How Meditation Changed My Life: Mamata Venkat


Mamata Venkat wants to empower people to unplug from their gadgets and inspire them to start working on themselves as much as they do their jobs.

She will discuss the interaction between our internal and external development using her practice of meditation to exemplify how success in either does not have to come at the cost of the other.


A Perrysburg native, Mamata Venkat is a 2014 graduate of Wright State University with a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies and a Minor in Spanish. After an internship with the United Nations’ NGO Committee on the Status of Women, she decided to return to Dayton to achieve her lifelong passion of working in the healthcare field. She is currently pursuing a Post-Baccalaureate Pre-Medical Certification at Wright State, with the aspiration of working in public health. Mamata is also employed with the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program and is a certified meditation instructor.

How Meditation Changed My Life | Mamata Venkat

0:05
meditation has been a part of my life ever since I can remember
0:09
I personally have been practicing meditation for the last five and a half
0:12
years and I’ve been it
0:14
last eight months but I’ll get into that a little bit later my college career has
0:19
been unconventional to say the least
0:22
I started out as pre-med and got halfway through my freshman year of college
0:25
before realizing that really wasn’t for me and I switched my major about four
0:29
times before finally landing on international studies and eventually
0:32
choosing public health and I think it took me a really long time to figure out
0:36
what I wanted to do with my life for a few reasons 1 i’d always struggled with
0:41
self-confidence and I would set my standards for myself so high that any
0:45
time I failed to reach them
0:46
I felt like I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing instead of finding
0:50
strength from that situation I would beat myself up in falter and to my idea
0:56
of success and happiness and satisfaction up until recently were
1:00
completely misguided
1:01
we live in a world that encourages that this idea that in order to be internally
1:06
satisfied
1:07
we have to rely on external circumstances and this is an idea that’s
1:11
been hammered into our heads
1:12
probably since we could understand what happiness and success and satisfaction
1:15
were and obviously these are concepts that are different for different people
1:19
at different times so it could be the little things like spending time with
1:22
friends and family or curling up with a good book or it could be getting good
1:26
grades
1:27
getting the job you want finding the person you’re meant to spend the rest of
1:30
your life with
1:31
while all these things are great things we’re still relying on things outside of
1:35
ourselves to make us happy and this idea of external substantiation has been
1:40
magnified with the increases in technology and the advent of social
1:43
media we can’t really exist without our devices anymore it’s almost like our
1:47
phones have become other body organs that we can’t live without and with no
1:51
offense to anybody in this room but i can guarantee that the second I’m done
1:54
talking the majority will probably subconsciously reach for your phone to
1:58
check your texts and social media social media has created this idea of false
2:03
happiness and satisfaction
2:05
nobody wants to share that moment with their live no lives no one wants to
2:08
share their mistakes or their failures
2:10
social media has made it seem that everyone is always successful and happy
2:14
and satisfied all the time but what if things don’t go our way
2:17
what if we don’t get the great we want we
2:19
you know the person we thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives
2:21
with breaks up with us or we do get the job we want but there’s some sort of
2:25
negative aspect to it like our boss sucks or we have a horrible coworker
2:29
suddenly the concept that was providing us with an internal site inspection
2:34
externally is now negative
2:36
so what I’m realizing more and more is that not only is our success temporary
2:40
but our happiness is conditional
2:42
we’re only happier satisfied because something outside of ourselves as making
2:45
us happy and satisfied
2:47
we’re never truly satisfied for the sake of being satisfied and that’s when i
2:51
realized i was going wrong
2:53
so let me back up a little bit anybody who knows me knows that my entire life
2:57
I’d been on a one-way path to becoming a doctor
3:00
my whole family is filled with medical professionals and at the age of five
3:03
i declare that i was going to be just like them and of course my incredible
3:06
