Rolling with one change a month…meditation…
In a previous post I wrote about rolling into the new year with a plan to make one change a month this year. That post was the introduction to the series and my idea was to write about each change in a separate post. I’ve been resisting this structure a bit, because I’m trying to keep this blog unstructured and maintain it as a free-form forum for my thoughts. I’ve been bouncing back and forth on this approach and have decided, at least for today, to just roll with it and write the second entry in the series.
I was looking forward to some undistracted time to write this morning. At the same time I was struggling to come up with something to write about. After taking the dog for a walk, I made some coffee and was about to instinctively bolt to my desk, sit down, and start writing. That’s when I remembered something I read recently in “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life,” by Leonard Kabot-Zinn.
One chapter of the book talks about the benefits of waking up early and especially waking up early and not doing anything, for a least a short period of time, early in the morning. The author really put to words what I had been experiencing since starting go to bed and wake up earlier, a couple of years ago. I’ll probably write more on that in a later post.
So, rather than bolt to my desk, I noticed that I still had 5 minutes left in my self-imposed and self-regulated schedule, before I was supposed to be at my desk. I decided to sit on the couch for five minutes start my coffee and enjoy the view of the East River on one of the first days that is starting to really feel like spring.
This time was in a way mindfulness and meditative time and allowed me space to think. As a result, the idea came to me to write about one of the first changes I decided to roll with, which was to start a meditation practice. Another influence that sparked this idea was a recent article that Russell Simmons published on his meditation practice. It turns out he wrote book on it too.
I went to the list that I’m using to track my changes for the year. Strangely, meditation wasn’t on it. Then I remembered that I started meditating in December of last year, making meditation a pre-cursor to my “official” 2014 list.
Like a lot of things I’m writing about in this blog, I took inspiration from a post on ZenHabits on how to meditate daily. What I really liked about this approach is that it made getting started very simple and approachable, starting with just two minutes a day. I used this approach and over four months have worked up to 12 minutes and day and will try my first 15 minute session today. Reading about meditation in Question #46 of “77 Questions for Skillful Living”, by Dr. Michael Finkelstein, also helped motivate me to keep going once I got started.
Logically I feel like now is the point where I’m supposed to talk about all the life changing benefits I’ve experienced. I don’t think I’m going to do that. I will say that I’m extremely happy to have started and stuck to the practice. I’m feeling the benefits and believe they’re having a positive impact on my day-to-day life.
After the first few months, I became more interested in taking it further, which is what led to me read the “Wherever You Go, There you Are” book, which I’m still working my way through at the moment. Seeing that Russell Simmons article got me thinking how mainstream meditation has become or probably has been all the time, since it’s such an ancient practice. Then I feel a bit confused when I think about how ancient, simple, and effective meditation seems to be and why it always seemed like such an “out there”, unrealistic, and unreachable concept to me.