Do You Meditate?

I do. And I love it. I always feel much calmer, more focused and I sleep better when I meditate.

The first time I meditated was in college with my friend Kirsten. I remember thinking the whole experience was kind of hokey. Sitting in a room with our eyes closed while listening to "weird" music silently for an hour with the goal of "clearing our heads" and not thinking. Hmmmmm. Okay. As you can imagine, this Type A Personality didn't do too well and I never went back.

Years later, I discovered a friend of mine was a certified hypnotherapist. She invited me to join a group she was starting of other Type A women for a once-a-week 1 hour guided hypnosis or meditation. To say I was skeptical was an understatement. At the end of the first session, we talked about our experiences and each of the other women talked about what they saw while they were in some hot air balloon, but I had no idea what they were talking about. So I talked about what I remembered and could recall a certain amount of the session, but suddenly my experience took a turn and rather than being in a hot air balloon, I was off on some other journey. Each week, my experience was vastly different from that of the groups' experiences.

A few weeks later, I had an experience in our session that would change the way I looked at guided hypnosis/meditation forever. As we were discussing our experiences, as we did each week after the hypnosis/meditation I was surprised to learn that the hypnotherapist hadn't taken us all down a road where we were to recall a tragedy and taught us to overcome it because in my hypnotized/meditative state, I relived a truly horrific and terrifying experience I'd had about 15 years earlier, fought back harder than I did at the time and actually changed the outcome. It was amazing and liberating. My skepticism was gone. I was sold.

Now I do self-hypnosis and meditate on my own a few times each week. I find it incredibly relaxing and a terrific way to help me release stress. Often I do it at night, but I also have some that I use in the mornings. Self-hypnosis/meditation has changed my life.

My friend Cindee posted the relaxing meditation below on Facebook today. It's a little different from the ones I use in that you should actually watch the video rather than focus on breathing and have your eyes closed, but I was surprised at just how effective it was nonetheless. I encourage you to take the next 9 minutes to watch this video. Turn off your phone, close your email, close the door so your kids can't walk in, turn off Pandora and just focus on you for the next 9 minutes. Trust me, your day will be better.