meditation

I recently started a meditation practice, using the Headspace app (this is not a sponsored post). Chema has been meditating with Headspace for a while and I finally decided to give it a go.

In these early days, I’m trying to focus on just showing up, without expectation of a “good” meditation that day. Just like I wouldn’t expect to see overnight progress at the gym, it takes time to train the mind to let go and gently focus on presence.

One of the biggest surprises for me so far has been a felt connection to my body in just ten minutes of sitting in awareness of the breath. As I was meditating one day recently, the rhythm and sound of my breath guided my attention to the ocean. As I felt the rising and falling of the breath, a moving picture appeared in my mind of waves falling back, building in strength, and washing onto the shore, expanding outwards before falling back once more. With each inhale, the wave recedes and builds, and with each outbreath, the wave washes forward and cleanses. I felt just that—a cleansing in my stomach, where I carry my stress and fear. It led me back to one of my favorite affirmations: 

I am an ocean. I can contain these waves.

It’s an affirmation that held me when we lost Baloo—that I could contain the waves of grief. The waves rise and fall like the breath, and the body contains it all.

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Yesterday as I was meditating, Dory came and lay down next to me on the rug, pressing her entire 55 pounds against me. It would have been sweet except that she had an elk antler that she was gnawing aggressively. Each scrape of the antler felt like an intrusion, her body jostling mine as she repositioned the antler to attack it anew. I was tempted to give up the meditation. Instead, I chose curiosity, to experiment with what it would be like to stay. In the end, I followed my breath back into stillness, into the rising and falling of the waves. With each outbreath, I emptied. And when the meditation was done (the exact moment Dory set the bone aside to lay sweetly and quietly beside me), I had a sense of “Oh. I am me regardless of what is happening around me. I can stay in my body regardless of what is happening around me.”

I’m still working on taking this embodiment and these lessons into the rest of my day—often mere minutes later I find myself rushing again—but it’s comforting to know that this space is out there, that I can follow the breath back to a sense of calm, inhabitance, and emptied containment.

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Do you have a meditation practice, or some other practice that returns you to yourself? What works in your experience? What has surprised you?