As I sit to write this blog post, it’s Yom Kippur. And, on Yom Kippur fifteen years ago, I met the person who told me about the type of meditation that I practice and teach. I was at a bar (long story, you can read about it here)… but I digress… The Gregorian calendar anniversary of the day I actually learned to meditate, three days after Yom Kippur in 2011, is October 11.
What that means practically: 15 years, or 180 months, or 5475 days of consecutive twice-daily meditation. 10950 meditations, to be exact. Plus lots more while on my meditation teacher training and other meditation retreats (see pic of me, above, swimming in the Ganges river on my first visit to India). I think I missed only once, and that was on purpose, during my teacher training, just to prove that I wasn't so rigid :)
What that has meant for my life: a total game changer. I measure pretty much everything in my life as pre-meditation and post-meditation. If you didn’t know me then, I was really intense, type A, and unhappy. I didn’t have any sense of spirituality or wonder at the world. I didn’t really have a capacity to deal with change, and I tried to control everything.
Meditation gave me a new way to exist in the world. It allowed me to think outside my own paradigm of what (my) life should be and what it could be. It gave me resilience, and it taught me how to embrace being wrong. It made everything I tried work better: anti-depressants, therapy, tapping, self-compassion, and learning about racism and oppression. It helped me connect with my intuition and my (more than one) true calling.
Meditation isn’t perfect. I struggled a lot with the spiritual bypassing, spiritual arrogance, and toxic positivity of the meditation community I was a part of (and of wellness spaces in general). I left my meditation community, which was painful and traumatic.
Meditation also didn’t make me perfect. I like to think it made me a much, much happier version of myself, but even more importantly, I’ve learned that no one is broken, and we don’t need ‘fixing’.
I can’t imagine where I’d be today without meditation. It’s one of many tools that have helped me live a much more vibrant, connected, grounded, fulfilling life.
What has helped you make changes in your life? Where do you feel like you have room for growth?
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