Making Time to Do Nothing

One of my goals for simplifying was to begin meditating. I've been working on that this week, and chose to tackle it in the morning when I get to work. I'm an early bird--don't get me wrong, I love when it's the weekend and I can sleep til 10, but during the work week, I'd just as soon get up and get going. In the morning, I get up and go running, and get in to work at the college by 8:00. No one else is in that early, so I have a bit of quiet time to myself, which is part of the reason I make a point to come in; I value the quiet, the time to wrap my head around my day, pull my files, drink my coffee, check the weather. So I folded my meditation time into that routine.

I like to sit on the floor. I tried my chair, but almost fell asleep. I set the alarm on my cell phone, close my eyes, and walk through a process of progressive relaxation from head to toe, and then focused meditation on a "mantra." Nothing fancy here: my meditation word is "still." It's a reminder to be quiet, to be calm, to cultivate an inner stillness when so much goes on outside.

As I mentioned before, a monk at the retreat I attended this spring gave me a brief tutorial on this type of meditation, and he told me a couple things that I feel are especially important. First, your brain takes time to get used to meditating, and it will become clear when it starts to move out of a meditative state. Sometimes, that happens before my alarm goes off, and I do a mental check to see if we can go back. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. The second thing he told me is to be kind to myself about the meditation. It's not about judgment. Some days, especially now at the beginning, I'm not able to do it for very long. 10 minutes and I'm just done. But that's 10 minutes I carve out for me and for nothing else, and that's valuable. I've been trying to add a minute here and there this past week, and today I did 14 minutes no problem--could have gone longer. So it's about practice.

Meditation is good for me. I am horrible about letting myself take breaks in my life, and this gives me a structured time to just be with myself. So far, a success.