LIFE: Meditation

I am on Day 5 of the Oprah and Deepak 21-Day Meditation Experience. I encourage anyone reading this to join in on this free three-week series. It is the third time I have participated and it is a great way to experience the benefits of meditation. The theme of this three week journey is Desire and Destiny, finding your passion and purpose.

I understand that time is a luxury, but it is crucial to find time for things that improve our well-being. Depending on the day, I’ll meditate in the morning or on my lunch hour. I prefer to do it first thing in the morning and begin with a cup of coffee as I listen to Oprah and Deepak introduce the meditation. Each session is about 8 minutes of them talking about desire and destiny, and then 10 minutes of meditating. This morning Oprah reminded listeners to “Pursue the moments that light us up.”

Mantras and visualization help me when I meditate. A mantra is a phrase that is repeated in our mind to help us relax and concentrate. Deepak gives a different mantra each day of the 21-Day Meditation Experience. If I forget his mantra while I am meditating, I start to use my favorite mantra, which is Om Shanti. To begin the meditation I picture myself at places that I love, like on my Aunt Nanc’s porch in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula listening as the wind goes through the trees. When I start thinking about things I have to do I re-direct my focus to the mantra and to a place where I am calm.

Some days are harder than others to meditate. I try really hard not to judge myself and to keep doing it. You can’t do meditation right or wrong, you just need to do it. I find that I am a more considerate and aware person on days when I meditate, and that is why I do it. I know this sounds new-agey, weird, hippyish…but it works for me and I wish more people would do it every day.

Like a lot of women my age, Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” was a life-changing book for me. It came to me in 2006, at just the right point in my life, and I feel like it helped me through a lot of things I was working on. (A few years ago, I was at a talk by one of my heroes,  Bill McKibben, and he said, “The Holy Spirit is the one that puts one book in your hand instead of another one.” I know that is true. Books always seem to enter my life at just the right moment – I plan on writing lots more about that in this blog.) Italy (Eat), India (Pray), and Indonesia (Love) are all a part of Gilbert’s journey; the India section spoke the loudest to me because of her descriptions of her meditation experiences.

She writes, “Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time.” She describes all of the frustrations that came up while she was practicing meditation at an Ashram in India, more importantly she talks about what the meditation does for her spirit. Gilbert writes, “The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simplify define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.”

If you have not read “Eat, Pray, Love” I think you should. It is an ESSENTIAL read. Also, it is not to late to join the Oprah and Deepak 21-Day Meditation Experience. You can still start at Day 1.

Namaste