Wakeena Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon, spring 2017

After 20+ years of a sometimes consistent but a mostly spotty meditation practice, last year I decided to see if meditating every day made a difference.

The short answer is an unequivocal yes. For me daily meditation was and is well worth the 30 minutes a day I give to it both in the short term and the long term and I found that the results compounded quickly.

My first test was for 30 days and honestly, I didn’t begin with any lofty goals. My only reason was to see if it made a difference for me which would help me know whether I should drop it or make room for it.

Those initial 30 days last December yielded much more than I expected and I wrote about it in this post. After that, I just simply kept going. It was a small decision but a very good one and here I am a year later having only missed a handful of days.

view of Mt. Jefferson as seen from 7000 ft. up on Mt Hood, Oregon autumn 2017

The first few months produced the most pronounced results but in retrospect I see that the improvements within myself and my life kept expanding all year but I didn’t notice them as much.

I heard Josh Radnor (from How I Met Your Mother) on the 10% Happier podcast awhile back and his teacher captured this well. He said that the results that are happening with you may not be obvious day to day but if you could compare side by side your mind and consciousness now with that of a year ago, the difference would be incredibly obvious and furthermore it would be absolutely intolerable for you as you are now to inhabit your former state! My experience has been true to this.

creek along Wakeena Trail, Columbia River Gorge, spring 2017

So what does “make a difference” mean for me? What were my results?

• A feeling that I’m not sure how else to describe except to say that life feels more buffered and supported, I trust the process of life a bit more.

• More present and feel more pluck for life, quicker to smile from a genuine place (although this could be as much from Steemit as from anything else ;-).

• Increased focus and mental clarity - this is a BIG one
  As Eckhart Tolle has said many times and in many ways, the power of focus should not be underestimated. Good focus solves a whole host of seemingly unrelated challenges. My mind clutters less quickly and I’m not as overwhelmed. Overwhelm has always been a huge problem for me because my life is extremely full yet I engage in everything I do deeply so I can’t handle lots of different things at once. Overwhelm has swallowed far too much of my time and energy and diminishing its frequency makes a big difference. It still happens but less often and I can bounce back more quickly.

• More emotional resilience and increased capacity to adapt to the demands of life. I take things less personally and I feel less like a puppet with someone else pulling the strings. For the last 4 years or so I’d been feeling a sort of powerlessness about the course of my life and lived with a low grade despair as a consequence. Thankfully this seems to have lifted and I feel empowered in planning and decision-making and a general excitement about life. (Steemit has something to do with this too).

• Have more of an objective perspective in difficult situations that would have previously caused me to react in anger or defense. Yes I still have these extreme feelings but I seem to have a few moments to notice these feelings before responding rather than just to have a knee-jerk reaction. I feel my anger, sadness, love, excitement deeply as always, but also now know how to let it move through me and I don’t hang on to it.

• Quality of my sleep is better and I sleep through the night
  All my adult life I have been a nervous sleeper and have gone through months of 4-5 hour nights. When traveling or any new factors entered in my life, my sleep would go into a tailspin. At some point in the last year I tried to remember the last time I had trouble sleeping through the night I realized it was before I began my 30 day meditation test. As you can imagine, sustained good sleep is amazing and I have found that over time I now need about an hour less sleep each night. I should also note that eating less sugar and more healthy fat for the previous 6 months had already lessened my sleeping troubles by about half.

On this note, I want to acknowledge that over the course of a year, I always grow and expand. There are always many factors that play into this growth but the improvements I’ve listed are at least in part a direct result of my meditation practice. They are also be supported by diet, Qi Gong and other ways I work towards self-mastery too, but my experience gives me clear feedback about the important role meditation has played.

Although I do not believe that meditation affects everyone the same way nor is it the magic bullet for everyone, it certainly has done a lot for me. If you’re at all interested, I would recommend at least giving it a try to see how if it’s something that works well for you!

Arcadia Beach, Oregon spring 2016

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by the queen of the custom gif, @stellabelle