Mindfulness and Meditation: A 30 Day Challenge

I have been doing a bit of reading on mindfulness and mediation lately. My husband has studied, practiced, and taught it for years. He takes his information from many sources and traditions and primarily teaches it to the church. For years, I always looked at him as super discipline and thought, "Oh. It is not in my nature to meditate." Now, however, I have decided I am up to the challenge of trying to meditate. I just finished a 30-day Birkam yoga challenge. I made 26 out of 30 days, which is good for me! If I can do that I can meditate 20 minutes a day for 30 days. I am going to write about my experience. I recommend mediation and mindfulness to my clients and have only dabbled in it a bit. I think it is about time I take this very good for you practice seriously for myself because mindfulness changes the brain.

I am going to practice something very simple called passage meditation recommended to me by my husband and can be practice regardless of one's faith tradition. It is mantra based. I am using it because I like the idea of saying a word or passage that has meaning. It is a little like TM, which has been researched and found effective. As well, I have used this style in the past when I was trying to meditate. It is recommended in the book  "Anticancer, A New Way of Life" by David, Servan-Schreiber, MD, Ph.D. He recommends the Buddhist mantra, "Om mani padme hum", which means the jewel in the lotus of the heart. I like this one because of the way it sounds and feels to me. I can sing it as well and hear the overtones in my head. I will probably use this one although there are plenty to chose from. The web site "Timeless Wisdom for Daily Living" has a good list of them.

Day One: Day one is today but I actually kind of started the day before yesterday. I think I am already experiencing some benefit. I found two things happening to me. The first was I did not become stressed out over the complete breakdown of my iphone calendar. I as a therapist my calendar is my life. I called Apple and they made things worse. It took time and energy I did not have to reconstruct my life. Oddly, I was not stressed out but felt peaceful during the process. The second thing that I have been feeling is more energy and greater focus. This inspired me to try to do this 30-day challenge and write about it. Try it with me. See what happens. Comment here or on my facebook page: Windows of Opportunity Counseling Services. I think this will be fun!

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