I’ve been meditating since I was a child. Before I knew there was a word for it. Lately I’ve been asking my tribe about who meditates, how they choose to meditate, and what they get out of it. So, if you’re asking “should I meditate?”, here are some real life experiences from everyday humans.
Just in case you don’t know yet, here’s the thing about meditating. You don’t actually have to trance out or sit in silence for hours. It’s not a “must” to chant or strike the lotus pose. You don’t have to wear robes or burn incense. And you definitely don’t have to be a monk or a guru or new agey to unplug and find a little mental and spiritual tranquillity in your life.
All kinds of everyday people are meditating … and they’re getting more out of it than you think.
Mathapelo says it makes her feel alive
She’s the courageous eagle who soars across the skies when she meditates and practices diplomacy in media in day-to-day life. She says meditating brings her an incredible amount of clarity, peace, and the ability to be more creative.
She likes to meditate in an “empty-ish” room with classical music and incense. She uses Yoga Journal as a source for simple meditation tips and guided practices.
For Linda, it’s about connection
A corporate change management consultant, Linda says meditation makes her feel more connected to the universe around her, to her place in the universe, and to a part of her that gets lost amongst the general noise of life.
She listens to guided meditations on her way to work and meditates at night before she goes to sleep. She uses Insight Timer, a free meditation app with thousands of meditations from silent to guided and intention-setting meditations. She especially loves Sarah Blondin’s Live Awake guided meditations.
Ingrid finds focus in meditation
A single mother of two and an indomitable tigress in the media and marketing industry, Ingrid says she finds meditation “incredibly refreshing”. It’s her own quiet space where her body and mind connect and release. It’s where she finds her answers.
Ingrid loves that you can meditate anytime, anyplace. She often meditates before bed or on the treadmill and loves meditation music and walking to guided meditations. Spotify is awesome for a selection of meditations and sleep podcasts.
For Lesley, meditation makes her feel as though she has a choice
She’s an innovative independent sales training consultant who has carved a formidable name for herself in the corporate environment, but she says her true place of wisdom is in meditation.
Lesley’s meditation practices depend on her head space at the time; sometimes it’s breath work, sometimes it’s a guided meditation (she loves David Ji for guided meditations), listening to music and chants, or even using prayer beads to keep her focussed. She also loves group meditations and finds gardening, baking, and some forms of housework deeply meditating too.
As a human living with bipolar disorder meditation is my magic elixir
As for me … well, it’s not always easy to wrangle my head into a meditative space with my bipolar swings, but when I do, I always feel amazing for it. It’s a place where I find an inner strength, and my own, quiet truth. Where I can still find beauty when things become dark. Meditation was also my calm eye of the storm during the years I cared for my dying father.
As a writer, I love the creative spirit of meditation and I kinda dive headfirst into vividly visual worlds of my own. Often I meditate in stillness, sometimes in dance, and sometimes I only meditate for the three minutes I spend brushing my teeth in the morning. And like Linda, I love Sarah Blondin’s Live Awake guided meditations. It brings me incredible solace when I’m at my most broken.
But wait, can meditation be bad for you too?
I do know a handful of people who panic in a meditation space, or can’t stop re-living traumatic events. Some people have said that it increases their anxiety or depression. Interestingly, in a recent study, researchers at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that ‘people who took part in the most common and widely available secular mindfulness program did not experience psychological harm at a rate higher than people in control groups who did not take part in the program.’
My thinking on this is simple: if it works for you and makes you feel good, do it. If it doesn’t, stop. If you’re worried about trying it out, meditate first under the guidance of your psychologist, spiritual advisor, or someone you trust. Then you can lean into the solace of knowing someone is there to bring you back into a good space … just in case.
And there are always other ways …
I will always believe that there is some way we can each find our own little magical path to help us step out of our minds and back into spirit. Some kind of quiet and beautiful practice that nurtures us at the deepest level, where we can find peace and clarity and hear our inner wisdom.
Doodling, cloud gazing, walking, running, forest bathing, painting, automatic writing, gardening. To me, these are all beautiful meditative, contemplative practices.
It’s really about stepping out of the chaos and into a lightness of being. And no matter how we each choose to do it, I still call that meditation.
