Accidentally meditating

Accidentally meditating

Sep 17, 2022

How I accidentally meditated and fell into a potentially life-changing experience

(Posted on main blogsite 28.07.22)

I have to confess that despite my line of work and everything I know about meditation academically and scientifically, I haven’t yet managed to make it a part of my life. I know why I should do it, I feel fairly confident that I know how to do it, even if I don’t yet consider myself very good at it, and I do want to do it. But somehow it just isn’t happening yet. Sometimes, but not regularly. But I recently had an unexpected brush with meditation with unexpected, potentially life changing results. Having had this experience I have already started to make a little more space for an informal sort of meditation and I think I can finally see a future in my life where meditation becomes more established.

When I had Covid I was lucky not to have many of the symptoms that lots of other people had. But I had one symptom that was really hard to deal with. I couldn’t breathe. Sometimes the difficulty breathing was manageable and it was possible to distract myself. But other times for hours at a time I was unable to do anything but pace about or sit in the hammock, while concentrating on every single breath. And still each breath was never enough. It was quite scary at times.

However, there were quite a few silver linings from that whole storm cloud. The one I’ll talk about today was particularly unexpected. Doing nothing but concentrating on breathing (belly breathing because that was the most effective at getting the air in), sometimes multi-tasking and watching the sky WHILE breathing, my head was empty of the normal relentless to do list, plans and debates and chatter. For the first time in a very long time. Sometimes I worried about my breathing, but that made it notably worse, so I practiced letting that go of the worrying thoughts and refocussing my attention on breathing. Gradually with all that new space in my head, as the days passed, surprising urges towards creativity crept in, alongside a sense of peace, separate to the worry. I started to realise that by accident I was meditating.

Even after I was back out in the demanding world again, those creative urges kept re-emerging and I found myself throwing myself into drawing pictures for my children to colour in and then I actually started to do something I haven’t done in about 15 years: to write creatively. I am still being drawn to all sorts of creative things – dance, painting, drawing, writing. I'm reconnecting to a side of myself that has been dormant for a long time. In addition to that Covid experience lingering, I have also had a perspective shift in relation to productivity and goals and planning. And with those two things, as well as some other experiences that have come together, things definitely feel a little different in my head these days. I’m still not meditating properly or regularly, but I am now taking space for breathing, meditation and pulling the plug on my brain in a way that I didn’t do at all before, and in a way that I sense will entrench itself more fully in life at some point. I am also holding on to the creative urges and answering them just a little bit, but increasingly, and I feel that this part too will take a stronger hold.

It feels like a new chapter, excuse the pun.

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