Is 2023 your year to get your meditation practice off the ground?

If you are struggling to achieve a consistent practice, don’t worry. Meditation is hard. Really, really hard!

It’s not like doing the physical practice of yoga, or lifting weights in the gym, where you can achieve tangible results in a short space of time.

A meditation practice takes time, patience and persistence to cultivate. Many people give up early on because the first thing that happens, is they come face to face with their own thoughts. This can be foreign territory and scary. After all, it’s not relaxing to sit there in the busyness of the mind! Besides, in the western world, for many to understand something, we need labels, an instruction manual and a plan before we can begin to accept a new concept. When was they last time you bought something that didn’t come with a label, and an instruction manual complete with the do’s and don’ts of using it (so you don’t have to use your mind)?

However, your mind doesn’t have an instruction manual and unlike the products we buy there is no ‘off’ switch either.

Deepak Chopra summed up the concept of meditation perfectly when he said:

“Think of your mind like a flowing river. On the surface a river flows the fastest and is broken up by waves and currents. But if you diver deeper, the waves disappear and the current is slower. Finally, at the bottom, where the water meets the riverbed, the current may be nearly motionless. The mind is like that, yet we identify only with its active, fast-moving surface. What lies deeper can’t be accessed by thought. You must allow your mind to seek its own quiet, to return to its own source”.

This is perhaps why so many people struggle with meditation: Because they are focused on the external, fast moving part of the mind and don’t allow themselves the time and space to experience the quieter, deeper mind.

And the truth is, the journey to the deeper depths of your mind, is a scary one as you suddenly come face to face with parts of yourself that you have been at war with for years. So of course it’s easier to come back to the surface, back to what is ‘known’ rather than take the hard swim through uncharted waters even if calmer waters beckon. But if you can begin to work with these parts of you, and accept them, beautiful things happen.

Think about the underwater diver. They will have trained over a long period of time to perfect their practice so they can function safely in unpredictable waters. They can do it because they have become comfortable with the uncomfortableness of not really knowing what will greet them on the journey.

Meditation is a bit like that. An unknown journey into the deepest oceans of your soul but one worth diving into.

With love, light and a little Ayama Magic xxx