Beginning My Meditation Journey 🧘♂️
For as long as I can remember, thoughts have always raced in my head faster than I could process them. Looking back, my performance on academic exams may have been hindered since I would be mid-way through a math problem and then for no reason start thinking about playing tennis, what’s for dinner, or a plethora of other random things. At first, I used to believe focusing was a major weakness of mine and began training myself to focus better. During high school and college, I would go into exams trying so hard to block out everything else in my mind and only focus on recalling the relevant information for the exam. Slowly as time went on and with adequate practice, I could make it through an entire exam without distractions looming around in my head. Resultantly, I came out of every exam with my brain completely fried 🧠🔥🍤. It’s as if I was trying harder to prevent random thoughts from appearing in my head than actually recalling the information needed for the exam.
In the last weeks, I had gone down a couple of rabbit holes on Reddit and found myself on a mediation forum. Before this, I had tried meditating here and there with little to no benefit. Most times I would get uncomfortable sitting and unable to solely focus on my breath. On the meditation forum, I had read about someone who had meditated for 8 years and told all about their self-realization journey. What caught my attention is this person also had thoughts constantly rushing through their minds and mentioned this is why they started their mediation journey to rid themselves of this “curse”. Intrigued, I continued reading on and was expecting them to say after 8 years they conquered their thoughts and were no longer plagued with mental distractions. The opposite was true! After 8 years of mediation, they still had thoughts going in and out at light speed. What changed was their ability to emotionally separate from their thoughts. The intention was not to remove the thoughts but simply to allow the thoughts to come and go without judgment. They talked about the clarity it brought into their life and how liberating it is to be free from your thoughts. Ironic I know, but this was enough to get me to download the recommended mediation app “medito” and give it another try. With a new goal in sight, I began the first weeks of mediating. During the first meditation sessions, I came in with a skeptical mindset and honestly did not expect to feel any change. I would love to say that I’ve had a eureka moments while mediating in the past week but I haven’t. What I have found is greater peace in my daily life by slowing down and taking a breath. Personally, slowing down has always been a big problem of mine. Finding a way to pull back the reins and take a new perspective these past weeks has been a great start. There is definitely not a shortage of thoughts going around in my head, but I’m slightly less reactive to them. This alone is a great motivator and will drive me for many more weeks and months to continue down this mediation journey. I have no idea where this path will take me and I have no desire to control where it will go. My goal is to be present and experience all it will reveal. Just like anything it will take consistency and effort to apply these practices to my daily life. Hopefully, in a couple of months, I can write an updated post on how my mediation journey has been going! Don’t forget to slow down every once to take a breath and focus on yourself.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject, please reach out to me with any comments at theonlyCV@yahoo.com