Episode 297: How To Level Up Your Meditation Practice with Chip Franks

Hal Elrod: Hey, goal achievers. It is Hal Elrod and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast. Today, we have a special guest host, Chip Franks, who you probably know well at this point, but Chip Franks is my good friend, Chief Miracle Worker, and he hosted the podcast actually a few weeks ago, maybe a month or so ago. He did an episode. It was at 289 and it was on scribing and he really went in-depth and did kind of a more of a training, if you will, on how to enhance your scribing practice. The final S in SAVERS is scribing. Well, the first S in SAVERS is silence and based on the feedback that I got from Chip’s last episode, people were just blown away. He and I were talking the other day, and he was talking about his meditation and what he does and Chip, in all honesty, is arguably, I mean, he’s more advanced in the SAVERS than I am like he has gone so deep in really mastering each of the SAVERS. And so, anyway, he was sharing this with me and I said, “Hey, would you do me a huge favor, our listeners a huge favor? Would you do another episode of the Achieve Your Goals Podcast but go really deep into silence and to meditation and share your practices with our listeners? And he said of course. 

So, you are in for a treat today and before I turn it over to Chip here, I do want to share. We got a lot of questions about the Best Year Ever Blueprint the live event coming up December 13th through 15th in San Diego. A lot of questions because we did announce this is our last ever Best Year Ever Blueprint Live experience. It was a very tough decision to make but Jon Berghoff and I felt it was the right one and we get questions about are there any seats left available and it looks like we are about sold out. The seats is a tricky thing to figure out because you’ve got, you know, how many guests are eligible, how many guests are registered? Okay. Well, there’s this many guests eligible that are not yet registered, so we can’t sell their seat because they may or may not show up. And then there’s always cancellations in the week leading up. So, anyway, if you do want to attend, I don’t want to guarantee but I would say it’s pretty darn close to a guarantee that this is going to be the last week that we’re going to have tickets available for sale. And so, you can go to BestYearEverLive.com to see what the event is all about if you’re not already aware and grab your spot. I would love to see you. 

I’m going to be doing book signings and taking pictures with everybody which we’ve actually never done before, which is kind of silly. And we’re finally, last year, I’m going to make sure I connect with you and get to meet – I want to meet every single person there, literally. So, I’d love to meet you as well. All right. That is it for that. Now, my good friend, Chief Miracle Worker, Chip Franks, taking you deeper into the world, into the practice, that is silence. All right, enjoy. I’ll talk to you soon.

[EPISODE]

Chip Franks: Well, hello, hello, hello, everyone. Achieve Your Goal listeners, this is Chip Franks and I assume that Hal has given an introduction to this so I won’t talk too long but I am Hal’s Chief Miracle Worker and sometimes the substitute podcast host and today I am going to talk with you once again. I actually did one of these about five or six weeks ago now, and it was on scribing and journaling and getting the best that you can out of that. And today is going to be somewhat similar, except today we’re going to be talking about silence the very first S of the SAVERS, of which there are silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, and scribing. And this will be once again a little different than most of the podcast episodes. And then most of those, of course, it’s Hal, and he’s talking with guests, and getting some good information out of it. But today, again, like the scribing the podcast, it’s going to be a little more instructional to give you some ideas about how to take your silence, practice your meditation to the next level and help you with that. Whether or not you are a brand new meditator or if you’ve been doing this for years, I think you’re going to find some things in here that can be useful and help you out with it. 

