Guest post by Nicho Plowman, Vedic meditation teacher and co-founder of the world renowned meditation app, Insight Timer.
We’ve all been there. Too busy, too tired, too stressed. Surfing Inbox tsunamis into the weekend then indulging in too much of a good time, having to do it all over again for your family, or just collapsing in a heap from exhaustion. Maybe you’ve already tried meditation and it hasn’t stuck.
For 10 years before I trained as a Vedic Meditation teacher, striving for more balance and less stress, I tried it all; mindfulness practices, a variety of meditation techniques including Buddhist and Zen practices, health retreats, Bikram yoga, and Qigong. Inevitably, when I tried introducing those techniques back into my everyday life, I’d find myself abandoning them.
Ultimately, we need to find the right practice for ourselves. It needs to be practical. If you learn a meditation technique and don’t find it straightforward to continue with relative ease over time, it’s not the right practice for you.
The good news? You don’t have to sit cross legged and master deep breathing in a Himalayan monastery to successfully weave meditation into your daily life. Before you get started, let’s bust four of the most common meditation myths.
1. I don’t have time
Most people who say ‘I don’t have time to meditate’ are saying so on the basis that their mind and body are feeling stressed and fatigued. When we’re tired and stressed, everything seems hard. We procrastinate and can be easily frustrated by even the smallest changes to our routine or circumstances.
So ‘I don’t have time’ is much more a reflection of where we are at in our lives than anything else. When we’re overly busy, we don’t allow ourselves to come to a place of real or deep relaxation. Yet if we give ourselves time, we find we have more time. It’s why a regular meditator will say the exact opposite; ‘I’m so productive, I have more space in my mind and life. I have so much time.”
2. It’s too hard to fit into my lifestyle
Most of the techniques that people try to learn come from meditation traditions that are more monastic in origin, practiced by monks, in monasteries, whereas we’re what we call ‘householders’; we have families, jobs, and other commitments. So trying to learn a technique that was not designed for us becomes hard to continue with.
Instead, we need a technique that, by tradition, is designed for our busy, demanding lives, not just in time (say 20 minutes, twice a day) but also space. Vedic Meditation is a technique you can practice anywhere; in the car, in a cafe, outside school. It enables you to create space in the midst of your busy lifestyle.
3. I think too much, it makes me restless
So much of our understanding of meditation is based around needing to completely clear our minds of thoughts. It’s not true. The by-product of a good meditation technique is thinking, and it’s one of the great myths of meditation that thinking should be avoided.
On the contrary, being aware of your thoughts flowing shows the process is working. In Vedic Meditation, we simply come back to an awareness of a mantra, whereby thoughts then pass more easily, which also works to release stress and fatigue from our nervous system.
4. I’m not into ‘woo-woo’
Meditation – especially Vedic Meditation – doesn’t require you to sit cross-legged at an altar, dressed in cheesecloth rags and burning sage to fit in. You can lead a very normal life and be a meditator.
Yes, there’s some discipline to it. But to establish (and more importantly, maintain) a regular practice, you shouldn’t have to change anything about your life based on what you think you need to do or be or wear, to be a meditator. No special ceremony. No ritual. We simply start and finish each day as we wish, with a few minutes of quiet. Anyone can do it.
