Meditations on Meditation, Week 1

Well, what do you know? I've made it through the first full week of Oprah and Deepak's 21 Day Meditation Challenge! And I've actually DONE the meditation every day of this first week! I've even used the online journal!

::Author does little happy dance::

I am not what you'd call consistent in terms of the time of day when I do the meditation. At least, not yet. I probably picked a bad week to start something like this -- my kid was home all day on a winter school break, so not a normal schedule. My general intention for "best time of day to meditate" is somewhere between 10-11am; that's late enough for me to get up, get my husband and kid out the door in the mornings, wake myself up enough, eat breakfast and get my one cup of daily coffee into me (or I'd fall back to sleep during the meditation), check email etc. THEN, before I feel compelled to get out of the house and do other stuff, I would ideally do the meditation before going on with the rest of my day. This seemed and still seems like it ought to work best as mid-mornings are overall when I have the most time to myself. On weekends if I sleep a bit late, it's not a big deal for me to meditate a little later.

But as a result of having to do things with or for my step-son this week, there were at least 3 days when I didn't get around to the meditation until nearly 6pm. This was not really such a big problem, other than the idea of these meditations is creating Perfect Health, and each day you are given a Centering Thought that is supposed to go with you consciously throughout your day. So if you're not doing the meditation until 6pm then you're not as tuned into that thought all day long.

And one day I was literally SO fatigued in the morning, even after breakfast and coffee, that I just curled up and went back to sleep for a while. I could not keep my eyes open. Fatigue has been an issue lately and I'm sure it has everything to do with having gained some pounds and those pounds putting extra stress on my body.

I'm finding these meditations to be very pertinent, actually, to my weight-loss efforts and my life-long battle with my weight. Intellectually I have known for a long time that being overweight is an emotional and spiritual issue more than it is a physical one; the physical side of it is the effect, not the cause. And after the first week of meditations on perfect health, what I observe is that much of my problem is how I think of and talk to myself about myself. In other words, I am my own worst critic. I have somehow internalized my mother's super-charged critical voice and I have picked up where she left off, constantly finding fault with my physical being, my choices relative to my body, etc.

The negative cycle may have started with my mother in my youth, but *I* am now the one perpetuating it. Is it any wonder I have such a difficult time making healthy choices and treating my body the way it deserves to be treated, when I talk to myself like I'm not worth the effort?

Anyway, this is a long, complicated subject that I don't want to explore further at the moment, not on the blog at least, but just wanted to say that the meditations are helping me see and understand the impact of some of the self-talk I've been engaging in for most of my life, and it's already giving me some tools to help break that vicious cycle and replace it with something more nurturing and self-loving.

Two weeks to go, but I think I'm off to a good start. If nothing else, 7 days of sticking to my promise to do the meditation is a record for me, and I feel good about that.