Try This Technique To Be Able to Study English For Hours

If you can't focus, you're not alone. ​​Let me share a secret with you. It has taken me more than 5

years to learn what I needed to do to focus on getting my work done, and, I must say, until this

day I sometimes find myself getting distracted and switching between tasks on a busy workday.

Does this happen to you? It's so easy to get trapped in distraction when facing a difficult

or daunting task, and I'm sure you have those moments while studying English. So, today

we’re going to look at the self-development side of English, exploring the different ways in which

the practice of MEDITATION can help you improve your English, and even more importantly, your life!

So, there are numerous benefits to it, but I'm going to explore some of them, such as concentration,

of course, self-confidence, clearing your mind, memory recall, and self-esteem. This lesson

uses excerpts of the Beyond Borders Talk Show. Download the RealLife App now to listen to the

full podcasts with transcripts. You may be wondering what meditation has to do with learning English!

Let's imagine a computer. Your brain is the hardware, the physical part that makes your body

work. Your mind is the software, the system and processes that tell how things

should work. Meditation is a super sophisticated program that changes the hardware.

Actually, both the hardware and the software become more sophisticated... faster, stronger, and less

problematic. My students have told me countless times that they are afraid of speaking English

or that they are not fluent because they don’t know enough. However, the real problem is that

they can't do it because the program (English or any other additional language)

is currently too heavy, takes up too much energy, and their brain just can’t work fast enough. So, if

you have ever suffered from fear or stress related to learning and speaking English, meditation can be

a huge help. Some of your favorite teachers have told me about their experiences with meditation

on Beyond Borders. So if you watch until the end, you will learn about the benefits of meditation,

how to get started (and continue), and how to connect it to learning English. But before I jump

into that, if your goal is to learn English so you can understand fast speech, communicate

with anyone, and even connect with others, I invite you to subscribe to our channel so that you

don’t miss out on our weekly tips to help you master English once and for all. Like Srushti who

after just three months learning with our channel feels much more confident in his communication. So,

we want to help you to reach your goals to actually use your English in the real world, but we can only

do that if you hit the subscribe button and bell down below so that you don’t miss our new lessons!

No! If you have heard of meditation before and always thought of it as a complicated

technique, full of many steps, let me tell you that it is not. One of the ways meditation

helps you with your learning is by helping you decide where you are going to focus your attention.

So, the first skill you develop with meditation is concentration, and this will gradually calm

the many conflicting voices in your head and help you remain present and focus

on what’s happening around you. This is extremely important for speaking and listening to people in

English and to build a strong memory. This is how I experience it.

- Do you? Do you meditate? Is that something that you do? - Yeah, I do meditate.

if you're sitting in traffic and you're frustrated, it's an opportunity that you can check in with yourself.

So you could, for example, pay attention

to your breath. Or you could maybe roll down the windows and listen to the birds chirping in the

tree nearby, or whatever is the case. You can pick anything and focus on that and just be present

n that moment. And just based on what you're saying, I think it's very similar that you're

taking a negative experience and turning it into a moment of practice, really something

that can help you to grow and help you to be more content in that moment, and in your life in general.

No! Learning how to meditate can be life-changing. As we briefly mentioned, with consistent meditation,

you develop the capacity to observe your thoughts and emotions, and with time you learn to stop

reacting to them. This is great for every area of life, but if you apply it to English,

you no longer feel constrained or scared to speak. You realize that you don’t have anything to be

embarrassed about with your limitations. With this attitude, your confidence will quickly grow, and you

will stop listening to the voice of fear. Take a look at Justin's process of getting used to it.

I had some pretty interesting experiences to start off with. I was fortunate - beginner's luck, I don't

know, but, but kind of like it doesn't always happen that way, sometimes, like your

monkey mind gets in the way, and it can be hard to have those deep experiences.

But I was fortunate to have a kind of a deeper experience in one of my first sessions.

And that sort of showed me something was there. But then beyond that, I was really making an effort to

get back to that experience. And I had a hard time doing that. Because when you, when you try hard to, you know,

have those great experiences, they tend not to come. But I would say like, just in general...

