I started one of my infamous (to my family) meditation kicks on Friday, after not meditating at all for about four months. Now I miraculously feel better, and am kicking myself for not starting up again sooner. I always know it will make me feel better, and it's simple to set up: it requires no special equipment or props (maybe an app or two; I have three - one is for children), just silence and your mind. Silence is hard to come by around here, but once I've gotten a meditation streak underway, I can do it without silence - I can do it in the middle of a toy-streaked, clothing-strewn room with my children screaming. Which is when meditation comes in most handy.
The thing is, sometimes when things are particularly tough, when meditation (or yoga) would help the most, I fall into this faulty space in my mind wherein I wonder if giving in and meditating means I'm actually giving up - like I'm not strong enough to just keep going without sitting down, taking a breather, and mantra-ing my way through it.
That fear of being not tough is something that's plagued me since I was, like, three. I don't know if consistent meditation will ever make it go away, or if meditating is just a way of managing it. And I don't know if "just managing" it is okay, or if not being able to think it away completely and forever is a sign of weakness.
I worry about passing this hindrance on to my children, so I make them meditate. too. We do it together with music from a lullaby app I used for both of them when they were babies. My son laughs through the almost the whole thing. My daughter gets real serious and does all the stereotypical things she sees people on television do - the exaggerated "om" sound; she asks to light candles. We usually do it in legs-up-the-wall pose, but she joins in on that after getting her fill of the cross-legged seated posture.
The whole thing only lasts four to five minutes because they're just kids. But at least meditation is on their radar as something routine and helpful, even if they're only calmed by the novelty factor of it, and by spending an extra moment of quality time with mom. I typically meditate after doing a sun salutation, or some other stretch I feel I need at the time, so they get in on that too. All of my son's "cool moves" are yoga moves. You tell him to dance and he stomps around clapping before going into his version of triangle pose, then downward dog, then three-legged dog.
They definitely see the whole yoga/meditation thing as being part of our lives. So I need to keep up with this meditation kick. And every other meditation kick I go on. I'd love them to mature into teenagers who meditate. That would make parenting easier, right?
The whole thing only lasts four to five minutes because they're just kids. But at least meditation is on their radar as something routine and helpful, even if they're only calmed by the novelty factor of it, and by spending an extra moment of quality time with mom. I typically meditate after doing a sun salutation, or some other stretch I feel I need at the time, so they get in on that too. All of my son's "cool moves" are yoga moves. You tell him to dance and he stomps around clapping before going into his version of triangle pose, then downward dog, then three-legged dog.
They definitely see the whole yoga/meditation thing as being part of our lives. So I need to keep up with this meditation kick. And every other meditation kick I go on. I'd love them to mature into teenagers who meditate. That would make parenting easier, right?
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