So, here’s the thing. A lot of times if we listen to podcasts, nothing changes. We listened to it, get a good idea or two, but it doesn’t necessarily make its way into our life. And I’m hoping to change that with this and hoping to give you several good ideas, several things to try. And actually, here’s something new. I’m actually going to invite you to join a meditation challenge. And I want to tell you about this right now. But if you’re a member of the Miracle Morning Community on Facebook, and I hope you are, if you’re not, oh my gosh, get over there. I mean, Facebook, yes, it’s got its pros and cons but the Miracle Morning Community is amazing. Lots of extraordinarily supportive people, people that are all looking to make their life better, and all kinds of just interaction and tips and ideas and people that are striving just to make their Miracle Morning better and sharing that, sharing their success with other people. And it’s just a wonderful place to be. So, here’s the thing. If you’re listening to this right now, I’d encourage you to go to the Facebook group, and click on Units in the Miracle Morning Community. And I know if you’re listening to this in a country other than America, sometimes they call the Units tab, something different. 

I heard in France it’s called Modules and I’m sure it can be something else in lots of other countries. But if you go to the Miracle Morning Community and click on Unit, you will see the podcast challenge group. And we’re going to do a meditation challenge where each of the people in it does meditation for 10 days straight based on some of the things I’ll be talking about in this podcast or just doing your own thing. But the whole point of this is, is to actually have the podcast help change behavior and help make life better. So, that is what we’re going to do on it. And here’s something else. Of course, podcasts are just inherently one-sided. It’s just me talking to you and you not being able to talk back and I’d really like to do that. So, I just want to encourage you, if you have anything to say about this where I’m wrong, where I’m right, things that have helped you that would be wonderful, just send it to chip@miraclemorning.com and I’ll take a look at that, and just put meditation in the subject line. So, I appreciate that. And let’s go and get started on this.

Now, again, this is going to be different. It’s kind of instructional. So, if you can, I’d really recommend getting a journal but if you’re like me and just driving your car or whatever, if you can come back to this, if you think it’s worth that, if you get some good ideas out of it, that would be wonderful. And just take some notes on this and use some spaced repetition, come back to it another time so some of these ideas can take hold on you and help make life a little bit better. By the end of this, what I want to do, my intention is that you will have several tools and ways to help with your meditation practice. Whether you are a fresh new beginner or if you’ve done this for a while, this is something that can really help you out. But first, why? Why do we even meditate? Now, I’m going to go over some of this and some of this may just be review for some of you. Some of you have experienced this. Like me, I’ve experienced all of these so these are really good. 

But here are some of the scientifically proven benefits of having a meditation practice. The first one is stress reduction. Obviously, we need a lot of that in our society and we are often in a fight or flight mode in our society and we aren’t necessarily wired as human beings to deal with the things that we’re dealing with today. The meditation is a great way to reduce stress and make life better for us. Another thing that meditation does is it lowers anxiety. If you’re fearful about things, if you’re worried about things, again, it’s that kind of physiological response in your body that’s really not good for it and meditation will help lower that anxiety. It will also promote emotional health. I can tell you right now that in 2014, back when I discovered the Miracle Morning and discovered meditation and started doing that, that it helped me tremendously. I was going through kind of a low-grade depression throughout that year. And when I started doing the Miracle Morning and started meditating and doing things good for myself, I just started feeling a lot better. And meditation can do that. 

It can help your emotional health with that. It can also increase your self-awareness. It helps your attention span and focus and doing it successfully with that you’ll be able to concentrate when you want to do so. It can also improve your sleep. This is wonderful. One of my mentors, whom we will talk about shortly, was experiencing insomnia for about 17 or 18 months straight. And she was a Broadway actress and it hurts her career. Life wasn’t real fun for her at the time. And literally, the day she started meditating, she was able to sleep through the night for the first time in a long time. So, meditation will improve your sleep. And I’ve also read in studying for this that it can literally cut your time to fall asleep in half. And as someone who’s meditated now for well over five years, I can say that that is very true. I can knock out very easily. You can also help improve self-control. It helps with addictive behavior if you’re addicted to something and want to stop that, meditation will help give you those mental tools and those self-control tools to help with that. And then I’ll also say it can help control pain and then finally, it also has physical health benefits, like lower blood pressure is one of those. 

