Ep 25 – My personal meditation journey and how you can get started

There are several myths about meditation that hold us back from getting started. And I want to begin this conversation by breaking them first before we go any further.

1. Meditation is oh so serious:

When we think of the word meditation, we imagine bare-chested sadhus standing on one leg on top of Mount Kailash. While you can deepen your practice well enough to do that too, no one starts there. It doesn’t have to be so serious. You must sit still, you must not think. The more you put such pressures on yourself the more your mind rebels. Today there is walking meditation, plug your headphones with your favorite playlist and walk amidst nature with all your awareness, that can be therapeutic in itself. Listening to this podcast with 100% attention can be meditative in nature. Doing the task at hand with all your awareness is meditative too. So first off don’t think of meditation as unnatural or serious or difficult.

2. You need to meditate for hours daily:

Incorrect again. Even 10 minutes of deep breathing and silence can make a difference in how you feel. The reason why we meditators keep extending our practice is because of the benefits we see from it and it’s peaceful than any other form of rest. But to get started you don’t need hours. And once you start seeing the benefits you will obviously make more time for something that helps you.

3. Meditation has no visible results:

A common thing I hear is I’ve done meditation on and off but see no benefit. Meditation works in an intangible and mysterious way in our bodies. It may not be visible like building a 6 pack abs but trust me when I say its working. Meditation works without you even realizing it. Day by day nothing changes, but there will come a time when you look back and realize everything has changed and you’ll start to see its visible impact. But that can only come from doing it regularly, so don’t give up yet if you’re not seeing results.

I can hear your brain buzzing. You must be thinking, okay I hear what you’ve got to say but where’s the evidence?

My personal journey with Meditation

So being from the south I’ve always been exposed to some form of yoga or the other as a kid. But I never took it seriously then, it was something I either did for fun or was forced to do as a part of my Arya Samaj schooling and did. I used to be the girl who would wait to get to Shavasana and fall asleep completely, that to me was the only perk of forced yoga classes in school, I got to sleep towards the end of it at least. I would be kindly woken up by my classmates to tell me the class is over now.

My yoga teacher, I can still vividly remember his face will probably be amazed to even hear me speaking about all this. But life has its fun with ironies and paradoxes and so here we are.

I have been a seeker all my life, but yoga and meditation happened to me only in the last few years of my life. But today, I cannot even imagine my life without my practices in the morning, it’s ingrained within me, they are a part of me. For me, it’s like a reset button every morning.

Those who know me from before would know how much of a control freak I am, I love to stay in control of my environment, my situations, my circumstances, my conversations. Everything. I’ve always had the capacity to manage multiple things in parallel and I would do so with all my might… With to-do lists after to-do lists, planning, and over-scheduling every minute of the day until there’s no room for thoughtful reflection or introspection.

I have been a seeker all my life, I’ve read multiple self-help books, done crazy self-help programs, traveled far and wide in search of meaning, purpose, who am I, what am I here to do? I looked everywhere in the world for answers only to turn back empty. Given how I pack schedules, vacation, or while I was traveling were the only moments of quiet my mind got for reflection. I loved who I was in these brief moments, I was free, liberated, thoughtless even for brief moments and I liked this person in comparison to the nervous wreck I was otherwise. A person completely warped in the What Next? I was almost robotic in my functioning – do everything that needed to be done with the utmost focus for everything else but me.

And slowly this rush of what next started to get to me? I felt more drained than satisfied with my progress. I was constantly exhausted. I resorted to many means to shun those thoughts of you’re not on the right track for a few hours at least. And slowly travel started to become my crutch. I would take 4-5 vacations a year. It was my escape route, I chased those few brief moments of stillness and boy was it good.  But it started becoming harder to come back to normal life.

And that’s when I realized this cannot work this way. As much as I loved traveling, I didn’t want to live my life for those few brief minutes of sanity. I wanted to be happy where I was when I was there and that’s where self-exploration started to happen. I started to question myself more and more. What’s causing this? What can I do to change it? How can I make this change happen regularly?

I had more questions than answers but I knew I must persist down this path to get some clarity and that’s when meditation happened. For a person who’s never been conscious or awake in any of her yoga experiments, this was a huge task. I bit the bullet though and signed up for meditation. I meditated. I decided to keep my logical left brain aside and was determined to do it no matter what.

I didn’t question the practice and did it as consistently as I could. If because of some reason I couldn’t do it, I made it a point to get back on track immediately. Until slowly it became a habit. I did it in cabs when I had to travel for work, I did it in flights, I did it when I was even on vacation in the safari vehicle in Kenya. Suddenly it felt like I ran out of excuses and was consciously making meditation happen every day no matter where I was or what I was doing. It was a gradual shift more so in the last 2 years, I did not wake up one day as a changed person, but when I look back now so much has changed.

A few things I’ve gained from a consistent meditation practice

– I am no longer obsessed with control and am much more calmer going with the flow

– I am barely affected by external situations, sure it gets to you somedays. There are and will always be bad days- but now I have ways and means to re-balance it quickly.

– I plan my life still but am not caught up in the what next anymore, I am more than happy enjoying what is in my hands today

– I am so much more grateful for everything that I have and appreciate the present moment more than ever before

– From eating 5 meals a day and getting acidic if I didn’t have one meal on time, I survive these days with just 2 meals in a day

– I have a better relationship with myself. I take neither my body nor my mind for granted. I allow myself the time and space to heal and grow which has reduced so much emotional baggage.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the drift and are reasonably convinced than you were 10 minutes ago. But don’t take my word for it. Try it out for yourself, get started, and see the results.

Tips to get you started with meditation

1. Finding the right meditation practice:

First things first, find a meditation practice that suits you and that you are convinced inculcating daily. There are 100s of guided meditations online – choose what works for you. There are apps like Calm and headspace also that you could use if you don’t know where to start. Don’t want any guided stuff and are confident about doing it by yourself? Do that – take time out to sit still and bring your awareness to your breath. It doesn’t matter what you do, the fundamental principles are all the same – still, the mind to reach higher consciousness

2. Start small:

Don’t start with 1-hour meditations if you aren’t used to yet. Begin with 5 mins, and slowly increase it as you get more comfortable with it.

3. Ignore the mindless chatter:

The monkey mind in all of us will appear the first few times you sit to meditate. You might think you left the gas on, or the water running, or you can hear the phone buzzing. Your mind will resist several times till you gain mastery over this. Let these thoughts come and go as they may and continue focusing your mind on the meditation. Slowly these voices will fade away.

4. Don’t worry about the results:

Let go of the thought on results for now. Take it up as a challenge and do it every day without fail for the rest of 2020. If you miss a day, make sure you are back on it the very next day. Never miss 2 days in a row and before you know it you have a consistent practice.

5. Take it one day at a time:

Don’t start meditation thinking you will do it every day for the rest of the life. That level of pressure is disastrous. Do it one day at a time. Do it today, that is it.

 

If you are still not sure how to get started, reach out to me personally across any of the social media platforms and I will be happy to guide you to the best of my knowledge.