I’ve been reading about a fountain of youth that leads to improved wellbeing and happiness for years – I have dabbled and am jumping back into it now.
I’m talking about meditation. The old adage goes ‘If you don’t have 20 minutes a day to meditate, you need 60 minutes a day to meditate’.
So – I’m starting at the 10 minute mark. I get anxious.
Yoga has always been my favourite exercise to do. I love how my entire body is frequently sore the next day. I love how energized I always feel after a class. Mostly I LOVE shavasanah!!! That’s the ‘drop dead’ pose at the end of most yoga classes – in a Bikram class you get a bonus in the middle of the class as well. And what really is shavasanah? A guided meditation. I always feel like it’s not long enough but feel like I’ve had the best nap after the 5 or so minutes.
The Mayo Clinic touts the many benefits of meditation – including stress reduction (obvious), an improved overall sense of wellbeing as well as reduction in the symptoms from many different illnesses ranging from asthma, anxiety, sleep disorder all the way to cancer, blood pressure, IBS and tension headaches. Regular meditation lengthen your attention span (great for students…), it can improve your memory – (regular age related memory issues as well as some improvement has been seen with dementia patients), improve your sleep, help fight addictions, help control pain and help decrease your blood pressure!! Studies have shown that meditation lights up the left prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain associated with joy and happiness. Sign me up!!
I’ve signed up a few times to different types of meditation – I’ve landed on guided meditations for now. I started by hiring someone to teach me how to meditate. That was a great start! She sat with me which I felt relieved my ‘sitting’ anxiety. I have a weird irrational anxiety when I’m sitting with my eyes closed and a timer that the timer will break and I’ll be left sitting there forever (yes, I said it was irrational). I did this a few times and then was left to my own meditative devices. I got up to 20 minutes at a time and then the 25 minute mark broke me (at the time) – I became too anxious and gave it up.
I then downloaded Headspace and did their free 10 minute 30 day meditation series. This one is guided and I really enjoyed that. I was a bit judgey of myself (yes, I need to work on that – maybe the meditation will help) and thought I needed to be able to do unguided meditations and moved on from Headspace.
I stumbled upon the Muse Headband – thought it was the coolest thing ever. This is a headband that you place across your forehead and it is like an EEG machine and reads your brainwaves while you are mediating and records it on an app. There are several types of background sounds that you can choose from – rainforest, beach waves, city sounds (no thanks). What happens is when your mind is calm, there will be birdies chirping and the background sounds will become very quite and soothing. When your brain becomes more active the background becomes louder triggering you to calm yourself down. When you complete the meditation (length of time determined by you) you can see a chart of your brainwaves and the percent of the time that you were calm compared to when you were active. As I already alluded to – I tend to judge myself harshly and decided after doing this for about a month that it was not for me. I’d get disappointed with myself if I had too little calm time. I also found the louder sounds to be irritating as I interpreted it as ‘punishment’ for an active mind – I thing meditation should be completely judgement free! Maybe when I’m more evolved I’d be able to enjoy this type of meditation for what it is intended to be – not yet.
So – back I am to the Headspace – I’ve gone all in and paid for a year’s subscription – oh – I’m also a huge optimist!! I started again a couple of days ago and am enjoying it immensely!! It is guided (no fear of staying in my meditative position for hours), the guiding voice reminds me that when thoughts come into my head that’s ok – let them come in and let them gently judgement freely go out again.
I’m going to see what happens with my chronic headaches – I’ll keep you all posted.
I challenge you all to try this as well – 10 minutes – I’m sure you can find that somewhere in your day. See what happens…
Fast forward a month!
I’m officially obsessed! I love my meditations! I’m doing about 15 minutes regularly as the 10 minutes wasn’t feeling long enough. I am still doing mostly the Headspace guided meditation but something has happened!! I tried to go back to the Muse Headband – more of an experiment to see what progress I had made by meditating daily. Well – it was remarkable! My mind was so calm. The birdies didn’t distract me. I wasn’t as judgmental of myself – I was able to ride the process.
Conclusion: Meditation works! I retrains your mind, your reactions. It feels like a great nap! I highly recommend giving it a try! I still enjoy the guided ones as there are helpful lessons to be learned that carry into a usual day – like how to react to discomfort. Noticing it as if you are a third party – there’s no push back making it worse. It is there, but it isn’t given any extra ‘oxygen’ or power.
Last challenge – meditate daily without talking about meditating daily! I suspect I’m becoming annoying… I’ll work on that!
