not that we become walking plants or zombies. The calm stems from this process of relaxed focus and equanimity.

Equanimity, one of my favourite words I have picked up recently - "calmness and composure, especially in a difficult situation." I used to think of myself as an activist for various causes and environmental activism was one of the causes I used to champion and work for. But it's hard to deny that in spite of what one, and the entire community does, we are losing this war. A decade ago, we are merely slipping, and one can see that every year, the statistics don't lie and in whatever way you wish to measure, nothing is improving. Now, the planet has entered into a new age of a spiral that we won't be able to climb out of. So how does one deal with this truth? One of the things that I've read that changed my life forever was The Dark Mountain Manifesto. When I first came across it many years ago, it felt like the most sensible thing to be written on the climate crisis ever. But, I struggled for many years in putting this knowledge into practice. I can see now, how meditation can fit into this puzzle. Equanimity. The new story we weave begins within ourselves. We terraform our minds first. And then, appropriate actions will follow.

Stay with the breath. Rising, and falling. Acknowledge and smile inwards at your arising thoughts. Thank yourself for "waking up" and noticing those thoughts. Return to your breath. Rising and falling.