Start Meditating With Me

On October 26, 2022 at 7pm Pacific I’ll be hosting my free online meditation group. Just to give you an idea of how weird this is to people who know me really well, yesterday I was talking with a long time friend and mentor about it. She was like, I have to hear how this came about, and she was laughing so hard she sounded choked up as she recalled attempting to guiding me through a meditation as part of my reiki attunement several years ago. It basically resulted in me freaking out, crying, and lamenting that I just didn’t work that way.

That is exactly why I decided to start teaching meditation. Because I just could not do it for years. So many people had recommended it to me because I tend to roll a little high strung when I am in a state of stress, and I spent the first 40 some years of my life in a constant state of stress.

All I knew about meditation were the benefits of it (there’s pile of science if you are interested). So I expected to sit down and just wander into a calm state and feel better. But if you’ve tried unsuccessfully to meditate you’ll likely understand that just sitting there didn’t work. At least not the way I was led to believe it would. Just sitting can be hard. Just being quiet can be hard. And when you get quiet, often your mind starts screaming at you all the things that you have managed to ignore by keeping moving and avoiding the quiet. That is a big freaking scary landscape to navigate alone. I couldn’t do it alone. I learned to meditate by sitting with others, by talking with others, and by sharing my experience with others. I learned to do it alone with others.

Meditation has been for me a process of developing a relationship with my mind and body that allows me to find calm and stillness outside of meditation.

One of the biggest changes in concept this set out for me is that meditation doesn’t have to mean sitting there and trying to get your mind to cooperate. Meditation has been for me a process of developing a relationship with my mind and body that allows me to find calm and stillness outside of meditation. This has been the biggest contributor to my ability to have patience with myself and with others. It has opened a space for me to accept myself and even love myself. It has created a space where I can tolerate the discomfort of healing from trauma. It has made it easier to set boundaries. My ability to regulate my emotions is greater than it has ever been. And yes, I have also worked my ass off on ALL of these issues outside of mediation. But having this tool has made these things so much easier and has given me a sense that I have some agency in the process.

Agency is a big word to use for this, but it’s the best one I have found. Agency isn’t about control, but it feels the way we think control will feel. Agency is about being able to act in the world of our own volition, from our own values. When people talk about something being “in alignment” they are often referring to agency.

Meditation has been so important to my personal process that I found myself all the time doing that very unhelpful thing that others did, telling people they would benefit from meditation and then moving on with my life. So I decided some time back that I would start helping people learn meditation, people like me who struggled with it. My initial thought was to offer it as part of my healing and coaching practice, but after taking the teacher training, I decided to also open it up wider.

In the meditation groups I will be providing foundational information, guiding you through a simple practice as an introduction, and we will then have a reflection period where we will discuss our experience in the meditation, prior experiences we’ve had, and how each of us can adapt the practice to our own needs. The meditation we will do is based on principles that have been in practice since antiquity, but it’s not tied to a spiritual tradition. I’ll point you toward resources for mediative practice in your spiritual tradition if you are interested. There are also more styles of meditative practice than I can count, so if my approach doesn’t do it for you don’t give up.

The goal of this group is to help you find your way into a practice of meditation and mindfulness that works for you and to give you a sense of how community can promote your practice. It will also help me determine what kind of specialized groups we may need to form in the future. Anecdotal experience and scientific evaluation have shown the possibilities of meditation for a variety of issues, from garden variety ones to more exotic issues such as trauma and issues associated with living in a capitalist society while being neurodivergent (see, mediation hasn’t tempered my politics).

So, join me to learn to use a tool that can help you regulate your emotions, accept yourself, find calm, learn to rest, improve your health and memory, and a whole pile of things that have made my life better. Or just show up because you’re curious. I would really appreciate having you there.

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