And I would also suggest, although I haven’t seen this specifically, the people who meditate, I’m pretty certain, just knowing how I was before I started meditating then after that people who meditate are probably going to live a little bit longer. Just don’t hold me to that but I’m pretty certain. Now for me personally, one of the biggest things that meditation has done and maybe you’ve experienced this or maybe you haven’t, but it seems to lengthen the time between stimulus and response. Like if someone says something bad to you, a lot of times we react. And react is a bad word. You react to this or react to that. It’s generally not good because the reaction is something that happens automatically, whereas a response is something that you choose. And what happens for me is it seems to lengthen the time between stimulus and response. So, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction at someone who cuts me off in traffic and me yelling about it, I can actually, it seems to slow down in my mind due to meditation and I can actually choose my response for that. And for me, that makes such a big difference. 

So, there’s that. I am more calm, I’m more focused, I’m mentally sharper. I had a stroke about two years ago and I’m certain that just being on meditation, in doing that daily is something that helps keep my mind fresh. It helps those neural connections and it’s really wonderful. And then I also do a couple of things in different types of meditations that help give me a lot of insights and increased joy. So, that is that and here’s the thing, and then hopefully, you experienced this and you meditate on your own but for me, it makes me a better version of myself. And think about that, I mean, is that something that it does for you? I hope so. There you have it. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons to get better at meditation. But here’s the thing. And one of my mentors, her name is Emily Fletcher and actually, she’s the one that suffered from insomnia. She has this quote and I completely agree with this. She says, “We meditate to get good at life, not to get good at meditation,” and I completely agree with that. 

So, with that said, this class is going to help you get better at life. And if you learn this, and actually, if you start and get very consistent with the meditation practice, it’s going to help make your days, your months, and your years ahead better. And I hope that this is a catalyst for doing that. Now, real quickly, I’ll go through this, but I started meditating back in 2014, when I discovered the Miracle Morning, and also, I kind of thought the meditation was maybe a little woo-woo and a little out there and didn’t really think much of it. But I remember at the time, listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast and, of course, he interviews, lots of top producers and people that are literally the best at their field in the entire world. And something he noted was that 80% of those people had a mindfulness practice. And that seemed to make sense to me. I could start to see the benefits of it and I started on my meditation journey back then, and I used an app to get me started, and I call it my gateway drug. Because using the app, it told me what to do, it told me how to do it, and gave me a really good foundation of how to get started. And I’ll talk about that app a little bit later but that was what got me started in meditation. 

And then from there, I started to branch out and I started to seek other types of meditation. I looked online for different mentors and different teachers, and I found a lot of them. And what’s really kind of cool is a lot of them didn’t meditate the same way as the others and some of them had literally spent decades meditating and did it differently from another expert of how they meditated. So, I started to kind of get a lot of these ideas and pick and choose what was best for me. And, you know, a lot of people, I don’t know if you’re in this boat, but I know I was when I started, I would think, “Am I doing this right? Am I meditating right? How long should I do this? How should I breathe? Am I sitting right? Should I use guided or unguided and transcendental meditation or just something off of the internet?” And here’s the thing, you’re doing it right when it benefits you and you get better for doing it. Now, there’s actually I have a Bruce Lee quote here. You don’t often hear Bruce Lee and meditation together but Bruce Lee says, “Use only that which works and take it from any place you can find it.” 

And in meditation, I have a lot of difference, a lot of different mentors with this and I take and I pick and choose what works for them, the different things that worked for them, and the different things that worked for me and piecing those together. But some of my mentors, I actually have two ex-monks in my mentors, I have an Indian guru, I have Emily, who I mentioned before, and she’s the founder of Ziva Meditation but one of my friends, Jesse Elder, is fantastic and he’s got a meditation technique that I have borrowed from tremendously and has made a really big difference in my life, and then another lady by the name of Tara Brach. And these are all mentors of mine. I’ve taken courses from each of them in how to do meditation. And I would say safely that I’ve spent a very comfortable four figures in my meditative practice and just learning how to do it better and practicing with it. Also, I believe that right now just on my current app that I use as a timer, I’ve been over 13,000 minutes of meditation. And I did a lot longer than I’ve had this app. So, I would say several tens of thousands of minutes spent meditating for me. 

