Is Meditation Exactly What You Need?
Why doing the hard things in life may be exactly what you need
I heard a story on The James Altucher Show about a head monk on meditation. The head monk told the other monks that he was going to meditate for one hour. The other monks started to panic. You don’t have time to meditate for one hour! You have to do all of these things! And the monks listed all the commitments the head monk had. The head monk said calmly, “I must then meditate for two hours”.
I’ve been meditating, not in any serious way, but for five minutes after lunch. It’s part of my ‘making it easy on me’ idea because everyone has five minutes, and since it’s only five minutes, it is incredibly easy to achieve.
This morning, I had some extra time so I decided I would try a 15 minute guided meditation. I’ll be honest, it was a lot tougher than I thought! My thoughts would wander and I would have to focus on my breathing. I thought about my to-do list. I thought about all the work I had to do. I thought about writing an atomic essay for the day. My eyes opened up every so often to see how much time was left on the countdown. And when the 15 minutes were up, I got down to work.
The 15-minute meditation did not feel 3x as challenging as the 5-minute meditation, it felt like it was much more challenging. There were longer empty spaces. There was less guidance.
But coming out of the meditation (and I did another 15-minute meditation after lunch), I realized it was exactly what I needed to get out of my monkey head and stay present at the moment.
Sometimes, what you think is extremely challenging is exactly what you need in your life. For me, today, it was meditating for 15 minutes.
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