There is a secret to make you meditate
As a meditation teacher, I have heard countless students share their excuses for why they didn’t meditate last week. They wanted. They know it would be good for them. They just didn’t. At least not consistently.
Something always seems to get in the way: they need more sleep, the dog needs to be walked, the kids are awake, they had to work late or had an early meeting, they felt too anxious, worried or irritable… Meditation just it didn’t seem as important as other things they had to do. However, all those things they did did not give them the peace of mind they wanted.
Of course, meditation is about changing your relationship with all the events, worries, and anxieties in your life. It is a daily ritual, like eating, sleeping and brushing your teeth, that creates a more relaxed, healthy, meaningful and intentional way of life. It is a powerful practice for achieving the deep peace of mind that we all desire. So what is the secret to moving from excuses to practice?
The answer is: you have to have a strong “Why?”
Where do you find your Why?
The answer may surprise you.
The secret is body awareness
Your body is not just a mechanical vehicle to carry out all the activities of your life. It is a highly sensitive biofeedback system.
Your body can tell you what is good for you to eat and how much, when you need to rest, when you need to relax and have fun, when you need to get up and move, when you need to be alone, to have contact. with others, being in nature and spending time in meditation. It connects you with when, why and how much to do anything. If you’re paying attention.
In our context, it connects you to WHY you might want to meditate in the first place. At least it has the potential to do this, if you pay attention. However, how often do you pause and really pay attention to your body’s signals? How often do you stop to feel what he is saying to you?
Why aren’t you doing this?
First of all, we have a culture that encourages just the opposite. We are encouraged to focus on the outside rather than the inside. We are encouraged to do our best. We are encouraged to collect as many products and as much richness, data and sensory input from the external environment as we can.
We are encouraged to react quickly and discouraged from taking the time for well-considered and deeply felt responses. We are conditioned to quick reactions and sound bites on the news and social media. We are impatient with anything that takes time. We go, we go, we go, until we are too exhausted to continue.
Do you feel this exhaustion?
However, are you worried about what might happen if you stop doing it? Are you worried about falling behind and being left out? At a certain point, she may decide that she no longer wants to live this way. When you get to this point, or preferably much sooner, take a moment to pay attention to yourself. Notice what all this thinking, doing, worrying, accumulating, and stimulating is doing to you.
There is another option?
Meditation creates a new way of being
Meditation interrupts nonstop thinking and doing and gives your body a chance to deeply relax, something you may not even be able to do in restless sleep. Consciously relaxing, as you do in meditation, releases the tension built up beneath your consciousness in the last 24 hours, as well as in the years of your life up to this point. It slowly dissolves the reactive mental-emotional patterns that drive you on the hamster wheel of non-stop activity. Silence your mental chatter.
Now, when you first start meditating, you may not notice this relaxing, calming, and calming effect. You may become even more aware of how busy your mind is, how conflicted your emotions are, and how tense your body is. If you have abused your body through excessive stress over a long period of time, the initial moments of Body Awareness in meditation may not feel so good.
Or, you may feel little or nothing at all. All that thinking, doing, and pushing yourself to do things that you feel you “have to” or “should” do may have isolated you from how you feel. You may have lost touch with your vital sensations and feelings. You may feel bored without external stimulation to keep you distracted.
However, discomfort, boredom, or numbness, when faced honestly, directly, gently, and non-judgmentally, as you do in meditation, can alert you to how much you need to activate another way of being.
If you pay attention to this signal and take the time to sit down, breathe and pay attention to what is happening inside you, the layers of stress will begin to relax and your vital senses will awaken. As you relax, Body Awareness can tell you how exhausted you are from the way you lead your life.
As you pay close attention to what your body has to say, you may find that all those things you’ve been chasing may not be as important as they seemed. You may find that you no longer want to live in the human hamster wheel of incessant activity, worry, and anxiety. You may feel inspired to make new decisions that reflect the deepest desires of your soul.
Meditation calls you to a more relaxed, healthy, meaningful and intentional way of life, and your body will tell you how important this is, if you pay attention.