And I don’t want to sound braggadocious or anything because I know that there are a lot of people probably hearing this right now that have meditated a lot more or have maybe gotten more out of their practice than I have but I know it’s made a huge difference in my life. And I use it and it’s been extremely effective for me, and I can’t wait to share this with you. But just something I caution you about. I’m not saying that my way is the way. My way is certainly a way but your way is going to be what’s good for you and what’s perfect for you. And I would just caution you and say to beware of anyone who says that there’s only one way to do something. And again, for me, I’m going to share some of the things that I do and some of the ways that I do it and you can decide if that’s good for you or not. So, here we go. Let’s get started with some useful information on meditation, mindfulness, and silence. I’m going to share those with you. After that, I’ll show you a couple of the ways that I’ve meditated, the ways that I got started on it, and then a couple of resources for you to take with you to hopefully do your own meditation challenge and get started with this. 

So, let us move on. But wait, actually, back up a second. Before we move on here, I’d like to ask you just real quick if I could get a commitment from you. And now I know I can’t actually hear you but just you can do this for yourself. If what I’m saying makes sense to you, as you’re listening to this, can you make a commitment to yourself that you’re going to try it? At least try it and see how it works. See if you get started in meditation or if you’re already meditating, maybe to try something a little new with it. So, that’s just something I’d ask. And if you’re on board for that, just nod your head to yourself or say, “Yes, I’m in it,” if you’re alone and people won’t think you’re crazy by talking to a speaker on this, but just do that. And let’s see if it makes sense for you, let’s do it. But what is meditation? For our purposes, we’re going to call meditation a useful form of silent practice. It can include mindfulness, prayer, breathing techniques, silent visualization, manifestation, and intentional deep thoughts. Now meditation, it is training the mind and it’s your silent practice to get more from life. 

Now, just real quickly, I want to talk about the difference between meditation and mindfulness. Mindfulness is about getting present in the moment, whereas meditation is entering a different conscious state. Now, I want to talk about that real quickly and I don’t have a whole lot of time with this but just so you know, if you go to the Miracle Morning and click on Units on that, there is almost a two-hour meditation class that I give on that. Now, I encourage you to go over and check that out. But here’s what happens just briefly in the mind. We have at least four mind states that we can be as human beings, and they are the beta, alpha, theta, and delta. Now, beta is typically the mind working normally like we do every day and it’s associated with just being in a waking state, normal consciousness going about your daily business. Now, alpha is a slower brainwave and it’s a relaxed state. It’s receptive, it’s mindful, and it’s calm. And just being receptive, it’s also a very, very good way to learn. So, if you need to learn anything or memorize something, or if you’re in, say, a podcast that you want to remember, it’s great to get into an alpha state because your memory will work a lot better from that. 

Then theta is the next one and this is deep relaxation. It’s where most meditation takes you. It’s also the brain waves associated with REM sleep. And also, when you feel together, you feel like you are one of the whole like everyone is one or what Carl Jung, the psychologist, would call the superconscious, and that is the theta state. And then there’s one more and that is delta. And delta can be reached by deep meditation. It’s also associated with deep sleep and healing. So, when you go there, your mind and your psyche is healing. And this is what happens with meditation is it takes you from that initial beta state down into the alpha, down into the theta, and sometimes all the way down into the delta and it takes you into those different ways of thinking, the different brain waves on it and then slowly, it brings you back out to take you back out to the alpha and the beta of your everyday life. And that is the way it works. And here’s just something I want to do with you real quickly and it’s a breathing exercise. And I want to show you if I can what a difference it makes to consciously enter an alpha state. 

