Everyday Stabs at Meditation

Tips

I know that somewhere along the line, I have spoken about meditation. If I am repeating myself, so what? I think it’s important.

What is important?

The idea of meditating. It’s not how long you do it. It’s that you take a stab at it every once in a while.

How?

Close your eyes and get quiet.

If I am in a room by myself and I am quiet, and I close my eyes, am I meditating?

No. The intent to meditate must be there, even if it is only for three minutes.

What is going to happen?

When I would announce to my husband that I was going to go meditate, he would snicker and say, “Yes, I know all about your power naps.” So, what is going to happen? I don’t know. Anything can happen. Your blood pressure might go down a few notches. You could end up going to sleep. You might get the solution to some pesky Excel formula that has been eluding you. You might get an idea about something you can write. Or you could drift.

Why would anybody want to drift? Where are you going to drift? What is the purpose of drifting?

You know how you can settle down into the comfiness of a couch. You’ve got your jammies on. You have your beverage of choice and something to eat. Cookies, chips, pizza, honey-roasted peanuts. You turn on Netflix or Amazon Prime and settle in to binge-watch something. That is relaxing. Or, if you are sort of depressed, it is wallowing. It doesn’t matter the reason for settling in for a four-hour stint of something that involves food, sitting, and no other human interaction. That’s wallowing. Don’t get me wrong. I wallow with the best of them. I know what I am talking about, depression or not.

But drifting while meditating is a good thing. You might not think so because the purpose of the meditation might be to focus on something like your breath, your toes, or the ringing of a bell, but drifting and staying with the drift is important. Experience the drift.

Drift until it is no longer drifting, your body snaps back to attention, and you’ve got a huge itch that absolutely requires scratching. Or, if you can’t have a chocolate chip cookie right now the world, as we know it, might stop.

See, it is just your body trying to keep you safe. It equates drifting during a meditation to being not safe. It is totally against the rules, so the body intervenes, and you get an itch, a twitch, or a craving for something.

Now, your battle to meditate just got bigger. Your own body is betraying your wishes and wants to interfere. This is not where you get angry and force yourself to meditate or throw up your hands in surrender and go do something else.

This is where you are gentle and kind to yourself. This is where you become the parent or big sister or brother and take your busy little self by the hand and calmly draw it back onto the path of meditation. No annoyance. No anger. No frustration. People do not get born knowing how to meditate like they already know how to breathe.

There is a path, and you must set your intention.

Is there a best way to meditate?

No, there are many ways to meditate. Each way will work for somebody. It is easier to know meditation is possible. It is easier to follow somebody’s advice as to how to do it. Trust that you will find a good way until you finally find your own way.

It’s kind of like shoes. How many different styles of shoes are out there? Do you wear every single one of them? No. You finally find the ones you want, and you pretty much stick with them. Same way with dating. Most people date a lot of people before they find a person they want to stick with in marriage or commitment. There are lots of ways to meditate. Try out some of them, learn the basics of drift, and make a regular practice of meditation.

I have several ways I trick my ever-vigilant conscious mind in diving into a meditative state of mind. If I am worried about something, it is important to know that I am protected and cherished. It is important for me to know that I am brave, that I have already been through a lot of terrifying times, and that I have always found a way. I don’t have to hammer myself on the head with that information, I just need to remember. Briefly.

Then I turn my attention back to the meditation.

At the beginning of my own meditative practice, I spent a lot of time just getting there. My body and my consciousness looked for any little thing to draw me back to The World. That’s why I recommend a beginning meditation be no longer than 15 minutes or so, that your phone and computer are off and not pinging at you, and that the doors are shut. If need be, hang a sign on your door that says something along the lines of, “I am meditating. It is 12:30 pm right now. Whatever you want can wait until 1:00 pm. Don’t you dare knock on this door.”

The intention of your meditation is important. A regular practice of your meditation is important. Start out wherever you want to start out. With the quiet. With the focus. With the lowering of blood pressure. It’s not going to kill you. It will never, and I repeat, never have a detrimental effect on your faith, no matter what sound spiritually intended advice comes your way. Your faith is your own, and nothing is going to threaten that ever. Why did I add that there? It happened to me. My father thought I was being led into a cult. Charles Manson and his followers had just done the killing, and my dad thought I was going to be like that. Never happened. But that’s what he thought. He thought that meditation was not something I should be doing.

I’m telling you meditation is good for everything about you.

The practice of meditation is important. It’s important to keep trying, and if all you ever get is quiet, that, in itself, is perfect and if you can get to the point where you are dancing with celestial beings, fine with that too. I did not know at the beginning of my own attempts to meditate that it is natural for all sorts of distractions to begin to pop up. That’s why you are gentle and keep trying. The 15 or more minutes that it used to take me to even start to have a quiet begin to take hold got less and less over time.

Until I finally learned a few tricks to use to get me to that point faster. One of them was to imagine I was melting into a pool of liquid. I would picture the Wicked Witch of the East in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy threw a pail of mop water on her. Sort of gruesome, but it was a good image for me. Another thing I did was a trick I learned in how to start a past life regression or a childhood regression, and that was to imagine myself going down a ladder rung by rung as I relaxed. You can also try counting sheep. My point is that you are going to be able to come up with something over time that will help you attain a meditative state of mind.

One last thing. If you have been impressed by people who think a longer meditation is what is important, please realize that if you think this way, you should have a meditation coach. Meditating is one of the best ways, I think, to battle with your inner demons. It might not seem like this will happen, but it will. It’s the fast track to Heaven, to God, to being a Spiritually evolved human being, to put yourself in a position to counsel and guide other people, and to do that? You must be operating on an even keel. Everybody needs an assist for good mental health.

Best of luck on your meditative path. Just get a book about how to meditate or use some of my suggestions and get happy.

I publish stories of hope, of encouragement, of growing old, of becoming a better writer, and of the magical life of being a psychic. You can subscribe to my stories here.