This past Friday, I went out to dinner with family. We had great food (nom, nom, nom), great conversation, and laughed plenty long, and plenty loud.
I wore a double strand of pearls that my maternal grandfather gave his bride (who remained his bride for over 65 years). After dinner, my father gave me more pearls--a necklace and earrings. I donned them forthwith. Wouldn't anyone?
At home, I was too hyped up to go immediately to sleep, so, again, I did what any red-blooded woman with a smartphone in the 21st century would do: I took selfies until I landed a good one and uploaded it to Facebook. Booyah!
What's making me grin in that picture, though, isn't simply dinner with family or a new necklace or a fun portrait.
It's a feeling of well-being I've been cultivating since the fall. It started with a 30 day meditation challenge and is only deepening as I continue the practice in the first month of this new year. My word of the year for 2015 is "MMM" and stands for Meditate, Move, Make. I'm not one hundred percent everyday on the making and the moving, but daily mediation is fast becoming an addiction.
I've always accepted the idea that mediation is beneficial, but mostly said, "One day," or "That's for others, not for me." Now I look for moments throughout the day when I can take a few minutes to breathe, to quiet my back brain, to dive deep into the pool of gratitude that collects at the base of my soul. In the mornings, I do a four minute guided mediation. In the evenings, I write down three things I experienced during the day prefaced by the words "I am grateful that/for..."
Of all the benefits a habit of mediation promises, perhaps the one I've seen most in action in this journey is how calming it is, how it's helped keep my moods steadier, my focus keener, my anxiety (oh, heck yeah, I still have that. I'm not dead. I'm just going hippie) lower.
Do you have a meditation addiction? Think it's all hooey? Don't know where to start?
P.S. I admit it. I really like the photo so I figured out a way to show it off. Pearls have little to do with meditation, as far as I know. But aren't they pretty?
