MM162 - Quiet Time is Meditation | MM Book Study Pt. 20

You do not have to sit cross-legged on a bamboo mat to enjoy meditation. Meditation can come from deliberate and purposeful Quiet Time. Every needs quiet time and can benefit from it.

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♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Welcome to Morning Mindset. A daily dose of practical wit and wisdom with a professional educator & trainer, Amazon best selling author, United States Marine, Television, and Radio host, Paul G. Markel. Each episode will focus on positive and productive ways to strengthen your mindset and help you improve your relationships, career goals, and overall well-being. Please welcome your host; Paul G. Markel.

*Professor Paul*

Hello and welcome back to Morning Mindset. I am your host Paul Markel, as I've said previously, but I know that every once in a while someone will pop in here right in the middle and they're brand-new. They might see the topic and think “I'm going to give that a listen”. So if you are brand-new, Congratulations, I'm glad you're here.

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Take a moment to close the hole under your nose and open up both your ears, and listen louder. As I've said many times before, we are going to continue with the Morning Mindset book study. Morning Mindset: a 30 Day Plan for a More Positive and Productive Life, written by Yours Truly Paul G. Markel, and available on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle for your phone or tablet, and of course, if you go to Morning Mindset podcast.com, you can follow the links and Order yourself a signed copy of the book If you so desire, we're moving on with our book study and we. On Section number 20. That's right. We're two thirds of the way through the book now. You're welcome, how cool is that?

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Today's topic is “Quiet Time is Meditation”. When I was a young man, when I was in my mid to early teens I got real excited about the martial arts, you know, karate and Taekwondo and and different martial arts, and one of the things that I was able to experience or that I was involved in was Asian martial meditation.

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If you know anything about their dish that traditional martial arts from either China or Japan, from Asia is that they don't just jump around and hit boards and bags and kick the air and scream. A lot of traditional Asian martial art training involves deep, Quiet meditation, and a lot of that stems from the original Buddhist Roots. But you don't have to be a Buddhist and you don't have to get down on a on a mat, on a bamboo mat and cross your legs and put your hands in your lap and recite a mantra or a chakra or whatever you want to call it.

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It's a mantra, not a chakra, but you don't need to do that. Now I did, and my parents thought I was losing my mind and you know, they're like, “Oh my goodness. My son is in a cult now”, I wasn't in a cult. I was just trying to clear my head and that's really all meditation is. It’s clearing your head, clearing your mind, and freeing it up from all of the clutter and distraction that is around you all day long, every day, and if people's minds were cluttered and distracted 30-40-100 years ago, imagine the magnification of that clutter and that distraction today.

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Think about it in your daily life you get up in the morning, and how long is it between the time that you open your eyes, you wake up, open your eyes. How long is it before you look at a monitor or a screen? How long is it before you see something that is potentially distracting or annoying or that demands your attention?

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How many of you, be honest with yourselves, wake up, sit up in bed, and before you even get up and go brush your teeth. You have your phone or your tablet in your hand and you're looking at incoming emails emails that have come in while you're asleep.

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Something is already demanding your attention. Before you even had a cup of coffee, you're distracted, You have, you know, you have demands on your mental attention. Every single day we have devices, gadgets, screens, monitors, that demand our attention. That are either an annoyance, or they're a distraction, or they are something that cannot be ignored because you’re like “Ah Paul you're saying, I gotta get those emails answered. I’ve got to get it done and it has to be done before I even start my day” and I get that, I get it.

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What does that do into your mind? How many of you feel like sometimes that your mind is racing, that it’s going a mile a minute? How many of you have tried to sit down, close your eyes and maybe take a nap or go to sleep at night, and you're laying there and yet your body tells you it's tired. But your minds just like this that's revving-revving-revving, stuff-stuff-stuff, think-think-think.

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Every once in a while, we need quiet time. You know the Calgon “Take me away” and I'm sorry, I know most of you are way to young to know what that was. Calgon bubble baths. The cliched old mom with kids, tells her husband. “You got the kids. I'm going to take a bubble bath” and you know, that's it's in you know, they use in commercials and it's kind of a cliche, but the fact the matter is you know, in a practical application what that Mom with young kids that were constantly demanding her attention, and she had to pay close attention to them and she was picking up after them and chasing them around so forth she needed quiet time, and that's what that bubble bath was.

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You know was that Quiet Time and it's very real and we've known this, humans have known this for generations, going back hundreds if not thousands of years. Humans have understood that you cannot run your mind in 5th gear all the time, and not expect it to break down. Sometimes you need to gear down, to first or pop it into neutral, and relax and that's what quiet time does for you.

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Quiet time is meditation. Now many of us have different types of quiet time. You may engage in the traditional type, you know, you do yoga or you do this or you do that and you literally, sit down cross-legged in a quiet room and you've been taught to clear your mind and enjoy actual traditional Eastern type meditation. That's good, you don't have to just do that. Some people's quiet time is reading a book.

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You get a paperback book, you go somewhere where there's no distractions, when no one's going to need your attention, put your phone away. Go put it on the charger in another room and just sit quietly read a book, I enjoy cigars. Often I will light a cigar, I'll get an adult beverage maybe, or good cup of coffee and I'll just sit out on the porch and I'll smoke the cigar and enjoy some quiet and that's it.

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I don't even have to do anything else. Now. I often smoke cigar when I'm writing but there's many times when I'll just enjoy the quiet time. Where I live there is a natural hot spring. Yes, it's hot water that comes up out of the ground because we live in a mountainous area and you have things like that and I like to go when the hopefully the hot spring is not very busy and you can sit there and enjoy quiet quiet time relaxing time.

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I'm not telling you have to do it every day. I may be good if you do it every day, but I'm not song that you have to but if you have not if you're sitting out there right now and you're thinking Paul II don't even remember the last time I was able to sit quietly without distraction without anyone needing my attention. I can't even remember when that was.

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If that's the case brothers and sisters you need some quiet time and quiet time is not for you to figure things out quiet time is not when you sit and mull things over and come up with solutions to problems and new. This is a new that's know quiet time is when you just sit quietly and enjoy the world around you.

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You're not have to you don't have to come up with any answers or Solutions or the you know, cure cancer or do long division or calculus or anything like that quiet time is just that you've been running in fifth gear Gear all the way down. Pop it out of first second. Put it in neutral put your brain in neutral just for a little while, and you'll appreciate it. You should appreciate it. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to leave you but fear not I will be back again very soon. I am your host Paul Markel, and I'm looking forward to chatting with you again, real soon.

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♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Thank you for spending time with us today. To get show notes, submit a topic request, for more from your host Paul G. Markel, visit MorningMindsetPodcast.com. That’s MorningMindsetPodcast.com. Please leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player, we appreciate your time & effort, and we look forward to reading your honest feedback.