Breaking Down the Biggest Misconceptions About Meditation With Balance‘s Leah Santa Cruz

Meditation has all kinds of incredible benefits for both your emotional well-being and overall health, but for newbies, the process of getting started can seem both intimidating and confusing.

A lot of that starts with a simple misconception about what meditation is. So much media portrays one specific vision of meditation, making us feel like if we can't completely clear our minds and reach some kind of enlightened state, we're doing it wrong, and we might as well not waste our time. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

We were curious, so for the real scoop on meditation, we turned to Balance app meditation coach and expert Leah Santa Cruz. The personalized meditation app works with its users every day, asking the right questions to guide their experiences and allow them to get what they want out of their daily meditations. If you've ever thought that meditation seemed overwhelming, just read our interview with her below to get all of your questions answered, and find out how you can start incorporating meditation into your life ASAP.

Sweety High: A lot of people have a misunderstanding about meditation. What is meditation at its core, and what are the benefits?

Leah Santa Cruz: I was just giving a lecture yesterday in a teacher training about this. I asked a group of 30 people, "What is meditation?" I had about 10 people raise their hands. Some said it's stilling your mind. Others said it's focusing and concentrating. Someone said it's healing myself, and another person said it's learning how to be in the present moment. I got so many different definitions, and then I asked everyone, can you understand how it could be confusing to know what meditation is?

If you look up the definition of meditation, you find that it has some really ancient roots in Latin and Old English, and it'll often say "to contemplate" or "to reflect." So am I supposed to be thinking, or am I not supposed to be thinking?

I refer to meditation as thousands of different techniques under this umbrella of learning to be connected to our own aliveness. I like to say meditation is a deep dive into our aliveness—into feeling who we are and who we are becoming and connecting with our relationship to all aspects of our life: our body, our breath, our mind and thoughts, our senses, our instincts, other people and the situations that are happening around us, our environment. We learn in meditation how to have a better relationship with each one of those things.

I find that definition to be really accurate when it comes to contemplating and reflecting on different aspects. What is my relationship to my breath? What is my relationship to sound?

Some meditations are designed to calm us and relax our bodies and help us get into our natural healing response, which has been coined the relaxation response. Other meditations are designed to energize our mind-body system and invigorate us and give us an extra boost of energy. A lot of those types of meditations involve movement or dance or something rhythmic in nature that is activating, like breath or fire, for example. We have that in the Balance app.

Other meditations are designed to bring us into the present moment. You could call it focus, but I like to call it being gently aware of what is here, without judgment.

And other meditations are designed to take us completely out of the body into a self-induced trance state, where we don't quite feel like we're awake or asleep—we're somewhere in between.

There are many different categories of meditation, but they're all tools to help us connect with our own aliveness, which is why I think meditation can sometimes be confusing and people don't know where to begin. What is the right way? What should I be doing?

It's really an exploration for people. As we discuss in the Balance app, it's not one-size-fits-all. Different people have different belief systems or come from different religious backgrounds or may have different personal preferences or different lifestyles, which is what makes us all unique. It's important that you find out what helps you to be more at ease or relaxed or more energized and feel good in yourself, and connect with yourself and with the rhythms of life that are happening around you. That may be different for the next person, and that's why we offer many different styles and help people on that journey of exploring what's best for them.

(via Balance)

 

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SH: Many can also struggle to get into meditation because of that confusion. What advice do you have for them?

LSC: We get these ideas about what meditation should look like and how it should go. If you ask someone to imagine meditation, they think of someone in a monk-like, zen state. They're sitting out in nature, completely at peace in a very particular posture with their fingers in such a way and sitting cross-legged, and with all the time in the world to just empty themselves. That leads most people to feelings of failure with meditation.

It's better that we take a bite-sized approach and we recognize that we live busy lives and we can get a lot out of just one to three minutes. Start with one minute here, three minutes here and three minutes here. As we learn to love meditation, we start to naturally make more time for it—and don't underestimate how much can happen within three minutes. That's why we have three-minute meditations in the Balance app, because that feels doable for everybody. Everyone has three minutes at some point in their day.

And the busier we are in our lives, whether it's school or work or family life, the more we crave a break. I really want a break from school. I really want a vacation. I really want to go to the beach, or lie down and take a nap, or to feel relaxed. That's what meditation can offer us—that same relaxed feeling as if we were to go take a nap or listen to a lovely piece of music on a walk. It's something that takes us away from the business of life. We can take the attitude that meditation is going to be beneficial to us, give us more time back in our lives and make us feel better and more productive and at ease, and then we make more time for it. It's not this scary, painful thing that's hard to do. If we approach it in a more natural and relaxed way and think of it as an exploration into ourselves or a mini vacation, we can approach it like listening to our favorite piece of music or eating something delicious. We can always make time for that.

(via Balance)

 

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SH: Can you walk us through the different types of meditations that are on offer via the Balance app?

LSC: We teach a few different concrete skills in the Balance app and through a plethora of different techniques. The skills in meditation may be such that you're learning how to bring your attention to something and to hold your attention there, and to learn to come back again and again, to bring your attention to that thing when you find thoughts or sounds come through or sensations in your body arise. It's part of the meditation cycle for us to get lost in a journey of thought. That's actually meant to happen. It's part of the way that our mind-body system releases stress and tension in the form of thoughts.

