How I Created My First Meditation (And How You Can Too)
I share the story of how I created my first meditation ever. I hope it gives you inspiration and guidance for your future creations!
GIFT FOR YOU
If you’re a meditation teacher or coach who wants to create unique meditations people listen to over and over again, enroll in my free course Meditation Script Mastery
Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots
Podcast Transcript
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. My name is Lou Redman and I share this podcast as someone who quit a corporate job in 2015 to learn how to make my way, living my purpose, sharing meditation, helping others along their journey. It took me over 40 years to figure out a way to make that work, make a living, make an impact. And I share this podcast to help you give you some ideas and hopefully maybe collapse some of that time so that you can start using meditation to share your gifts and help you navigate your spiritual and entrepreneurial journey. And today I share with you a little story about how I created my first meditation. And stick around to the end because I have a special gift for you to help you create your either first meditation if you're brand new to this, or if you have been creating meditations. I have a gift to help you come up with new ideas, new ways to explore how to create meditations that really move people, that really evoke a sense of connection and transformation. So stick around at the end. I'm so excited to share this gift with you. And so today, today's really a story about following the threads, listening to your intuition, connecting and seeing the synchronicity that's there. When we start to really align ourselves with our purpose, when we start to align ourselves with a deeper contact with the presence and the energy that is within us, synchronicity starts to show up, events start to align and signs present themselves. And so I'm gonna take you back into 2016. Last episode, I talked about how May 2016 was when I started to share myself on social media. And that was just a really big catalyst point and a momentum point for me starting to bring a gift or to bring myself to express myself in this world. And it was around same time, spring of 2016, when I had a friend and I was part of this really powerful mastermind group that I share a little bit in my story if you want to go back and listen to that. And I'm sure I'll share more about it coming up, because masterminding is something I'm really passionate about. And so a friend who is in this mastermind group is a videographer, and he, for whatever reason, shared with the group a link that had a set of tools for anyone who wanted to start recording audio. Now, I look at this now and I'm like, what the heck? How? Why did he share that? I don't remember. I don't remember. But it felt like he was sharing it for me, like it was this beautiful synchronicity where, for whatever reason, I didn't even think I was wanting to record meditations at the time, but there was something in me that was saying, hmm, see this thing? Why don't you buy it? I think it was. It was pretty expensive for me at the time. It was $350 for an H4 Zoom recorder, a little portable recorder that you would record on an SD card and a lavalier mic and a XLR cable, which I don't think I actually used the XLR cable for years after that, but pretty much just used the H4 Zoom and Lavalier M and I just bought it. I didn't know what I was going to use it for, but I felt like I needed to buy it. So here's lesson one. When something out of the ordinary presents itself that is connected to something that you're pursuing, someone shares something that you wouldn't expect them to share. Listen, take notice and be curious. Hmm, this is interesting. And listen, notice if there's a little voice inside that's calling you to take this action, to spend a little bit of money to meet some person somewhere, whatever that little nudge is. We have to learn how to keep listening to that little nudge, that whisper that's guiding us forward. And so what I did was I bought this recording, and at the time, I told you I was creating video. So initially I thought I was just going to be using this lav to go outside and just up my video quality. And I did that here and there with some videos, but those videos aren't any good. And again, I encourage you to go to my YouTube channel and scroll all the way back to see me ranting and yelling at people, because it's quite comical. Anyway, what happened was, is I went on a retreat in July of 2016 to Nicaragua. Now, at this time, I had been sharing meditation with a couple friends. I had been getting together in a park, guiding them through what they I knew how to do. And at this retreat, I had some friends that knew that I was doing this and asked me if I could lead meditation in the morning before anyone woke up, because they knew how powerful meditation and how big of a thing it was for me because I was talking about it all the time. And I just had this whole experience and this whole transformation happened. And so they were curious. And so I was so nervous. It's so funny. I was so nervous on a retreat that I was on to wake up a little bit earlier. It's like 7am we went out onto the beach and four or five people that wanted to wake up and do it came out and I just intuitively led them through a meditation and slowly but surely kept growing the comfort zone, kept finding some experience. And I did that about three or four mornings of that trip. And it was so powerful and just really, really rewarding. And one person on that trip was one of my best friends growing up in high school. Actually. It was a really, really cool to share that experience with him. And, and he at the time was building his own music recording studio and he just felt like he needed some motivation and some support. And so he asked me if I could create a meditation that he could listen to or a series of meditations that he can listen to. And I was like, oh great, yeah, I just, I got this recording mic now and I'm going to recreate some meditations for him. And so I got back from that trip and I started my first frontier of sitting down thinking about what I wanted to record. What is the arc of this little seven day series that I wanted to create for my friend. And, and it was really the first meditation course that I created. And I even put music to it. I never even use music now, but at the time I use like this very kind of motivational type of music and recorded. And I created something for my friend and I only shared it with him that's not been shared anywhere else. I only shared it with him. But in that same time, as