Meditation: It’s a choice!
“When was the last time you lived in a moment?”: the question which many of us have heard more than once in our lives. We might have even heard, “you were so fun in the past, what happened now?” and our most generic self would answer, “life happened!”. Yeah, that life, which makes us continuously worry about the future.
Why are we always in a quest to achieve the next thing? A single person is looking for a partner, a married couple is looking for buying a house, and after house, maybe it is a time for a baby, then a child’s education and the list goes on. The sequence might vary for few. Even the conversations we do with our friends revolve around career aspirations or how to make more money. Our mind is churning data all the time to find the optimized algorithm, which can make our future a successful one.
But, sometimes, while working on the next best thing, we hit a rough patch. It happened to me recently, which made me run towards meditation. I was telling a good friend of mine that “I have to start doing meditation to feel better, but I am not able to do it.” He told me something which stuck with me. He said, “There is nothing in life which one “has” to do or “should” do. Everything is a choice. If you make meditation your choice, then only you will be able to do it”. And I kid you not, he was right. The day I changed my mindset towards it, things changed. I have been regular for the past few weeks. I even did it for ten straight days, and it felt like an achievement. My 15-minute mediation routine is a way in which I pay gratitude to my brain. It is the time when I am awake and still not worrying about my future or feeling anxious about the things I did in the past. Meditation helps in creating a bond with the surrounding, and it makes me feel connected to the world around me.
I would like to share a beautiful experience from my mediation practice. I use the Headspace app, the coach from the app asked in one session, “For the whole day, try to be present in the moment when you are going to stand from sitting and vice-versa.” It was an exciting revelation that I couldn’t do that. The next day when the coach asked again about it, I realized, yes, I do not remember. I tried it again; this time, it was only once or twice that I could stay at the moment while doing this activity. I came to realize how difficult it is to stay in a moment, especially for the most trivial events of our day. This little experiment helped me understand how much I might be missing out on those times when something extraordinary is happening around me, and I am busy in my thoughts. Probably, that’s the reason mediation is called a skill that needs to be acquired.
After practicing meditation for a couple of weeks, my intention has changed. Now, I am not expecting anything from this exercise. I only want to do it because it feels good and mindful. It is my choice to learn to live in the moment, and I am happy that I am living for at least those 15 mins when I am doing my meditation practice.
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