I am currently reading Pema Chodron’s book “The places that scare you” and I feel like I’m finally ‘getting’ meditation. I have really struggled with meditation over the years. I have started and stopped many times. I’ve had motivation to do it because I know it would be good for me but I have found it so hard to get through the resistance when my thoughts and emotions have overwhelmed me, when I have sat. What is really sinking in now is that ‘doing meditation’ isn’t the point. It is facing yourself and sitting with where you are and what you are feeling and not running away from yourself, no matter how much you might want to. This is exactly why I have been finding it so hard to meditate. Feeling my emotions is very scary. I know I am not alone in this. There are feelings I bury because the fear is so strong that I can’t handle it. It’s too much. Having a tendency to go into fight or flight response/adrenal stress a lot makes it even harder.

Life has its way of challenging us, though and I have been going through enormous change in my life in the last few years. which is pushing me to go to those places that scare me. Doing Reiki I in recent months has helped me enormously in working through many issues and the support I feel through it is grounding and nurturing, even if at times it feels like it’s a lot to handle at once.  This is very much a work in progress and I understand now that I will probably never ‘finish’ healing in this life. I am gradually *baby steps*feeling more ok with facing my own vulnerability, my rage, my frustrations, my grief and my fears. I still feel like running away a lot of the time and it’s so easy to find distractions in the modern world that can help us to escape from reality for a while.

My son is like a mirror to my emotional state and parenting him forces me to deal with my own shit, to put it bluntly. The more I am self caring, the more present I am with him and when I am feeling overwhelmed being present with him is so challenging as he triggers my emotions by being a toddler who is only just beginning to learn about the world, what emotions are and how to express them. There is not much quiet time to sit and meditate, but being with a child certainly encourages mindfulness practice throughout the day, especially when those meltdowns happen. As any parent knows, it’s not just children that have meltdowns!

So, I’m going to be kinder to myself with regards to meditation and remember that it is about checking in with myself and being open to what is and not being achiever orientated about it, like it’s something I ‘should do’ to accomplish some kind of goal, imagining that I will be transformed eventually into some kind of enlightened being that has everything all sussed out!