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If I could tell you one thing that has changed my life, my perspective, my daily mindset and physical and mental health forever—it would be meditation. We have an estimated 70,000 thoughts a day, according to a laboratory at the University of Southern California, and to simply silence your mind, reconnect with yourself and escape from your ego for 10 minutes a day could change anyone’s life who is willing to try.
During the summer before my freshman year of college, my journal was my best friend. The summer didn’t start on a good note. My best friend at the time, who I once financially and emotionally supported, completely betrayed me, the boy who I was immensely infatuated with broke my heart to pieces and I was one of the last people to see my friend before he got into his car, crashed and passed away. In addition, I stopped talking to most of my friends from high school because they were bad friends and bad influences and only detrimental to my own well-being. Never had I felt so alone in my life. My mom got remarried, and we were living in a new house with a man who felt like a stranger at the time, and I was about to enter college, a completely new phase in my life. All of that change felt extremely overwhelming.
My cousin, who attends CU herself, is very invested in meditation and spirituality. She recommended a meditation teacher who I started seeing shortly after my friend’s funeral. My meditation teacher taught me how to meditate, how to forgive without ever receiving an apology, how to be present and how to come to peace with certain situations in my life. The coping skills she taught me are the reason I forgave my friend and the guy who broke my heart, started talking to my dad again, bettered my relationship with my mother and transitioned smoothly into college.
Before I started meditation, I had unhealthy coping skills and resorted to outside resources, such as mind-altering substances, to calm me down instead of letting it come to myself. I recommend meditation to people I know, but I always get the response, “But I don’t know how.” People meditate in different ways — it’s just a matter of concentrating on your breathing. Then again, people say, “but I CAN’T meditate, like you don’t get it, it just doesn’t work for me. I think about too much stuff.”
That’s the point of meditation though! The more you meditate, the better you get at it. It’s like a muscle — the more you strengthen it, the stronger it becomes. When I meditate, I sit upright with my back straight and my hands facing up on my lap and do a breathing called “so hum” breathing. “So” is the highest sounding vibration and “hum” is the lowest. In my mind, I say “so” and inhale and expand my stomach, and exhale and say “hum” and release my stomach. I imagine myself inhaling all the divine energy and exhaling everything negative, detrimental and irrelevant.
Of course ideas, and scenarios, and faces and thoughts are going to pop into your head — that’s inevitable — but it’s a matter of practicing mindfulness. As soon as you notice any distractions in your mind, you focus back on your breathing. This skill of grounding yourself starts to spill over into your daily life. You’ll start noticing when you’re spacing out and bring yourself back to becoming present. Being present means not thinking about your past or worrying about your future; your attention is fully immersed in your present situation or task. You are being mindful of where you are, your current situation, who you are with and where your thoughts need to be.
When I have any kind of concern or question I’m thinking about, I write it down on a piece of paper and meditate on it, and as soon as I wake up I just write — without thinking about what I’m writing, I just let my hand go. It brings clarity, as I believe that most of the answers we have in regards to our own lives lie within. I believe that if everyone on this Earth meditated at least once a day, the world would be a better place. It’s a healthy coping skill and has completely helped me with any kind of anxiety or attention issues. It’s scientifically proven that meditation works for your mental health. Before you automatically assume that you can’t meditate, just try it for a week. Every day for seven days, meditate at least 10 minutes and see how you feel at the end of the week. I guarantee you will feel a sense of liberation.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Domna Dali at domna.dali@colorado.edu.
