Moving Meditation

Categories: Blog, blog Aug 30, 2020

Do you meditate?

 

I’m really asking, do you set time aside to get alone, get still, and get quiet? Do you get lost in yourself? Or found, rather? 

 

There are many health benefits of meditation, on all levels of you (spiritual, mental, and physical). Meditation can help you deal with anxiety, it can help you solve problems or issues, it can invigorate or reignite you, it can soothe you, and it can lead you to know yourself at a deeper level - the real you, not the you that you play for everyone else. 

 

The real you doesn’t get frightened by the news. The real you doesn’t get angry over politics, toilet paper, or coin shortages. The real you is steady, open, joyful, respectful, polite, kind, generous, patient, and hopeful. This is the you that meditation, that intentional stillness, can invoke. That might seem like a fairytale, but it’s certainly worth the pixy dust to explore if you’ve never done it.

 

If you're curious about the "real you" that I'm speaking of, I wrote a book about it called Discovering You. For less than the price of multi-level marketing vitamins with your loyalty customer discount, you can learn about this "You" that I speak of!  If you discover it, it will change your life. Anyway, even if you don’t buy the idea of the you I am describing, meditation can leave you feeling very refreshed. 

 

But... Sometimes it’s hard to get still. Sometimes it’s hard to quiet the mind. No doubt some of you have tried with 100% intent to get still and quiet only to have your mind rip wide open into thought, dreams, to-do lists, memories, fantasies, and whatever else the “monkey mind” comes up with. Or, you sit down with the full intention of meditating for thirty minutes only to discover that three minutes feels like an eternity. Meditation, getting still and quiet, is not always easy to do, though it does get better with practice and dedication. We are all different. Some people do well with this, some need a different way. 

 

I am a fan of movement mediation. I have found I can use movement to “get still” and get quiet. I have learned I can get lost in myself when I roll or rock for long durations of time. I get on the floor, close my eyes, and rock or roll for 10 minutes or more, and I disappear. And so does time. 

 

If you’ve never tried it, nows your chance. I’ll walk you through this with rocking, it’s the easiest to get into as the risk of dizziness is almost nil. 

 

1. Get on a soft surface (carpet, mat, knee pads, etc) and get on your hands and knees.
2. Close your eyes.
3. Breathe in and rock back. Breathe out and rock forward.

Don’t get upset about the breathing pattern. I just like this way and I’ll tell you why. When I breathe in and rock back, I imagine a wave pulling water and building up. When I breathe out and rock forward, I imagine the wave crashing or folding over and reaching the shore. I am constantly thinking wave building on the inhale and wave releasing on the exhale as I rock back and forth. And that’s it. 

 

When I do this, everything disappears. My worries, my thoughts, my duties, my shoulds, my coulds, they all melt away. It’s just the breath, just the waves. It’s peaceful. It’s soothing. It’s stillness in motion. It’s quiet in thought. And it’s wonderful. It feels amazing. 

It feels amazing to feel amazing and you deserve to feel amazing.

 

Give this a try. Set aside 10 minutes and see if you can wash away in the waves of your breath as you rock back and forth. Do it every day for a week and see how you feel. Maybe you’ll feel great. Maybe you’ll have less stress. Maybe you’ll discover more about yourself than you knew. It’s worth all the pixy dust to see what happens and it really doesn’t cost anything. After all, if you learn how to make time disappear, you can’t even lose that. 

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