I never thought meditation was for me, even with early exposure, even after my first 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat at age 15. I’d always fall asleep during every kind of meditation. What pushed me even further away from meditation was an overnight sleep study in a hospital 3 years ago that confirmed for me what I had had a hunch about for many years, that I had narcolepsy. The only solution proposed by Western medicine? Take pills for the rest of my life.
Definitely not a choice I was ready or open to making.
So? What did I decide upon? A combination of movement, meditation, and breath through my yoga, and while it did help for a while –I discovered my love of dancer’s flow yoga, the relief could not be prolonged. Working with my body was only a fix for a few hours. I needed to work with my mind.
I’m on that journey that I’m still figuring out. I recognize that sleeping during meditation was not only my body’s way of showing how exhausted it was, it was also my body’s way of shutting down and disrupting trauma, recreating patterns of avoidance, avoidance of feeling, avoidance of pain, of feeling the subtle body. I didn’t want to listen to the patterns that lurk.
And so, now what? Every day for the next 30 days, I will be combining any kind of flow movement and 5 to 10 minutes of meditation in the morning. I commit to being curious about how my body and mind with feel after 30 days. With nothing to lose and learning to gain…
THIS is Day 2, of movement, of meditation, of choosing love over fear.