So, wherever you are right now, if you’re driving, obviously, don’t close your eyes but if you’re sitting in a place where you can, if you can bear with me and try this little experiment, I want you to kind of think and take note of how you feel right now. Just a mental, like, I’m feeling good, I’m feeling great or whatever it is for you on a scale from 1 to 10 how am I feeling? And let’s do a quick breathing exercise. And we’re going to take you from beta down into alpha. So, if you’re ready, let’s get started on this. Now, what you’re going to do is you’re going to breathe in through your nose and let’s start it with a count of three and then you’re going to exhale through your mouth for two times that three breath. So, it’d be inhale for three, exhale for six. If you inhaled for four, you would exhale for eight. Now, let’s go ahead and try it with the inhale for three and the exhale out of your mouth for six. Now, what I want you to do is when you breathe in through your nose, breathe in completely and totally until you feel the breath all the way down to your stomach. And you want your chest and your stomach to expand when you take it in. And then when you blow it out, blow out just kind of calmly at the 2X breath. 

So, here we go. Let’s give it a try. In for three and out for six. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. In for three. Out for six. In for three. Out for six. Last time in for four. And out through eight. There. Now, I want you to think of how you feel right now versus how you felt when you first started this and ask yourself if there’s a difference. If you’re anything like me, just doing this and actually talking while I did it, I still feel much better after than before. And this is literally it’s taking your brain from a beta state to an alpha state. And this is the first gym and if you can write this down anywhere that you can, what’s wonderful about this is you can get into an alpha state in a relaxed state quickest and the easiest way to do this is just by concentrating on your breath, and doing what we just did and you can get a lot more calm. And if you’re a Miracle Morning practitioner, if you’re someone that learns for a living or teaches a lot of people, this is one of the first things that you can do to get into a more receptive state and to be able to learn with it. So, I hope that you liked that and it’s something that can help you. 

Now, real quick before I get into two of the ways that I meditate, here are some helpful ideas for your meditation. And one of them is that consistency is king. You want to try and do it at the same time and the same place every day and sometimes generally the same type of meditation because that’s going to make it easier to make a habit of it and it’s going to make it just something that will add itself to your routine and you can do that. And the thing about meditation is that there are cumulative benefits to it. The longer you do it, the more it trains your mind and the better you get with it, and you get to train your brain. So, reduce variability, do it at the same time each day and try to create a habit with it and that’s going to serve you a whole lot better. There’s something else. Set the bar low. Count yourself as having done your meditative practice if you just do it for a minute a day. And I know that’s an extraordinarily low bar, but it’s also something that anyone and everyone can do. 

Now, something I’ve done is I actually set my alarm in the afternoon to remind me to do my afternoon meditations. Typically, I’ll do it twice a day once during my Miracle Morning and then later in the day at 2:30, my alarm goes off and that’s when I do the second meditative practice and that’s something that can really help you. Now, here it is, change up your routine as you see fit. If you see something like what we talked about today that makes more sense in what you’ve been doing, then try that but don’t let this be the only thing that you do and just commit to actually doing it each and every day. And I’d recommend if you have a journal, if you have a way to write it down for me, when I put my commitment in writing, it seems to mean more. And that’s like it’s imprinted on my soul that, yes, I’m going to do this, yes, I’m going to try meditation or, yes, I’m going to consistently engage in the behavior that I want to, to get to where I want to be. 

So, hopefully, those are some ideas that can help you with your meditative practice. Now, let’s get into this real quickly. First of all, this is how I began. Tim Ferriss introduced me not personally but through his podcast introduced me to The Headspace App. And it is created by a former monk named Andy Puddicombe and he created that. And what’s really good about this is if you can download Headspace onto your smartphone, it’s easy and it’s guided, and it covers that question, “Am I doing this right?” because he literally walks you through everything on how to do it. He tells you to find a place to sit with your back straight, your back supported, your head free and close your eyes now and count your breaths and do this and do that and he walks you through the whole thing. So, there’s no guesswork, there’s no ambiguousness to, “Am I doing this right or for the right length of time?” or anything like that because they walk you through it. 

