Episode 028: Meditation Isn't for Everyone (and that's ok)
Meditation is amazing...and it isn't for everyone. This podcast offers tips and ideas for adding more mindfulness and peace into your everyday life.
+ Read the Transcript
Today I want to talk about meditation, not being for everyone. And I'm a little nervous about talking about it, to be honest, because there's so much buzz out there about meditation and how amazing it is and how it is the key to everything when it comes to happiness and compassion. If you Google, self-compassion the first thing that pops up is self-compassion and meditation.
So I want to start by saying I'm not against meditation. Meditation is fabulous and wonderful. It is a tool that can help us become more centered and grounded. There are a lot of tools to do that. And the reason I wanted to do this podcast is so often I hear from clients; oh my gosh, I just need to start a meditation practice.
So anything that we start discussing or bringing up, they're like, oh yeah, I need to start that meditation. And so meditation becomes this block or this excuse for what, why they're not implementing the things we're talking about, because if only they did meditation, then everything would be healed.
And so meditation becomes that new magic button that you think that, oh, once I start doing meditation, then everything I talk about with Nancy and everything I learned about when it comes to getting centered and compassionate will come true. But until I do that meditation thing, I'm not going to get anywhere near that stuff.
In the quest of being honest with ourselves, sometimes meditation won't work for you with where you are in your life, and that's okay. It is okay not to have a meditation practice. So if you are one of those people, that thinks when I get the meditation practice, then everything will be okay. I want you to stop and ask yourself. Can you implement a meditation practice right now? And if the answer is no, if the idea of stopping for five minutes or two minutes, or even a minute to pause and think, and be calm for five minutes to sit in stillness for five minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes makes you want to poke your eyes out, which it does for me right now and that's okay. Find something else.
So this podcast is about figuring out other ways to add mindfulness and centeredness, and peace into our daily lives that may not involve—sitting still for five minutes and doing a traditional meditation practice because a traditional meditation practice may not be for you.
And so, if you are using that as an excuse not to be centered and grounded and find peace every day, then you're just using it as an excuse. It's saying the only way to exercise is to run. And the only way I'm going to be able to exercise is to run—lots of ways to exercise. There are lots of ways to get the benefits that come from running in a variety of ways.
And so that's what I've spent the past few years of my career doing. When I realized no matter how hard I tried, I could not implement a meditation practice sitting still for five to 10 minutes every day. Or every other day, it just wasn't in the cards for me. So I had to get serious about, okay, if I'm not able to do that right now, how will I add mindfulness, groundedness, and peace into my daily life?
Because that is the key to being intentional and mindful about your day, that is the key to self-compassion. It's when we runoff in our day and we let our brains just take over, and those thoughts just become a way of life, and we don't have any way of grounding it into our body.
That's where we get into. And so that's why meditation is so amazing and why everyone says, oh, we should be meditating. But even as I talked to a yoga instructor this week who has an active meditation practice, she said, "I still have to do intentionality all day long. I still have to get grounded. That meditation practices, I love it. It's a great way to start my day. It's a great way to quiet my mind. And I still have to be intentional all day long."
So meditation is not the silver bullet. It's not the only answer. There's a lot of things we need to be practicing in our day-to-day lives. That's why I wanted to do this podcast. I want to talk about some other ways of meditating or adding mindfulness into your life.
So the first one is I want you to think about changing the rules. So let's redefine what meditation means to you? And hands down. One of my favorite ways of getting mindful, and it radically changed my life, is the five senses meditation. It's a five senses mindfulness exercise, it takes 30 seconds, maybe a minute, but man, does it drop me into my body so quickly. And it allows me to get out of my head. And I've talked about it here before, but the five senses meditation simply goes through your five senses to stop what you're doing and go through your five senses. What am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I feeling? What am I tasting? What am I smelling?
And the beauty of this meditation is it. You can go as deep as you want. You can sit there for as long as you want and get into what am I smelling? And you can just start to smell things you weren't even aware of, or what am I hearing? And you start to hear things you weren't even aware of. So the power of that meditation is that you can do it for 30 seconds, and a quick way to get you back on your body.
An easy way to go a little deeper is to observe what's happening around you. Without going into this, I'm going to go into meditation for five minutes.
Another mindfulness practice is to engage in one activity at a time, limit your desire to multitask. When you're washing dishes, wash the dishes, just be present when you're vacuuming, vacuum, whatever you're going to be doing. Just do that activity one activity at a time. Another great one is, be fully present. The most awesome place to do this is when you're in the shower.
How many times are you in the shower? And you get out of the shower, and you're like, whoa, what just happened in there? Or you'll wash your hair, and you won't be paying attention that you washed your hair. So you have to think do I need to wash my hair again? Practice being fully in the shower when you're drying off when you're in the car, when you're stuck in traffic. Instead of being, oh my God, I'm stuck in traffic, blah, blah, blah, blah, catch yourself and practice being fully present there when you're stuck, waiting in line. How can you be fully present wherever you are? One of my favorite ways of getting into that mode is parking far away in a grocery store or wherever I have to go. If I have to go to Target or the mall, I can park as far away as possible. And that allows me to walk into the mall. As I'm walking, I'm just concentrating on my breathing. I'm concentrating on what's going on around me. I'm not stuck in, oh, we've got to get there as fast it's possible.
And then the last one I'm going to talk about is, there's a big buzz these days about crayons and coloring, but that truly is an awesome way to become more mindful. I've found that to be an awesome way of slowing down throughout the day.
It takes no time at all. Earlier this week, I had a day where I was grouchy, and I didn't know why. I had a break between clients. And I happened to glance over and see the crayons that I have sitting in my office for this very task. I pulled out a picture, and I pulled out the crayons, and within five minutes, I felt better because I was focusing on the crayons and the coloring and being creative.
It works a different part of your brain. And that is so helpful. And that's what we're talking about here, just getting out of your head, into your right brain into a more creative and relaxed place. And there are lots and lots of ways to do that. That isn't necessarily five minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes of meditation.
So that is my small spiel on creating an active meditation practice that's a little non-traditional.
+ Weekly Ritual Challenge
One thing that has really helped me reduce anxiety is adding regular ritual practices to my daily life, so each week, I am going to be sharing a ritual with you and challenge you to complete it.
This week's ritual: Jam to Your Favorite Song
Recently I had the house to myself and I decided to put on some music and dance. As I lip-synched my cares away I decided to make this a regular practice in my life. So whether in the car, your living room or office get lost in your favorite song!