Celebrate Teddy Bear Day

I’m not quite ready to come out to my friends and family about putting videos on YouTube, but I did want to talk a about why I’m making these videos.


When I was doing counseling I found that one of the main mental health problems people have are the stories that they tell themselves about themselves. What is the story that you tell yourself about what you personality is and what kind of person you are. In counseling I would often try to get people to change their narrative by having them think about alternative narratives and trying to point out examples of where their narratives did not ring true. One example I have for myself is that I always thought of myself as a sedentary and non-athletic person. I had put on weight in elementary school and was heavy through junior high and never liked group sports. When I began doing these meditations I wrote one about being active (which I will post soon). I began to realize that my narrative was not true. I lost most of the weight in high school and although I have gained and lost weight since then I have been an average weight more often than not. More importantly I have excercised at a gym for most of my adult life and now exercise 6 days a week. I also started thinking about my childhood and although I never played sports I spent sun up to sun down in a pool during the summers. I was not an inactive kid. My narrative didn’t ring true

I think often as adults our brains are very rigid and we think our narratives are fixed. It is difficult to get our brains to put aside our past beliefs as we try to change our thoughts about our self. I don’t know if you have ever tried to use affirmations to change your thoughts. I have and although I try to believe an affirmation like “I am an energetic person” part of my brain keeps yelling “That is bull.” I have found that in meditation my brain is more flexible so it’s easier to tell my brain new stories to believe. I think through visualizations you’re able to almost live through the experience, proving that your narrative is false. Actions always to speak louder than words. Our brains are not very good at distinguishing a real memory or real story from a story we have created in detail. That is why musicians can think through a piece of music and how they would play it and get almost as much out of this as an actual practice session. Athletes use the same visualization techniques to live through the perfect winning scenario.

The more often you use these visualizations the more they become integrated into your thoughts. I hope these meditations help you as much as they are helping me. Please leave me comments. I know my comments will not always be positive but the few I have received have had me on a high all day. Thanks for listening and please subscribe and send feedback. Remember meditation changes your mind.

Jess