Welcome to June, dear readers! I hope this glorious Spring is treating you well: filling your hearts, lifting your
spirits and warming your cockles.
Here in the American South we’ve been having a beautifully drawn-out
sweet and temperate Springtime.
What good fortune we are having!
The month of May found me cultivating my meditation
practice, as you may recall. This
resolution – while perennially difficult for me – has proven to be much more
attainable than expected. I have
managed to sit for my practice most days this month. And I’ve not really felt guilty about the days I didn’t sit,
but I did, strangely, miss the experience on those days. I have discovered that evening
meditations work best for me right now.
In the past, I always tried to practice meditation in the mornings after
waking, and with mixed results.
However, meditating just before bed is proving a welcomed addition to my
nighttime routine. It allows me to
soften my mind and body in preparation for sleep.
In an effort to keep myself from getting too “thinky” about
the practice, I have only been asking myself to sit down and count out 50
breaths. I have a pretty slow
breathing pace, so this allows me a decent amount of time ‘on the cushion’ for
my practice. I do hope to
eventually add more breaths/time, but for now, this seems to be sufficient for
me to feel benefits and to still feel like I can sustain the practice without too much effort.
I have noticed that I am drifting into sleep much more
easily and comfortably. (However,
my sleep, once I’m in it, is still fraught with physical discomfort and crazy
dreaming. Will have to figure out
how to address that at some point, but that will have to be left for another
blog entry.) I have also been
experiencing some pretty auspicious emotional shifts happening. I don’t attribute these solely to the
meditation practice, but I think the practice is definitely playing an
important role. I will talk more
on that later. I’m also feeling
like I have a much calmer internal sea; much more equanimity. There may be some emotional debris
bubbling to my surface, but deep underneath all that is a new stillness and
serenity. It sounds a little hokey
when I type it out here, but I don’t know any other way to describe it. I believe those moments I’m spending in
mediation are directly contributing to the well of contentment, and that is
motivation enough to keep up the practice.
June’s resolution is one that I feel would be well applied
to the lives of most modern Americans:
Give myself days off of work and don’t work on those days. Sounds simple enough, sure. But, in practice, this can be a nearly
impossible feat for many of us. In
fact, the timing couldn’t be better on this resolution. Just last month I made the decision to
add an extra day of work to my schedule.
I was already scheduled to what I believed to be my maximum number of
client hours in a week, but I was feeling concerned about money (thank you,
IRS), so thought I’d try working a little more. Surely I’d be able to do that – work one more day a week …
just for a few hours … no problem!
Well, as it turns out, it is a problem. So,
a few days ago, I changed my schedule back to the old one. The moment I did that I felt a weight
lift from my heart and from my shoulder girdle. Whew! Just
adding that one day a week to work had increased my stress levels, dramatically
decreased the quality of my sleep, affected my ability to make the best food
choices for myself, roused an old muscular injury (which is still not ironed
out), and made me feel so exhausted and overwhelmed that I found myself just
wanting to crawl into a hole to get away from it all. No good! And …
No more! I’m back on a schedule
that my body, mind and spirit can handle.
And, in the spirit of June’s resolution, I am not going to plan too much
drudgery on the days when I’m not at my job. Instead, I’m going to do things that make me feel good. Brilliant plan! I encourage you to try it, too! I’d love to hear how it goes for you.
Well, that’s it for now, superstars! Today’s a day off for me, so I’m going
to wrap this up and go enjoy the rest of this beautiful Sunday afternoon. I hope you do, too!
xoxo,
melanie
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