A martial artist once asked Bruce Lee to teach him all he knew about martial arts. Bruce held up two cups filled with liquid and said, “The first cup represents all your knowledge about martial arts. The second cup represents all of my knowledge about martial arts. If you want to fill your cup with my knowledge, you must first empty your cup of your knowledge.”

To create a life you love, find solutions to problems or discover your life calling, you need to ’empty your cup’ by quietening the left hemisphere of your brain. The left hemisphere is the logical, analytical part of the brain that processes information sequentially. Give this part of your brain a problem, and it will work on finding a practical solution for you. The brain is a beautiful tool. However, if you don’t know what you want or don’t know how to create what you wish, logic, reason, and analysis can have you going around and around in circles. This can lead to feelings of frustration or uncertainty, and that’s when it sometimes gets too hard, and we settle for what is.

You won’t find the answer to life’s problems in analysis, continually discussing your frustrations, or by making lists of the pros and cons. You see it by allowing the right hemisphere of your brain to take over and guide you. The right hemisphere of the brain is your creative, intuitive side. It is the space where inner peace resides. You access this part of your brain through meditation.

Meditation isn’t just something that makes you feel more relaxed. It changes the structure of the brain and the chemicals your brain produces. It develops your intuition. It enables you to find a way where there is no way. Science has proven that advanced meditators use their whole brains, which is the ideal state we need to aspire to.

If you can’t meditate, join a group. By meditating with a group, brainwaves are entrained. This phenomenon of entrainment was discovered in approximately 1665 by a Dutch scientist named Christian Huygens. Charles had a room with several pendulum-driven clocks and one day. He noticed that the clocks fell into synchronisation with each other. Even when he deliberately started the pendulums swinging at different times, they would revert to synchronisation. Charles called this pattern ‘entrainment’. Since then, scientists have discovered that when people meditate together, their brainwaves are entrained, making reaching a deeper meditative state easier.

Another discovery by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1893 was that binaural beats could induce relaxation. More recently, it was discovered that listening to binaural sounds regularly could balance both brain hemispheres. We experience binaural beats when we hear two different frequencies, one in each ear and these frequencies increase specific frequencies in our brains. To participate in a binaural sound meditation, you need to wear headphones. Holosync is one of the better-known brands of Binaural meditation.

If there is something in your life that you are struggling with, some dream you are yet to fulfil, commit to meditating for 20-30 minutes every single day. State your desire/s at the beginning of your meditation, then start by giving thanks that you already have what you ask for. Do this for at least 30 days, and longer if you choose. Support this habit by acting like a trusting person, then focus on what you have. By doing this, you find a gradual shift; often, you will find a way to achieve a goal you hadn’t thought of before, or people will support you. Sometimes, you may find that something better has come along.