Bringing Meditation into my life

I'm a huge fan of yoga. I started doing it through a work sponsored event over ten years ago and immediately experienced results. The physical assertion of a yoga practice creates a stronger body and may lead to health benefits. However, the aspect of yoga which really affected me is the mental component. Yoga allows calmness to overwhelm me through specific concentration. I always feel stronger after a yoga class, physically and mentally.

Everyone knows about meditation. How you perceive it is directly related to whomever you know who does a meditation practice. Personally, I never thought I needed meditation. I do yoga fairly regularly now and am grateful for the mental strength it gives me. However, a few people have recently asked me if I mediated. One was going to do a Oprah/Deepak Chopra 21 day meditation challenge in August. She, a person whom I once dragged to yoga and subsequently hated it, had done a similar meditation challenge earlier this year. She claimed it helped her immensely. The only reason this intrigued me was because she hated yoga. How is meditation really different from yoga? The obvious answer is the physical actions of yoga differ from the physical relaxation of meditation. Knowing my friend is an active person by nature, I was even more curious.

So I started to meditate. I used the Oprah and Deepak Chopra 21 day meditation challenge as a guide mostly because I started after August 5th. Well, I should say I tried to start meditating. The more I learned about meditation, the more I realized it is quite naive to do it without a teacher. Yet even without guidance, I felt myself, for a lack of a better word and believe me I thought it, enlightened. If yoga makes me calm, then meditation makes me purposeful. I really can't explain any other way.

I recently read a GQ article about transcendental meditation. The article inspired me to try other types of meditation and to write this post. Meditating requires 2 sessions of 20 minutes every day. Some days, this also happens to the writer of the GQ article, meditation is easy and other days it is hard. Some days I completely forget to do it and other days I can't wait to meditate. I encourage everyone to try it because everyone should experience meditation. Overall, I'm glad to have started something that will only benefit me in this existence called life.