During a youth Q&A session at a recent Week Long Advanced Retreat, a member of our community asked me something with real urgency in his voice.

“I really feel the emotion of my future in my meditations,” he said. “But – how do I lose it so quickly once I open my eyes? I mean – it’s gone. And I have to work really hard to bring it back. Why does that happen so fast?”

Of all the ways to answer this question, there’s no more powerful or instructive example I can give than the people who’ve healed themselves through this work. What I’ve learned from years of witnessing their transformations – and interviewing them to find out what they did – is, there are two main reasons they come back to their meditations again and again.

The first reason has to be stated in terms of what it it’s not. People who are deeply immersed in this work are not primarily doing their meditations – some of them three or four times a day – to heal.

They’re doing their meditations to change.

They’ve grasped something profound: Before we can realize any external goal – restored health; improved finances; a new relationship – we must first understand that nothing can change in our life … until we change.

And when we have overcome and transformed ourselves, the “side-effect” of that transformation can produce desired outcomes. That’s how so many people have healed – not by asking, “Why hasn’t it happened yet? Why aren’t I healed?” But by first asking: “What do I have to change about myself to heal?”

Refraction and Reaction

The second reason so many people return to their meditations is to temper their emotional refractory period. That sounds clinical and complex, but what it means is this. When we’re exposed to an external stimulus that triggers a stress response, we have a reaction … and it’s often a habitual, automatic reaction tied to our old stories and our old self. We’ve forgotten ourselves – and who we want to become. We’ve gone unconscious.

When this happens, we’re filled with doubt – because our habitual reactions pull us out of the present moment and back into the emotions of our past. All of a sudden, our belief in our new future is shaken – and we lose our belief in our ability to create meaningful, lasting change.

People who’ve overcome themselves in this work understand this. And when they sit down for their meditations, they do so with the intention of not getting up until they’re once again feeling the feelings of their future.

Put simply: they’re not doing their three or four meditations a day to heal. They’re doing them to remove their doubt that they can heal.

Remembering and Reconnecting

So what do we do when we have the same experience as that young man I was talking to a few weeks ago? When doubt starts to take over – and we realize we’re seeing things through a very narrow lens? When we go unconscious and forget ourselves?

Once we’ve caught ourselves in a reaction, we’ve achieved something important: we’ve become aware of what we’re doing. With kindness and love, we can remind ourselves of what we already know – but had allowed ourselves to forget.

When we realize we’ve defaulted to an old emotion, one that’s correlated with everything known in our environment, we can name that emotion – doubt – and resolve to get back to our feelings of our future. To practice feeling those elevated emotions until our belief in that future is restored.

And so, like the many people who’ve achieved miraculous transformations, we go back to our meditations. We sit down with the intention of not getting up until we’re feeling the emotions of our new future.

I believe we are eternal. Thus, in the expanse of eternity, on the journey back to source, I think that when it’s the hardest, it matters the most. By overcoming ourselves, mastering the moment, and recalibrating our nervous system to coherence and order, we’re literally changing our destiny. Now, the intention to self-regulate becomes more about who we are on the journey than about the circumstances at hand.

In this way, meditation is no longer about performing the act just for the act itself. It’s no longer about trying to bring about a desired outcome. It’s about staying conscious – and not going unconscious the moment we arise. It becomes about remembering ourselves.

 Our lives are filled with so many external stimuli; so many internal alarms that may sound and set off a reaction. We all react – but we can work on the strength and length of those reactions.

So – we don't work on shortening our refractory period just because we want to be emotionally intelligent. We work on it because the emotions of stress are signaling the same genes that cause us to disconnect from the future.

It becomes a practical application. We go back to our meditations again and again – not because we want to heal, but because we went back to our old self. Because we understand that before we can heal, we have to change.

When we tune in to the feelings of our future, and we can stay in those feelings, then we’re connected to that new future. We actually believe in it. Because we’ve overcome our doubt, we’ve become our belief, and we’ve remembered what’s possible. And in doing so, we’re remembering our future.