Keeping Up With The Meditation

A few weeks ago I signed up to a primordial sound meditation course. It's all done online, but when you sign up for it, you have to commit to meditate every day for 21 days. If you miss a day, you have to go back to day 1 and start again. Because it takes 21 days to form a habit.

I did my 21 days of meditation, many days meditating twice for 30 minutes each time. I loved it; I bored people silly with telling them how much I loved it, and what fabulous improvements I was experiencing in all areas of my life.

And then, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of, once the three weeks were safely over, I stopped. I think I stopped for about a week or so. During that time, my life suddenly seemed really hard.

Anyone who's read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks will tell you I was having an "Upper Limit Problem." Basically, things seemed to be going quite well with my work... so I went a bit batshit on my personal life. I panicked at a few things that should actually be quite exciting, and everything went to pot because of it.

At least two evenings last week, I put S to bed and then sat at my desk crying. I felt crappy. I wasn't coping with things, I was hugely unproductive in the time I had to myself, and the time I spent with S was not well spent either.

It's not that I actively decided "yes, I'll stop meditating now." I decided very early on that I intended to keep up my practice indefinitely because I really did (do) feel that it's helpful in every area of my life. I just... fell out of the habit I suppose. One evening I looked at the clock and realised if I wanted to meditate for half an hour now, I would be really late for bed - and I had to be up early in the morning. And the same for the next day, and the next and the next. I have no clue why I wasn't just making time to meditate during the day while S was at nursery any longer. I think I convinced myself that I was too busy... doing what, I have no idea. 

Over the weekend, I gave myself a bit of a stern talking to and decided I really needed to sort my shit out, as it were. And so I began again. And it felt pretty good. Suddenly I remembered all the good reasons for finding that half an hour in my day. Suddenly I remembered how good it felt to take that half hour out of my day. 

And now... Now I need to work on not being scared of success I suppose, and not buggering everything up when I am scared. Feel the fear and all that. And to recognise that my meditation practice is only going to help me with that process.