And that’s one of the things this is how I started and it gave me a really good foundation for meditation and it taught me several different types of practices in the meditation,  of course, counting your breath is one of the things that you can do. Another thing is to do a body scan where you feel each part of your body and all of those is something that they go over in Headspace. So, for Headspace, just so you know, obviously, we’re not an affiliate on this because I’ll just tell you to download it on your phone. But Headspace has what they call a 10 for 10 and that is for 10 days, they will give you a 10-minute meditation, so you can try it out and see how it is and they can walk you through doing your meditation for those 10 minutes each and every day. And again, that is something that walks you through it quickly and it gives you a good foundation. And then at that point, you can decide if you want to continue with it or not but again, that gave me a really good foundation so I really appreciate that. 

Another free resource for you is to download on your phone something called Insight Timer. And this is the one that I actually use as a timer to time my meditations. I do it in the morning when I have five equal lengths of five minutes each of my meditation and I do something that I call the God bookend. And I don’t mean to offend you with the word God. If you’re one of those folks that gets offended with that, you can call it the universal bookend or the collective intelligence bookend or whatever you like, but I do five different sessions or timed parts of my meditation for five minutes each. And they are prayer and presence and appreciation where I go out and appreciate something and really just feel that gratitude in my heart. And then also pre-paving which we can call visualization for Miracle Morning. And then the last part I call it my power or my download. And that is when I asked from a higher intelligence a question or a thought or something that I need clarity on and I bring it to that session and just let my mind calmly collect any type of thoughts that I have towards it and just let my intuition roam free. 

And for me, it’s really kind of like a superpower and I won’t go too much more into this because it’s really a lot more detailed and could literally be its own podcast post, which, maybe I will do that here in the future. But that is how I do that in the morning. And then in the afternoons, I use the timer to do something called Ziva Meditation and actually, let me get to that real quick after I give you another resource. After Headspace, after Insight Timer, you can go to TaraBrach.com, and that’s spelled T-A-R-A-B-R-A-C-H.com. And there’s a lot of free meditations on it. She will teach you how to meditate and she even has a free beginner meditation kit that you can download that will walk you through it. And she’s got a lot of guided meditations, some where she guides you through the first parts and then allows you to meditate through the rest of it. And that was very helpful for me as well. 

And now, I know I don’t have a whole lot of time with this and again, I apologize if this is coming fast and furious but again, if you want the entire class, you can go to Miracle Morning the Facebook group, the Miracle Morning Community and click on Unit and you can see the meditation class there, which is almost two hours of this so it can help you out. But let me tell you real quickly about Ziva Meditation and this I got from Emily Fletcher, and this is what I do in the afternoons. And real quickly what it is she details this in her book, Stress Less, Accomplish More. It’s a great book. She’s sold a bazillion copies of it and she talks about the Ziva technique with this. So real quickly, I’m going to go through it and kind of give you a good overview. You might have to write this down or come back to it to be able to get it. But first, you want to sit down with your back supported and your head free. That’s important and you also want to be comfortable. 

And here’s the thing, this is kind of a myth, but thoughts are not the enemy. So many people say, “I have a monkey mind and thoughts keep coming through my mind through meditation,” and that is fine but what happens with that is every time a thought comes to mind, you can softly dismiss it, you can acknowledge it, and then let it go and then continue with your meditation. And what happens with that is that you become better and you become more focused each and every time you do it. So, that’s kind of neat. So, thoughts are not the enemy. You can set a timer so you don’t meditate too long. That’s why I set my timer for doing this and you can do it anywhere that you like and it’s recommended to do it twice a day, once to kind of clear out whatever happened that day and then the second one to actually go back and to clear out past trauma or past things that have happened to you, and to help clear your mind and your spirit and your soul further on. So, that is the things that you need to know for it. 

