Meditation is medicine.
Whether we have experience or are hearing about it from all sides, meditation gives us a way out, a way in, a way up, a way down. It’s a practice that brings balance, steadiness, quiet, and light.
What happens when you meditate?
Your body begins gearing down. Literally, the functions of the systems that generate stress reactions begin slowing, and the systems that are designed to manage such reactivity come back in line. Try for one minute to simply watch your breathing, inhaling long through your nose down into your belly, then exhaling long out from belly to nose to the space around you.
Set your phone. One minute.
Notice how your entire body has softened, from your feet to your face. Note how your interior tone has become somehow more radiant, more vibrant, yet more quiet. This is meditation, and it doesn’t need to be elaborate.
For decades of my life I felt disconnected from pleasure, from feeling well, from trusting in myself. As a result, I couldn’t connect to the world, I never felt whole, and I couldn’t trust others. I became an addict, swimming in self-hatred and couldn’t imagine loving myself. Ever. To begin finding my way on this path, I began practicing yoga, which had one crucial result: practicing yoga helped me start LISTENING. Before yoga, I couldn’t listen to my own body, I couldn’t speak its language, and I certainly hadn’t ever taken the time to hear or respect its signals. Once I began listening, to the profound longing for wholeness inside, I began exploring what might help answer the call I was hearing, from deep within me. I realized I was mercifully being called home.
How does yoga work?
It places us into moments of undivided attention on our breathing, our architecture, and our physiology, so we can begin to enter into a relationship with our body that transcends thought. It’s simply physical, at least initially. Ultimately it calls us home into a relationship with ourselves that becomes both the physical and the emotional foundation for how we approach everything.
Meditation helped me refine my listening, and taught me to learn how to be more sensitive – both to content and context. Meditation helped me recover from my addictions. Meditation helped me remember that my love is wise, and it’s for me first. Then it taught me that once I can love myself, I have the capacity to extend my highest love to my family, my tribe, my colleagues.
H
ow does meditation work?
It gives us periods of time where we can enter into a quiet, effortless period of releasing. For those minutes each day, my body has the time to release doubt, fear, drama, pain, and chaos. Once those are released, I can cooperate with my highest learnings, my finest understandings, and my dreamiest inspirations.
There’s been one crucial understanding gained from meditation.
When I notice a resistance arising, a judgement crossing my field, I now know that it’s just a little pocket of my own internal doubt departing from my body and from my life.
Now, whether I’m practicing yoga or meditation, I’m practicing willingness – to listen, to note, to watch, to let go. Willingness to celebrate and honour the mystery of this existence with all its trials and victories. How will you stay willing to grow, especially in light of the stresses you’re encountering daily? Watch and notice. Listen well. Be ready to practice releasing beliefs, doubts, pains, fears – DAILY – and to welcome in a brand new Love that changes everything.