By Estefani Dujardin, staff writer
Silence. It’s not a concept I’m entirely familiar with since I am very outgoing. I wanted to try it because meditation to me seems to be connected with gratitude, which is something I struggle with saying because it requires me to admit that I’m wrong at times. This pushed me out of my comfort zone to start expressing gratitude and taking the time to recognize the opportunities to say thank you.
So I decided to try out meditation to look into myself and just slow down for once, instead of getting ahead of myself. Meditation is something that always sounded interesting to me, but I never quite had the patience for it, so I never wanted to try. Well, that’s about to change as I attempt to reach myself on a more personal level through meditation.
Now I knew that meditation required me to be calm and quiet so I started with a five-minute guided meditation on my first day and each day I started to do multiple meditations throughout the day.
During the first three days, I watched guided meditations on Youtube on different topics. Throughout the first few days, I was able to get through the meditation fairly easily since the videos ranged from 5 to 10 minutes. I thought that since they went fairly well, I would begin meditating multiple times during the day. Though after the third day I had gotten a bit over my head.
By the third day, in the middle of my visualization meditation, I started getting really distracted because I was hungry. I ended up visualizing food in my meditation instead of visualizing the night sky like the guy in the video said to do. While I was able to get through the meditation eventually, it was frustrating for me because I really thought I was getting the hang of it.
I decided to revisit the meditation videos I enjoyed for the next couple of days. On the last day, I did the previous videos from the beginning of the week and mash them together to do a sort of power meditation for 20 minutes.
Overall I really enjoyed meditation and just pausing to meditate and breathe opened the door to mindfulness for me. Mindfulness is a big part of meditation itself, guiding people to pause, reflect, and get in touch with their feelings as well as their surroundings. Meditation was a cornerstone for me because I got to practice mindfulness and learn to pause and be in the moment.
Meditation helped me to stay centered, but I’m always going to worry and get frustrated, so at least I was able to do that like a champ. Going through all these different meditation practices benefited me since I got to choose the ones I liked the best. Though I can say with certainty that I struggled with how I would react to the external forces in my house that I’m unable to control. Meditation is a hard thing to do, and it’s hard to know where to start, but I highly recommend trying meditation whether you are new to it or not. Everyone has to start somewhere because meditation isn’t about zoning everything out but tuning in with all our attention.
Meditation wasn’t as bad as I initially thought it was going to be, so I decided to keep on doing meditation since it made me feel better. In fact, I do meditation 4 times a day for a week and I really look forward to continuing to do it.