And now here’s exactly how it works. Now, there are four parts to the Ziva Meditation technique. The first part is the two times breath that we just did and the sample that we did earlier, that little example. The second part is to come to your senses. We’ll talk through that real quickly. Then the third part is the actual meditation, and that’s where it moves beyond mindfulness to a deeper state. And going back to what we talked about earlier, it’s like you’re moving from a theta to even a delta state in your meditation. And then the last part is manifesting positive visualization. And here’s how we do it real quick. Those are the four parts. For the two times breathing technique, just do it exactly how we did it before, breathe into your stomach, expand for a count of two and hold one second and inhale. And if you say inhale for three seconds, you want to exhale for six seconds. If you inhale for four seconds, you want to exhale for eight. So, that’s why it’s called two times breath. 

And generally, in this case, you breathe in through your nose and I like to breathe out through my mouth to get started. But if it’s more comfortable to do it through your nose, that’s fine. And you want to repeat this several times until you feel comfortable and then you want to drop into regular breathing. Now, the second part is called come to your senses. And what you want to do with it is you want to go through your five senses and getting very present and very mindful with each. You want to go through hearing in your sound, and then feeling and then your sight, your taste, and then finally your smell. And smelling I should say, you know, just smelling the air. It’s not smelling bad. It just makes it sound kind of weird. Anyways, go through your five senses. And what you want to do is you want to notice the big things, the big sounds that are with you. 

And then after that, try and listen to something that’s more layered or soft or something that you can’t hear just blatantly and let those sounds come to you and just really concentrate on those. And then do the same thing with your feeling, with your eyesight, which of course your eyes are closed, but typically, you can still see some patterns and you can still see some light of some sort and just really concentrate on that and do the same thing with that, your taste, and then your smell and then finally, just for fun all at the same time, Emily says to your Spidey senses and have all of those senses going off at one time, where you’re smelling, and you’re seeing and you’re feeling and you’re hearing everything that’s going on at the same time and just getting that together. And that is the part two and that is the mindful part of the meditation. 

And then number three, I’m going to take this a little slower, but this is actually where the meditation occurs. And this part is called dropping in with a mantra. A mantra is it literally means a mind vehicle. You might have heard this before, but people saying the word om, O-M or O-H-M. I actually use the mantra aham, which is A-H-A-M and it’s Sanskrit for meaning, “I am.” Then, of course, you can choose your own. You can look online and find a mantra that means something to you but it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. It’s just a mind vehicle to get your mind rested and relaxed. So, what’s going to happen is you’re going to start to mentally repeat that mantra. You don’t have to do it out loud and you want to do it with easy or no effort and what I call this is just releasing the result. It’s not trying to drop into a meditative state or getting to a place where you can really get this. And to me, like the more you try and hold on to that, the more you try to force a result, the harder it gets to do it and it seems to kind of just run or just get out of your grasp all the time. 

So, what you want to do is repeat that mantra to yourself in your mind and think about that word over and over again and do that until you drop into a meditative or a blissful state. Now, if you’re like me, when I started this, what would happen is those thoughts would come and I would have to acknowledge them and have them move on while I continue to repeat the mantra in my mind and think about the word and think about the mantra. And sooner or later, and hopefully sooner, you’ll actually while you’re doing that fall into what we call the bliss state and that is where you lose track of time and you thinking of what’s going on. And that’s kind of what you’re striving for but again, you have to release that result and don’t force it. And when you get there, it’s a wonderful feeling but if you’re not getting there, you’re still doing a lot of good because you’re working out your mind and you’re acknowledging the thoughts and moving them on. And again, that’s just like lifting the weights in the gym for your mind and getting better. And you want to do that until you come out naturally into the next state. 

