As I write this, my household is once again in quarantine because my son was exposed to COVID at daycare. When I got the news on Friday, a sense of dread came over me as I anticipated what the coming week would look like, working from home with a one year old and a three year old.
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If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know I’m a regular meditator. But the “regular” part really only happened within the last year or two. Before that, I had meditated in fits and starts, trying it here and there for a few days or weeks at a time. Then I’d stop because I thought I didn’t have time, and I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right, and I wasn’t seeing obvious changes in myself, despite the research suggesting that meditation can have significant benefits.
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The night before Thanksgiving, I did a guided meditation on the 10 Percent Happier app called “Gratitude for Benefactors.” The meditation asks the listener to call to mind a person who helped them in some way. The first person I thought of was, surprisingly, a teacher I had in middle school. I haven’t seen her in years, and I had never before thought about how much she encouraged me or the learning opportunities she provided.
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Over the past few months, I’ve been working on tuning in to my body. The first lesson that Kara Loewentheil teaches in her coaching program is that emotions are physical sensations in the body. To process an emotion, you have to allow yourself to feel the physical sensation and then name it. When I feel a lump in my throat, a knot in my stomach, a racing heart, or heat rising in my face, I now stop and take note of it. I observe the physical sensation with curiosity. I ask myself, what thought is causing this emotion? What can I learn from it? What is my body trying to tell me?
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You may have noticed a decrease in the frequency of my posts this spring and summer. It’s been an unsettling few months for all of us. I’ve been more inclined to turn inward, and this season has felt like one for listening rather than talking.
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