GROW AND FLOURISH

Developing personal strengths through meditation

We already know that meditation helps us to develop important personal strengths such as calmness, patience, and focus, but it also gives us the tools to make long-term changes in any area we choose, from developing courage to kindness.

Long-term personal growth, such as developing a personal strength, requires self-awareness and willpower—two core skills that you enhance through meditation. First, you need self-awareness to recognize opportunities to practice that personal strength, then you need willpower to bring your attention to your chosen way of interacting with the world and follow through with it. You train to do this in meditation many times: noticing that your mind is distracted, then bringing your attention back to where you want it to be.

Although meditation gives you these two skills, the transformation is not automatic: you still need to make active use of them and do the work needed, outside of meditation.

STARTING WITH THE BODY

Before you change what’s happening in your mind, it can help to use the self-awareness you develop through techniques such as Yoga Nidra, Vipassana, and Mindfulness Meditation to trigger the physical states that usually come with whatever virtue you want to develop. For example, if you are seeking to develop the virtue of courage, try to identify how it feels in your body when you lack courage or back down from something. Perhaps this is a tension in your shoulders and a churning in your stomach. Then do the same to imagine how it feels once you have used courage to overcome a fear or anxiety. You might remember a time where you felt courageous and took action regardless of fear, or use your imagination to feel what that would be like. This could be a sense of expansion in your chest and energy in your muscles. Understanding this difference will enable you to create the quality you seek by consciously triggering the physical sensations of courage.