I started to get a little bit more comfortable speaking on this mic recording and meditation, I decided to record a meditation on self love that I was going to upload to YouTube. And that's what I did. I recorded this 15 minute meditation on self love and upload it to YouTube and I ended up getting some really great feedback on YouTube. And I was like, okay, that feedback, I don't want you to feel like you need the feedback and the validation because you don't. And it does feel good when you receive it. It's just, okay, I'm just one person, just one nod of like, oh my gosh, I'm not speaking into a vacuum or something's working. And if we can just continue to expand the little bit of something that's working, that's. That's what it's about. That's what it's about. And so this is also the story of how I uploaded my first meditation on insight timer, how I even found insight timer. So I record that self love meditation, I put it on YouTube and of course I'm all about meditation. I'm searching it everywhere and I'm sure I don't even exactly remember how, but I see on the App Store there's this Insight Timer. And I use it initially and I still just pretty much use it as a timer, as a bell. And it was something that I could use to time and create a log of my meditations. And I don't know how I found that Insight timer. I could upload meditations on, but I must have saw that you can be a teacher and you can upload your own tracks. And I thought, wow, this is interesting. I just, I just recorded this self love meditation. I just put it on YouTube. Maybe I should just see what happens. And so I listened to this little nudge that told me to create the profile. And In October of 2016, I uploaded a meditation called Love Yourself Today. And I didn't think much about it. I didn't think anyone was really going to listen to it. And the next day I look and it has 2000 plays and all of these comments on it. And I'm like, whoa, what is this? What is this? What's happening here? And I'm kind of like so shocked by it that I don't even give it the attention that I probably would if I could go back. If I could go back. I tell myself, dude, just block everything in your calendar and record a meditation every day. Upload a meditation every day. You know, you'd have millions and millions of followers by. No, but it doesn't work like that, right? Sometimes we don't realize we struck gold when we even struck gold. And so, you know, that validation again, it was this little note from the universe that I'm on the right path. Something is here now, a big lesson in this. You could still listen to this meditation on Insight Timer. It is actually a meditation that they have on their self love page called Love Yourself Today. And it's still not even edited. It's. Yes, it uses a lav mic because I got. I was inspired to get this kind of special setup. But the message here is that you don't need the fancy editing and you don't need the fancy mics. Some of my early meditations are still unedited. I'm like swallowing and I'm gonna ask my editor to not take that out so you can hear like, I'm doing that, like in meditations. And some people would comment like, you know, I couldn't concentrate because of your swallowing and that's gonna happen and that's fine. Ideally, you're not swallowing like that intensely during Med, but I didn't edit it at all. When I sat down and recorded meditation in the beginning, it was like I go from I do this whole 15 minutes as perfectly as I think I can, or I have to restart over again and I would just upload them the raw track to Insight Timer. And again, that track is still one of my most popular tracks. And it was really just me following intuitively my heart and not feeling like I needed to do anything special. But so I really just. I say that story to encourage you to just start to even take out your iPhone. Actually, no, don't take out your iPhone. That's. I won't go that raw. Don't go that raw. You can, for very little, little, little amount, buy a little mic that will plug into your iPhone and radically upgrade the quality of microphone or quality of sound that's going to come out that you can actually upload. So don't do a RAW audio file just on voice notes. Buy the $10 little microphone if that's where you want to start, and do it into the iPhone and then start to progress and up from there. I was just called by my friend having this kind of length. He made it easy for me to buy this recording equipment at the time. But you don't have to do that early on. And of course, if you already have. Great, great. I used that Lavalier mic for three, four years. About four years I used that. And for the first two years, I still did not edit my tracks. So many of the tracks, my early tracks, are unedited, which blows my mind now. But when I created my first course, I was like, okay, I need to edit this. And so I learned some basic editing tools in Audacity. So that's a tool for you, if you don't know Audacity, to start to edit. And if you want some more guidance around editing, shoot me an email. I'll send you some notes that I have that can help you to edit on Audacity by yourself. Pretty simply, it really doesn't take that much or that much technical skill. So coming back to this message, start with what you have. Listen to the synchronicities, follow the little nudges of what is this? And if you do catch a little bit of a break, don't do what I do, which was do nothing, and just be like, whoa, this is really cool. Maybe start to create more. But I say that all laughingly because it was all perfect timing. What I was fortunate in is that coming up in that year, I was doing a crowdfunding for my book. And as part of one of the packages people could buy was a seven day meditation course. And I did that without even having the course. I just figured when people bought it, I was going to fulfill it. And that was that. And so I think a few people bought it. So in December of that year, December of 2016, I had to create a seven day meditation course that I was delivering in this crowdfunding campaign. And so what I did was, oh, I remember I had this Insight Timer account. I could upload things and over, over some early 2017, I started to upload those tracks from that course to Insight Timer. And again, this is still a wild west gold rush time of Insight Timer where your track stayed on the front page for a couple days. You got a lot of plays, got a lot of notice, and that was great. And they kept slowly, slowly building Insight Timer at an early time. I would say definitely an early time comparatively to other teachers or I mean comparatively to right now. If you're going to start on Inside Timer, which I still