Maybe I was meditating as a kid when I didn’t even realise what it was. Did you ever get a telling off from your teacher for gazing out of the class window instead of paying attention to the lesson? Perhaps, in some way, me drifting away from the noise and busyness of the class room during mathematics to focus on cloud formations was my first experience with meditation.
To meditate, you don’t need to sit a certain way or to think about anything in particular. You don’t need to be spiritual and you don’t need to repeat ‘ommm’ if you don’t want to. Adults tell children to stop day dreaming, but maybe that is just their brains trying to get a time out. I think we all need to day dream a little bit.
My first official experience with meditation was about 7 years ago. My wife had postnatal depression after giving birth to our second child and her doctor prescribed medication. But this wasn’t a route that she wanted to take. There must be an alternative to tablets.
We got in touch with a local meditation tutor who did guides on a 1-1 basis. My wife started to attend the meditation guides for one hour a week. She also began practicing on her own and this is when I would join her. This later led me to attending guided meditation too. I was hooked.
The misconception of meditation is that it is an opportunity to clear your head. Yet it is quite the opposite. You fill it will good stuff. Positive thoughts, visualization of a particular journey or of your dreams, ambitions and goals. It is true it is a chance to declutter your head, but it will be replaced with something much more worthy of your thoughts.
As I gazed out of the class room window looking at the clouds as a kid, I was creating shapes with these clouds of me scoring a goal or getting a hug from my mum. Wouldn’t anybody, at any age, want to have a moment of a much more innocent time? That didn’t seem like a waste of time to me then and it doesn’t seem like a waste of time to me now.
We all have goals that we want to achieve in life, but to get through the difficult moments or the sticky patches how are we to actually get them? Do we ever stop to think about a pathway to achieving them? As I say, that’s not to say that you have to sit and chant or be a Buddhist to do it. Having 10 minutes to focus on your breathing and taking charge of your energy each day should be a minimum requirement in achieving your goals.
If I am to assist my Personal Training clients in getting their goals then a part of that process must be for me to enable them to accept themselves as who they currently are. There are lots of ways to do this but by far the easiest way to self discovery is through meditation. That is why I felt so strongly about becoming a meditation tutor. How can we tell the body what to do if our minds are constantly on high alert?
So maybe you should be gazing into space sometimes and having a little daydream. Put the breaks on. Take a few deep breaths. Ground yourself. That maths equation will still be there when you have finished but it might be a bit easier to solve.
Never Give Up PT 