Indian parents let out a huge sigh of relief because they don’t have to
3:09
convince me to go into medicine and for a long time that’s what I wanted to do
3:13
until I started learning more about myself and my passions in my interest
3:17
and suddenly becoming a doctor was less of what i wanted to do and more of what
3:21
I felt obligated to do because my entire life I had been taught that in order to
3:25
be successful you have to be a doctor and I was always a weirdly compliant kid
3:30
I always knew my parents knew what was best for me so instead of finding the
3:33
confidence in myself to stand up for myself I went along with it
3:36
flash forward to my freshman year of college and I was miserable
3:40
I was taking classes that I hate it and I was doing poorly in them
3:43
the person that I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with broke up
3:46
with me the second he went to college and I was still living at home so I felt
3:49
like it wasn’t having the normal college experience and after years of having a
3:53
plan in a direction for my life all of a sudden I was lost and when you go
3:57
through hard times when you go through a breakup or whatever
3:59
everybody tells you to get out of the house do things for yourself and I did I
4:03
would hang out with friends i would go curl up with a book at a bookstore
4:06
i joined our Bollywood fusion dance team at school I again I would get a massage
4:10
but those were temporary satisfactions i would still come home and still feel
4:15
internally dissatisfied with myself and social media became the bane of my
4:20
existence I will see my friends and my ex and all my classmates posting
4:24
pictures of their new college adventures their dorm rooms their new friends
4:27
it’s all these new things and I felt like a failure for a couple of reasons
4:31
one I didn’t have anything to share on social media I was still living at home
4:35
I didn’t feel like I was having the conventional college experience and to
4:38
as an Indian
4:40
I wasn’t meeting the standard of success that had been dictated for me I wasn’t
4:44
doing well to become a doctor but because i was all I knew as success
4:48
I stuck with it and my GPA and my self-esteem failed as a reason
4:53
so how did I change this how did i turn my life around
4:57
like I said meditation has been a part of my life ever since I can remember my
5:01
dad has been practicing a form of meditation called Raja yoga more yoga of
5:05
the mind for over 35 years and my mom started shortly after they got married
5:09
so just like people go to church or temple or synagogue meditation is my way
5:12
of life
5:13
it’s all I’ve ever known and I always knew that I was going to start
5:16
practicing meditation at some point and I tried it a couple times my freshman
5:20
year of college but anything at that point that my parents that would be good
5:24
for me or would help me get out of the rut that I was in I was completely
5:27
rebellious against thankfully for me and very luckily i have incredible friends
5:33
and I have to show off pictures of these guys because they are my whole world
5:36
I was very lucky to have friends who were not only starting their college
5:40
careers or they were halfway through their college careers but they were
5:43
going through similar things that I was and they hadn’t built up the resistance
5:47
to meditation that I had and one of my friends convinced me to go to a
5:51
meditation retreat when we can at first i cribbed and I dust and I wanted to
5:54
stay in my own little bubble of self-pity misery but in the end I’m so
5:59
glad I went because it was probably the best thing that could have happened to
6:01
me
6:02
so what is meditation I’m sure everybody here has a general idea in their head of
6:06
what it is but just to give a few more definitions
6:09
meditation is an exercise that trains your mind to regulate itself
6:14
it’s the ability to focus on one thing continuously without break and it
6:19
practice properly and do diligently
6:22
it’s a consistent reconnection with your true inner self and a lot of people
6:27
brush the concept of meditation aside because we think how we function without
6:31
our thoughts
6:32
how do we get through our day without thinking and another thing that people
6:35
don’t realize is just like our bodies require physical activity to keep it
6:38
strong
6:39
and healthy and active our minds our muscles that also require exercise and
6:44
regulations to keep it strong and happy and healthy and active and a lot of
6:48
times people neglect their minds because they forget this . and if you think
6:52
meditation is hard
6:54
you are absolutely right it’s very difficult to get your brain to shut up
6:57
for longer than five seconds and not think about something else and that’s
How Meditation Changed My Life Mamata Venkat
7:00