And the next state after you’re dropping in with your mantra and hitting that bliss is called manifesting. So, when you come out from that, you still want to keep your eyes closed and then you want to do the type of visualization that you would do during a Miracle Morning and thinking about your goals and thinking about you actually accomplishing them like doing the work to accomplish them, and visualizing and seeing through your own eyes what things would look like as you accomplish a goal or as you move past an obstacle, or as you feel like you want to feel or as you’re experiencing the relationship that you want to experience or that you’re building the business that you want to build or that you weigh a certain amount. You want to just feel that and make it as visceral as possible. Think about the smells and the sights and the sounds that you would do and keep all of those in mind as your eyes are still closed. And then smile really big. Imagine that it’s done and then slowly open your eyes. And that, my friends, is how you do the Ziva Meditation. And, again, a lot of this will be explained in more detail in my meditation class. That’s at the Miracle Morning in the Facebook group. So, that is it. 

So, I just wanted to tell you with that, and if you’re like me, use a journal with this and write down your thoughts on it and what you can do to improve your meditation and also just how the meditation is going and you can rate yourself on it. You can write your commitments on it. You can help yourself if you’re having problems with any type of meditation. You can write it down in your journal and do that. So, that is what we have. So, I just wanted to share with you again those apps include Headspace. They include the Insight Timer and the Insight Timer is completely free. I don’t think you can actually update it or upgrade it by paying some money but it’s certainly not necessary. And there is a Miracle Morning group on the Insight Timer app. So, if you look for that, check out the Miracle Morning and I am actually in it, Chip Franks, and you can look me up on there to check out me meditating, what I meditate to, and when I meditate and that kind of thing. And there’s that. And then again, the mentors that I talked about. 

One, my God bookend mentor, he had a four-phase meditation that I borrowed from liberally, and his name is Jesse Elder. And that’s J-E-S-S-E-E-L-D-E-R. And actually, if you google him, and you search for the world’s most dangerous meditation, he will actually walk you through the four-phase meditation of which I changed to be my God bookend and that’s really wonderful. Emily Fletcher who I’ve mentioned here and is the creator of Ziva Meditation, I believe she actually spent three years in India kind of learning more how to meditate and getting really deep into it. She’s an excellent human being, wonderful, and you can find her and her information at ZivaMeditation.com. That’s Z-I-V-A Meditation. And of course, you can also search for her on YouTube as well. And then the last mentor I’ll leave you with here is Tara Brach and I know I mentioned her before, but if you go to TaraBrach.com, that’s T-A-R-A-B-R-A-C-H.com you can check out a lot of free meditations from her. And she’s got a couple that I think are really good. 

There’s one that’s called the reign of self-compassion. And especially if you’re listening to this and you’re really hard on yourself, go listen to that because that’s something can really help you out. Help you love yourself and help you accept yourself a lot more. And she also has a free meditation kit on there as well. So, those are the resources for you on this. And just something again that I would like to encourage you to do on this is recommit to meditation practice. And if you’re doing it, great. Just continue with that, obviously, but if you haven’t done it or you’re sporadic, I encourage you to join our challenge group on Facebook. Just go to Facebook, the Miracle Morning community, look on Unit and see the challenge group for the podcast, and you can see that there and we would love to welcome you there, get some feedback, get some people to help hold you accountable, some people to encourage you. And of course, all the resources that I’m talking about are in there, as well as a class that I did that includes a lot, it includes all of this, plus a whole lot more, plus an hour or more teaching to help you with your meditative practice. And just want to pass that on to you. I think, I hope that you will enjoy that. 

[CLOSING]

Chip Franks: And with that said, that is the Meditation Podcast for the Achieve Your Goals listeners. So, thank you so much for your time on this. I hope it was helpful. Please come back to this if you’d like to try the difference, the different techniques that I’ve talked about in here. And let me know if this was helpful for you. You can email me directly, chip@miraclemorning.com with the word meditation in the subject line. I’d love to get those and just let me know if this was helpful for you or if there are things that you would add or anything like that. Thank you so much for your time. I wish you the best of luck and the best of everything. And please remember that you are loved and you are deserving. Thank you so much. [END]