I know, dear reader, I know. Yet another article about meditating. (Enter eye roll here.) Before you scroll past this, I invite you to hear me out. You see, I get it. I really do. My mind is just as (if not more) neurotic than yours and the thoughts, oh those darn thoughts they keep flying around and wreaking havoc while you’re just sitting there trying to find the peace. Trying to find the calm. I know.

It seems everywhere you turn, people are talking about meditating and a few scrolls into Instagram will reveal serene, bendy, beautiful yogis portraying meditation as if its the easiest and most peaceful experience on earth. You’ve heard about the benefits, your best friend is doing it and many of the people you most admire are doing it so finally, you decide to sit down and give it the ‘ole college try. You declare to your friends, make a post on Instagram, that at the turn of the New Year, your heartfelt resolution to meditate every day for 15 minutes will commence.

Finally, the big day arrives and admittedly, all the build-up to starting your practice has been more exciting than the actual experience of waking up on your first day knowing you have a task that awaits. You spend about forty-five minutes prepping your quiet corner, with a candle, a soft blanket or pillow to sit on, place a cup of tea beside said pillow. Finally you close the bedroom door and finally you sit down in your little nest, set the timer and close your eyes.

Nobody has prepared you for what unfolds over the next fifteen minutes. Thoughts start popping up like weeds left and right. Some of them ‘hook’ you and carry you on long winding tangents for what seem like days. Somehow you jump from “I wonder how much time has passed”, to “Hmmm, what should I wear on my date later?” to “Ugh I am SO pissed at Jane for saying that earlier”, which just becomes a landslide in to why you should get a raise at work, maybe you’re sitting there calculating numbers trying to budget the next month, to mental meanderings about what happened to that guy you dated in high school or that girl you used to see every day at the local coffee shop, what ever happened to them? Suddenly the timer goes off and you feel like you’ve just spent fifteen minutes in a landmine.

You see, that chaos – the chatter, the stories, the narratives, the calculating – its always there in the background of our lives, like a low frequency hum. Meanwhile in the day-to-day we are running around trying to reach career goals, go on dates, make new friends, raise our kids, heal our bodies and get places in this world we oh so deeply want to go. Yet as long as that subconscious chaos is in the background on constant rotation, we will approach our moments from a somewhat distracted, half-present, semi- or fully stressed out mentality and our lives will reflect that. Then we wonder why that relationship didn’t work, or why we got sick or why we feel absolutely exhausted at the end of the day.

When we choose to take the time once or twice per day – even for five minutes – we are setting a new tone to our day; to our life. We are allowing the chaos and the chatter to air out. Our task is to become the sky and recognize that the internal mayhem is the weather. Gradually we begin to connect more with the sky and see the weather is just passing and transient. Everything we do through-out the moments of our life, will be rooted in this calm even if it’s not noticeable right away. From here, our lives gradually transform from the center out and eventually the world will transform as well.

So this, my dear reader, is exactly why you and I need to be meditating every day. We are dealing with a tremendous amount of upheaval in the world today. Its more important than ever that we let our minds breathe and begin to find some space so that as we move forward from here, we’ll gradually do so from a relaxed, anchored, spacious inner foundation.
I hope you’ll join me in taking up this practice in your own life. No need to anything special, no big ceremonies required, just sit, let your experience be and see what happens to your life over time. Eventually rather than getting spun around in the weather, you’ll identify more with the sky and your life will begin to transform in ways you could not have ever imagined. We’re at a tipping point in the world today and this is one of the greatest ways to help ourselves and the world. #mayitbeofbenefit