another piece reason why people don’t try it out
7:03
the first time I sat down to meditate it felt like every single thought I’d ever
7:07
had in my then 18 years of experience existence decided to come into my head
7:12
at that exact moment and no matter how many times I try to push them away or
7:16
ignore my thoughts are trying to get into a state of thoughtlessness
7:19
they kept coming back and I remember thinking why am I doing this
7:22
here’s yet another thing in life that I’m failing at why am I even trying
7:25
the second time I sat down to meditate during that retreat
7:29
my thoughts decreased by a quarter the third time I sat down to meditate during
7:34
that retreat decreased by half and gradually it was as though i was
7:38
starting to see the world in high definition
7:41
not only could I see my external circumstances very clearly that it was
7:46
finally starting to see my true inner self with the objectivity and clarity
7:50
that I not had ever before and the practice of meditation that I’m a part
7:57
of prescribes meditating twice a day for one hour each time
8:02
so once in the morning for an hour and once in the evening for an hour and I’ll
8:05
be totally honest with you guys it took me a very long time to get to a point
8:08
where i was consistent with this
8:10
some days i was doing a really great job and get up in the morning and meditated
8:13
go to bed and I meditate before before I went to bed I would meditate not be fine
8:17
but other days more bad days than good days
8:21
I would just be downright lazy and I would choose to stay up all night
8:24
watching Ellen videos and then you know seven
8:27
wake up late the next morning instead of meditating and my rationale for this was
8:30
like yeah i’m young i got the rest of my life to work on my meditation practice I
8:33
don’t have more time to watch Ellen videos
8:36
but i think it took me a long time to read to connect with my meditation
8:41
practice because i wasn’t accustomed to the silence that came with meditation
8:45
I think as humans we thrive on noise because it makes us feel as though we’re
8:48
doing something and so I’d sit to meditate and about five to ten minutes
8:52
in i would realize i was craving noise I needed some sort of distraction so I’d
8:57
give up on meditating and I immediately reached for my phone or from my laptop
9:01
and what this taught me was I’d come to a point where I hated silence and this
9:06
also taught me how loud my world was and noises not just sound or cacophony of
9:11
noise is the frustration you feel with a family member or friend its writers
9:16
block
9:16
it’s not understanding a concept at school anything is noise if it’s loud
9:21
enough to distract us and one so I realized that I’d come to hate silence
9:26
it made me examine my routine and I realized I couldn’t get it through a day
9:29
without sound or noise or distractions of some sort I would wake up in the
9:33
morning and i would meditate have hardly before giving up because it got too hard
9:37
and immediately reached for my phone or my laptop and I would play music and
9:41
videos while I was getting ready for school while i was eating breakfast i
9:45
would drive to school with music on
9:46
I would get to class and it’d be fine and then about halfway through class and
9:49
without thinking about the video I watched that morning and then be so much
9:52
chaos coming around me and in me because of my thoughts and all these
9:56
distractions that I’d come home and feel frustrated and let out that frustration
9:59
of my family members because I didn’t know what to do with it and i start my
10:03
homework and feel frustrated because i wasn’t understanding the concepts but
10:06
that’s because I music on the background and then I try to sit down and meditate
10:09
at the end of the day and I’d give up again because there was so much going on
10:13
in my head and I get annoyed when I couldn’t fall asleep and then I get
10:16
frustrated because I felt like I wasn’t progressing in my meditation practice
10:20
so what this taught me was that in order to create a true connection with my
10:24
inner self had to learn how to love
10:27
silence and in order to learn how to love silence
10:30
I had to really use my willpower and commit to my meditation practice and in
10:34
order to sustain the love for silence that I’d cultivated internally my
10:39
internal environment had to interact with my external
10:43
environment and so the more and more i meditated the more I started to learn
10:47
how to love silence
10:48
internally the more my internal environment began to reflect my external
10:52
environment and that’s when I started to see the changes in myself that I wanted
10:56
to see
10:57
so here if you how meditation creates interaction with the internal the
11:01
internal with the external confidence like i said earlier
