MEDITATION NEWSLETTER
How do you become friends with your thoughts?
In this newsletter, I am sharing about my favorite subject and lifelong passion: Meditation.
Meditation is so many things. For me, it’s stillness and silence and being surrounded by the deep nurturing loving presence that holds us. How we get to this place of single pointed focus and immersive presence is different for us all.
Traditional sitting meditation, I’ve discovered, isn’t always required to find this place.
We can choose a practice or activity that works for us, that makes us feel connected to ourselves, where we forget time, and where we are in a state beyond thoughts and desires. It is in this place of stillness, and pause, merged in the present moment that we find awakening moments. We can get there by walking in the woods, playing tennis, saying a prayer or giggling with our loved ones.
My mind chatter's speed has slowed down to turtle speed, where it was once a galloping horse on a race track going around at full spead ahead.
The concept of meditation can seem so scary to most of us, as it definitely did for me. Two decades ago, when I began meditating, I started with sitting quietly in a cross legged position for one minute in the morning and one minute in the evening. To me, those two minutes were so uncomfortable that it felt as if someone was rubbing me with sandpaper. Yet, those two minutes were enough for me to feel a shift, and somehow it book-ended my day. Little by little I felt more supported somehow, I felt something.
Soon after that, I met my teacher Sally Kempton. Sally taught me that through meditation I could tap into an infinite supportive source of love. Through her, I understood that meditation could be fun and attainable also for someone like me, early in recovery and having been a fulltime partier for most of my teens and my 20’s. The idea of sitting still for even a second, or being able to feel a source of infinite love, had never even crossed my mind.
Sally showed us that it was in the pauses, in the spaces between our thoughts, that a gateway to love could be found. This concept was so incredibly hard for me to understand, but the small glimpses of stillness and love that crept through here and there kept me going.
Traditional sitting meditation was what worked for me, it was what began my journey of healing and self-discovery. I was able to find moments of inner joy and presence, and I was able to find that in truth meditation exists all around me, not only while sitting cross legged with my eyes closed, but also outside in nature and in the presence of animals.
In the blog My Friend: Meditation, I describe how, in fact, meditation became a way for me to become my own best friend. It was the discovery of my own inner source that provided everything that I had been searching for.
I encourage you to give yourself this gift, I encourage you to believe that you are what you are looking for. Meditation, in whatever form you choose, gives us a way to become friends with ourselves, and to like ourselves better. Find that thing that you love, that calms your mind, where everything becomes quiet, and find your peace and connection there. Your soul will thank you, and you will discover a shift in your perception and in your reaction to life. You will feel more grounded and more able to handle whatever comes your way.
Meditation is love, love of yourself, and this is the most precious gift any human can give to oneself.
Featured Book
Meditation for the Love of it
Sally Kempton
Sally’s book “Mediation for the Love of it” is a modern spiritual meditation bible. When I read it, I was already a few years into my meditation journey and what was most striking was deeply underlined by the experience I had already had from being Sally’s student, which was that meditation is the experience of love, love for yourself and for the universe around you.
For me, “Meditation for the love of it,” created a foundation from which I could understand my own meditation practice better, while at the same time giving me a roadmap to my inner experience.
