A simple meditation…sit…close your eyes…breathe…think of everything that happened today…breathe…make a shopping list in your head…breathe…
A slightly less simple meditation…sit…close your eyes…breathe…
A complex meditation…sit…breathe…
The most difficult meditation…go mindfully through life.
Question: What can I do to make the world a better place?
Research: For the past couple of years, I’ve been meditating daily, give or take. The result in my life has been that I am calmer, I am arguably kinder, I am more focused on my creative work. I am healing. I am not triggered by things that would have upset me in the past. I am less worried about things I can’t control. People have noticed and commented that I am very different to the person I was two years ago.
My hypothesis: If everyone in the world sat and closed their eyes, listened to their breath, allowed whatever was in their mind to pass through for ten minutes in the morning and ten more in the evening the world would be a much better place in just one week. You don’t have to sit and breath, you can do a guided meditation; they are great. (I love Davidji. His meditations are rarely longer than 9 minutes. There are so many on free streaming services like Spotify and YouTube.
Experiment: Can everyone in the world please do this and report back to me next week? Also can someone please send this to all the world leaders, parents, teachers and prisons? Then I will report back my conclusions…
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A lot of people believe that they are not capable of meditation. To me, that’s like saying you’re not capable of breathing. Anyone who is breathing is capable of sitting for a few minutes and just observing the breath moving in and out of the lungs. I like to focus on the feeling of the breath moving in a out of my nostrils.
To just sit and breathe; what a luxury in this busy, busy world.
A word of warning; sitting with yourself can be daunting. Even though I say everyone can do this, anyone who has trauma in their past would benefit from working with a teacher trained not only in meditation but also in therapy so they can create a safe space for you. As bandied about as that word is, if you have a traumatic past experience, it is important to have the tools to deal with it or you’ll be experiencing it all over again. Thoughts and memories surfacing during meditation can be healed but need to be treated correctly.
I love this quote from one of my favourite writers;
My mind is a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into alone.
Anne Lamott
Feature Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash
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