Most people don't realize that. They think they're not supposed to be thinking, when thinking is part of that release process. We teach you in the Balance app to befriend those processes and learn to approach them in a relaxed and welcoming way. That's a really important skill of meditation, no matter what kind of technique you do.

We also teach you how to build a stronger connection between your mind and body. Most of us are living in our heads so much that we feel completely disembodied and disconnected from what's happening in our bodies, which is where our nervous system mostly lives. We learn through things like the body scan technique how to bring attention through parts of our body and see what's going on there and what's happening within you in the moment.
We may be surprised by what we learn.

We learn how to build our focus through things like bringing our attention to the present moment, to our breath, for example. That helps us when we're struggling with focus or attention. As we train those muscles to be here and to be interested in what's here in the present moment, we can apply those skills outside of meditation when we're trying to bring our attention to something that we need to get done.

We also teach skills that have more to do with relating to other people, because a lot of the stress in life happens in relationships with our family or loved ones. They really know how to push our buttons—they installed those buttons.  We teach you skills like loving-kindness, which helps us tap into the compassion that we can have for other people—forgiveness, and forgiving ourselves. It's not just a relationship with others, but it's also how we build our relationship to our own self. That's a hugely important skill that's really necessary but isn't really taught in schools. We like to fill in that gap and work on how we can build empathy, how we can build emotional intelligence and build a better and stronger connection with other people through loving-kindness.

That's why we also have things like the partner meditations you can do with someone, as well as loving-kindness that you can do even when that other person isn't there.

We have some meditations that are designed to help you in the moment if you're feeling angry and frustrated, or feeling grief, or you're feeling sad or you really want to feel more joy today. If there's something specific going on or there's some desired outcome that you want to reach, we have a whole section of single meditations that are designed to guide you to that specific outcome.

We also have plans that help people learn all the core foundational skills of meditation by learning how to be with themselves and learning how to draw their attention to something. We teach different techniques. Some are breath control practices to calm us, some are energizing practices to energize us.

It may sound like there's a lot going on, but we all need different techniques for different times in our lives. Meditation isn't just finding the one technique that works. It's actually good to have four or five different techniques in your tool belt, so you can tap into what you need on any given day.  We want to give people different tools for each of those things.

(via Balance)

 

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SH: Is there anything else we should know?

LSC: I didn't have a meditation teacher when I was a teenager and in my early 20s. I didn't find my first teachers until I was about 26, and I wish I would have known then all the simple practices that I could have done.

One of them is a skill we teach in the Balance app called body scan meditation, and once you learn the skills, you can artfully add things to them. For example, a body scan is going to ask you to bring your attention through parts of your body. The whole point is to be aware of your body and to be in the present moment, but a nice variation of this that I like to do is to bring your attention through your body, and in each area, reflect on how this part of your body helps you and how this part of your body does so much for you. This is especially important in the parts of our body that we dislike or that we have issues with. There's a lot of body dysmorphia out there, and a feeling of unkindness towards ourselves.

Try bringing your attention through the body and sending a little loving-kindness to that part and saying, "Wow, you do so much for me, and I haven't said thank you." Thank your legs that helped you to walk through life and run and stand, and for your arms for being able to write and hold a loved one or give someone a hug.  Just take a split second to appreciate that part of your body, and if needed, if you've been unkind to that part of your body or have neglected it in some way, you can say, "Forgive me. I'm sorry. I love you." A little act like that can chip away at all the layers of self-hatred and neglect we put on ourselves in these really important formative years that end up carrying with us for the rest of our lives. We learn how to tap into self-love.

If you're active, it's also a good idea to add on just a couple of minutes of meditation right after you do some exercise.  Usually, after we get done exercising, we feel a flood of endorphins in our body—that runner's high. It's really nice to lie down for a minute or sit down on a park bench or just stand wherever you are for a moment and let yourself absorb the sensations of that flood of endorphins and that rush of blood flow and energy that's moving through your body, where you feel really energized and you feel really alive, and to let yourself bathe in that for a moment with your attention. Recognize what it means to feel alive in your body and connect with yourself in that moment. Perhaps set an intention, like how you want to feel that day. It really can be as simple as that, and that can be a beautiful meditation itself.

And when you're feeling stressed by life, or by school or by others, remind yourself of when you feel safe at home in yourself. Maybe it's in the comfort of your bed. When I was a teenager, I used to sit by myself on this big swing on the tree at my family's house, way out past the garden. I felt really at home in myself there, and even now, every time in my meditation practice, I still bring myself back to being on that swing, and I can recall the sense memory of what it felt like to sit there and the sensations in my body being on the wood and holding the ropes and feeling the wind flow through my hair, and the scent of the air, as I would swing. You can recall all the sensations of a moment and what it looked like and what it felt like and what it smelled and tasted like, and just bathe in that for a few minutes. That can really help you find your center in moments of chaos or difficulty. Remember you have this place within you that's really strong when you need it.

(Image courtesy of Leah Santa Cruz)

 

Curious to learn even more about meditation? Click HERE to read about what we learned from attending a chakra-healing meditation class.