11:05
I’ve always lacking in self-confidence the creating a consistent reconnection
11:08
with my inner self drove that fear of confidence away i suddenly i was able to
11:13
stand up for myself I was feeling more confident within myself and it gave me
11:16
the courage to eventually switch my major to international studies and
11:19
eventually get rid of this idea that in order to be successful I had to do
11:23
something big
11:24
replacing the positive with a negative
11:27
like I said before you know we may get the job that we want but there’s always
11:30
going to be some sort of aspect about it that ends up becoming negative or
11:33
something that we don’t want to deal with and all of a sudden the entire
11:36
environment becomes negative cultivating a connection with my internal self
11:41
through meditation has allowed me to see that the positive and any situation
11:46
regardless of what it is
11:47
exercise not just exercise of the mind
11:51
but exercise of the body when you’re taking care of yourself internally
11:54
you’re given the ability to take care of yourself externally as well
11:58
communication I’m seem like a talk a lot up here but I’m actually pretty not a
12:04
sort of most of the time and so by creating a connection with myself
12:08
through meditation constantly i was able to say the things I need to say speak up
12:12
for myself when I needed to minimizing stress and anxiety being able to create
12:18
confidence in myself maybe take on challenges without any worry or fear and
12:23
staying in the present moment
12:25
it’s easier to live in the past it’s more fun to live in the future but it’s
12:28
better to stay in the moment and that’s what meditation does for you
12:31
compassion tolerance acceptance being able to see everyone with as their true
12:38
selves because of reconnecting with myself and willpower
12:42
meditation is hard but if you could create the willpower to stop your brain
12:46
from thinking long enough you can pretty much create the willpower to do just
12:49
about anything
12:50
and the capacity to love as corny as it sounds
12:54
the more and more i was able to love myself the more i was able to love
12:57
everything around me
12:58
there was only one time in my life that I really straight away from my
13:01
meditation practice and that was when i was working on president obama’s
13:04
reelection campaign
13:05
this is the day my dad and President Obama went public with their bromance
13:09
huh anybody knows anything about a campaign knows that the energy they are
13:15
so strong that you really don’t need much of anything else to cog to sustain
13:18
you and I realized that I was trying to take the energy from this product from
13:21
this campaign and use it in my daily life but once again I was relying on
13:25
external circumstances to make me feel good internally
13:28
I got to do a lot of really cool things my senior year of college I got to go on
13:33
to study abroad trip to Europe to study human rights got you will be in our mod
13:38
right Stacey accredited Model United Nations team but it became less about
13:42
the big things that I was doing and more about committing to my meditation
13:45
practice committing to my internal self and making sure that all the values that
13:49
I created within myself were expressed and everything I did that I did what I
13:53
was supposed to do to the best of my abilities and when I was very fortunate
13:58
to get the internship with the United Nations I carried that same mentality
14:01
with me
14:02
so what I’m learning more and more is that we shouldn’t have to rely on
14:06
external circumstances to make ourselves internally satisfied true success comes
14:12
when you take the time every single day to work on yourself internally and
14:16
cultivate the valleys that you want to see yourself internally and then being
14:20
able to hold on to those values and express them in any external
14:24
circumstance whether they be positive or negative one of my best friends for and
14:29
she actually just recently wrote a blog post about this
14:32
we think that change is gonna come to us as we get older we think will learn how
14:35
to cook when we move that we think will exercise more when we really need it but
14:38
that’s not the case we will learn how to cook when we choose to learn how to cook
14:42
we will learn to work out and exercise when we choose to learn to work out and
14:45
exercise my internal sense of self didn’t change until I made the choice to
14:50
change my internal sense of self and to me
14:53
true success is being able to learn about myself more and more every single
14:56
day with my meditation practice and use
14:59
and that and expressing it in any situation that I’m put in
15:02
thank you

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *