Meditation

It's no secret that I meditate.  I started close to two years ago after an unfortunate crab-walking incident led to a broken elbow and the inability to do much physical activity.  Prior to the incident, as I like to call it, my favorite way of dealing with feelings of frustration, anger, and even joy was to punch, kick and lift things.  I LOVED my gym and loved my workouts.

Unfortunately, the healing of the elbow coincided with my car accident and the beginning of the major decline in my health. I was so angry and frustrated because I literally felt trapped in my body. I had all this energy, all this desire and I couldn't do anything about it because my body couldn't handle it.  I knew it was unhealthy to  stew in this, so I decided to try something VERY different from what I had done in the past. I was going to sit still. Not only was I going to sit, but I was going to meditate. My friends and family thought I was crazy.  Hell, even I thought I was crazy. How could I go from vibrating tension/energy/anger and doing things like using a sledgehammer on tires as a way to relieve stress to simply sitting.

One of my BFFs C decided it would be a good time to drag me to weekly talks by Marianne Williamson, who lectures on A Course in Miracles. I won't get into any theology or discuss the merits of one philosophy over another, but I found some peace there.  The lectures began and ended with a guided meditation and for the first time I could feel myself calming down. I felt like I could finally breathe.



Since then I have played around with all sorts of meditation - mindfulness, zazen, guided meditations, walking meditations, transcendental meditation, you name it.
 I personally like to mix it up and try something different every couple of weeks, as it keeps it interesting for me.  No matter what style I use, however, I always find that I learn more about myself. When you quiet your mind from the distractions of the outside world, you start to know the person inside. It's not always pretty, and it challenges what you thought you knew about yourself.

Tonight I had one of those intense meditations, which I did not expect at all. I turned on a guided meditation for stress relief, and suddenly saw the layers of defensiveness I live with on a daily basis. I saw the tension that vibrates off of me and the lack of trust that I have and how that is conveyed.  Being stuck at home for the last week due to this flare brought up a lot of tension and defensiveness in me because yet again I was trapped in my body with no real way to fix it.  I just had to wait it out.  I'm not quite sure what to do with all of this emotion and information, so I've decided I'm going to sit with it for a few days and see how it feels, how I feel and if and how I want to deal with it.

That's the beauty of meditation...no matter where you are, you're there. Your breath, the quiet, the stillness in your mind will always be waiting for you when you are ready to unlock it.