Photo by TravisAndersonPhoto.com

Hello World!  We’ll see how long this lasts, but basically I have decided to dedicate a blog strictly to document anything and everything that comes up in my daily practice of meditation.

I started meditating a few years after being an avid yogi.  I always got somewhat timid when I heard the term “meditation.”  In fact, I mostly thought it was strictly for New Age hipsters or for all the “woo-woo” people out there.  Once I started practicing it though, I couldn’t stop, life just started to flow so much more smoothly and I didn’t feel such a strong need to control it as I had in the past.

I had fallen out of practice or would only meditate once a week for a while and anxious thought patterns seemed to drift back during this.  I am now currently back in practice, going to one meditation group here in Portland, OR once a week and then meditating for 20 minutes every morning in the comfort of my own bedroom.

I have noticed lots of interesting things since practicing every day, mostly that…well, my old destructive thinking patterns do seem to occur still, but I am able to hold them at a distance and in a space that I have never found before.  I have had such a clearing of the mind that no substance, no person, and no anything has ever given me before.

Somewhat of a way to hold myself accountable, I have decided to document at the end of the day anything that came up throughout the day after my 20-minute morning meditation.  So here it is…..my first day of documentation:

Today I had the day off of work, so I was able to get to meditating a bit later than when I usually do.  Because of this, I noticed I put it off until the very last minute….closer to noon than to the morning hours.  Either way, when I did get to it, I found it incredibly difficult to follow my breath.  I had an intense stream of thoughts and worries that didn’t want to calm down.  Instead of pushing them away, I finally just embraced them, along with following my breath and they seemed to drift away.

Throughout my day of errands, everything seemed to flow so smoothly, even if it wasn’t as smooth as “normal” standards.  The day never had any sunlight, the rain wouldn’t stop pouring and the drivers wouldn’t stop excitedly throwing on their brakes unnessicarily, but I didn’t care.  I had a lightness to my body and an extreme feeling of joy in my mind.  Every stoplight was fun to me, it gave me a minute to stop driving and enjoy the scene around me: the man with the overly big black jacket running across the pedestrian crosswalk splashing through the puddles, the tall Pacific Northwestern fir trees lining the golf course, and other small treasures I wouldn’t have noticed had I been in a rush or mad over a red stoplight.

As I left my gym, my friend called me and I stopped to sit in front of a pizza parlor to chat with her.  Even though I had a sense that I had a “bunch” of stuff left to do, I realized instead that my friend caught me at just the right time and connecting with friends is more important to me than errands.  As we chatted, a mother and her young boy stopped directly in front of me to zipper up their coats, the boy was staring me down as he sang a song.  I smiled, waved and said “hi!” to him, his eyes lit up and he reciprocated the hello.

I am realizing that as I take care of myself and center my mind, I am bringing my joy out into the world to be reverberated.  Or maybe today was just a really good day and I wasn’t tested enough?  We will see how my day at work flows tomorrow.

Anyhow, I hope you join me in my journey!