It's like... There's a phrase from a really great  mystic named Nisargadatta, from india, that is basically

The very act of perceiving it shows  that what you perceive is not real,

it's not who you are, it's not real, but not  who you are. So basically, like for example, when you

meditate, and you see your thoughts, we oftentimes  get confused and caught in those thoughts. We get  

caught in the story of who you are, in any given moment it might be like a conflict with somebody

or something that, that you get emotional about. It might be like standing in line at a store or being

in traffic. I think those are the moments that I first started to see like, a difference because

I was able to see kind of like the thought, being born of the emotion. And to recognize that and see

like I actually had a choice, I can step between stimulus and response. And what this is what

meditation does it sort of gives you the practice of stepping back and identifying

with the witness, with the consciousness, that's in the backdrop of your life experience.

Now is the perfect time to start. It doesn’t take much. Sit down and look at your mind. There’s

nothing better you could do to improve your life and improve your English at the same time.

ou can use some guided meditations in English to also practice your listening. Remember, when

you meditate every day, you are upgrading your mental/cerebral system, which can handle

many more programs. So I asked Justin:

How would you recommend that they get started meditating?

Here are his tips to help you get started.

I would say like, there are lots of really great apps to experiment with.

There's the Waking Up app that you and I both use with Sam Harris.

There is Headspace. There's Calm. And these guided meditations are perfectly suited just to

actually help you cultivate that habit. And the hardest part is the habit.

Right? I would say, a lot of people really get hard on themselves, they think that they

need to stop. They're thinking that they need to have some transcendent experience, but really

just showing up sitting down even for a minute, right, just starting the habit doing

it every day getting that streak going. And that's really going to be helpful to

building the practice. And over the the days, and weeks, and months and years, you're gonna see the

development, you're gonna, it'll start unfolding, and you'll learn to quiet your mind, you'll learn

to go deeper, although even advanced meditators aren't able to always quite, quiet their mind.

I think it's, it's a process, and definitely something that you just need to

get started on the journey.

And Speaking of apps that can help you to improve your English, have

you tried our RealLife English app, yet? First of all, you can listen to interviews like these with

Justin and Leo with a full interactive transcript and vocabulary definitions. But that’s not all.

You can speak English. Anytime, anywhere. It’s simple, you press a button and we connect you

to another English speaker in a different part of the world for a fun and dynamic conversation.

So not only will you improve your English, you’ll also discover other cultures! And guess

what. It’s absolutely free! So download the app right now by searching for RealLife English

in the Google Play or Apple App store. Or just click up here or in the description below.

All right, so when you first start meditating, one of your first realizations is that you have

difficulty concentrating. That's completely normal. Your mind is full of thoughts about the

past and the future, desires and fears, things you're excited about and are things that you're  

worried about. You don't need to put so much pressure on yourself. Just like when you

are studying something new, it's doesn't need to be perfect all the time. It's okay to have good

and bad days, just like Leo who I found out has different ways of clearing his minds when

life doesn't allow him time to dedicate to his practice.

I'd be curious, if you meditate as well.

I will be very honest with you and say that my meditation practice is out of balance at

the moment. I have days where I'm able to meditate, and I have days where I'm not

doing a good job of meditating. I'm not doing the kind of meditative practice, which is spending,

I'd say 10-15 minutes in complete silence. I do that with a bike ride, I go for a bike ride. And

I feel like that's a way for me to gather my own thoughts and to understand, and to

develop that clarity, that is really important to, to understand yourself a little bit better.

You have the sort of informal practice of actually trying to do that in your own life. So like you

were saying, in traffic, that can be a really great moment, because most of us will get really angry

in traffic. And there's also other things that you can do, you know, put on a podcast or music, like a

great song that you love or something and you can find something else to enjoy in that moment, or to

help you or you can just meditate, even if you have already learned how to do that.

And you, dear listener right now you can actually just think of the sensation in your finger, the

sensation in your elbow, in your knee, we're often not aware of it. It's just there.

We're kind of lost in the story of our lives, you can look at the thought,

you can look at the thought that's occurring in your mind right now. You can say the word

like, Listen, right now that's a word appears in your mind. Right? So stepping back, and looking at

it, you can recognize it's really going back to that phrase that quote, 'The very act

of perceiving shows that you're not, you're not what you perceive'. So you aren't

your emotions. You aren't your thoughts, your body sensations is external to you.

If you want to learn more about other habits that can help you with your English,

we have created a lesson with Justin's easy tips that you can start applying right now

and it'll make a huge difference. Take a look.