encourage you, I hope you listen to the interview with Nini Lee because I think there's still a lot of, lot of opportunity in that app. Now, of course, if I can go back, I might do things differently, but I was also navigating a time when I was about to publish my book. So that was really front of mine and just a whole slew of self doubt and fear that that brought. So that was really a big part. And it was in 2017, that January, where I met David Gandelman for the first time. And he gave me this advice that I kind of scoffed at because I thought I was creating these meditations. Now when should I get paid for them? I should get paid for doing this. This is what I'm trying to do. I'm not making any money. I need to support myself. And he told me to keep creating meditations and keep giving them away, just keep giving them away away and that you can have the best stuff, but if no one knows, it doesn't really matter. So he was all about building the audience for free. And so I give that to you because that's what I've continued to do ever since is to really make sure that I'm giving away as much quality content from my heart as I can, especially in meditations, especially since Inside Timer is a free meditation app and other apps, Aura and YouTube, obviously that these are free platforms. So there's a plethora of free meditations. So whatever you are creating, we'll talk more about the Power of having a bite sized piece of how people can connect and trust you. But of course, if I can go back, I would be creating meditations every day for insight timer in 2017. But alas, I didn't miss the boat by any means. So I'm grateful and I want to encourage you to create, to share. Maybe you create it, maybe you make a meditation course with one person in mind or you and you create a more meditation with one person in mind and you don't even give it to that person, but it helps you to give yourself ideas on like, okay, if I was making it for what this person's going through, what would I do? And I guarantee you that that's going to have a broader scale impact. Now, speaking about giving things away for free, speaking about how to create your own meditations that you can share, that can help people connect to themselves, that can help people release and transform through meditation. And I have a special gift for you. I created a powerful course. It's a jam packed course, seven lessons, it's only an hour long of content. So you don't have to quit your day job to take this course that is going to help you think about, help you create to script and create powerful and evocative guided meditations. It's called Meditation Script Mastery. And I'm giving it away for free. And you might be like, Lou, you're giving away for free. It must not be very valuable. Honestly, I've been debating for weeks over I should charge for this. The original intention was I wanted to create this for free. And then after I created, I was like, wow, this is good. I should charge for this. I should charge, you know, 37, 47, 50. I don't even know what I was gonna charge for it, but I felt like I needed, I should have charged for it because then people would have taken me, taken it with more value. But after thinking about it long and hard, the intention with this podcast, the intention with a lot of this work is I really want to grow and connect with more of you. And giving this course away for free allows me to do that, to really use this and give this as a gift to the community. And so that's what I'm doing. And so it's for you. Please go check it out, go download it or sign up for it and you'll get a chance to. It'll help you create new ideas. How do you come up with new ideas for meditations that are unique to you? It'll help you think about how you script your own meditations. And really it's a. It's an artist little journey. This is. I'm not going to give you a bunch of scripts and tell you how to do it. I'm going to give you some ideas so you can make it your own, which I think is how people really are going to resonate and connect with what you have to share and how you start to find your unique voice, how you start to find your gifts. So you can enroll for the course at Meditation Creators Thinkific. T H I N K I F I C so meditation creators.thinkific.com or just scroll down to the show notes. There's a link to that course. Hit the link. Enroll for the course. You're gonna have to create a little password, move through that. You created a million passwords, create your little password, and you get this free video course that I put a lot of heart into and I think it's really valuable and I'm giving it away for free. God, I'm just trying to give this away for free. Alas. Have fun with it. Let me know. And in the course you can send me a voice message and share an experience and I'm going to give you your ideas on meditations that you can use. So take advantage of that. Send me a voice message, ask me questions. I just want to help you create your art and use meditation to share your gifts and have an impact on the world. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I'm sharing this podcast. So that's all. That's all I got for today. More story times to come. I know that some of this is kind of me ranting stories of my past. And so I hope it's helpful. I don't, I don't know if it's helpful. It's a little different than like teaching you the five steps to enlightenment or whatever it might be. And we have some episodes like that and some more directed ones, but I hope just giving you background into my story, encouraging you to listen to the synchronicity, to follow your own synchronicity. Your story is going to look different, but I'm hoping that it gives you some inspiration on how to go about and navigate your own spiritual entrepreneurial journey, your creative journey, and share your gifts. So thank you for listening. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Again. Go download and enroll for the free course. Share it with your meditation teacher friends, your wannabe meditation teacher friends, even if they don't want to be meditation teachers, but they want to use meditation in some way. They want to learn how to create their own meditations. Share it with anyone who'll be interested. They're going to love you for it because there's a ton of value and it's absolutely free. So go enjoy it and I'll see you for another episode very soon. And in the next episode, at least solo episode, I am going to be sharing a little story of how I actually made money after I quit my job. I never shared this story publicly so stick around for that. I look forward to speaking with you and continuing to support your journey. Lots of love.