We need meditation
I’m about to say some thing that took me years to understand and believe. So I could understand if you may not immediately connect with a statement. But I’m gonna say it. It’s so important that at least sharing the idea and allowing you to ponder on it it’s a good start.
We need love to feel happy.
You might be thinking that’s obvious. But the next statement is going to define what that really means to us, what is love and how do we want to receive it?
Love is attention.
I think that word attention gets a bad rap especially in today’s world attention is associated with social media celebrities who need followers to be successful.
That’s unfortunate because we may take away from that idea that we shouldn’t want attention.
This is a good time to clarify what we mean by attention.
The depth of the love correlates to the depth of the attention.
The strongest sense of love is when we are given caring, unconditional, continuous, nonjudgmental attention.
I think in this statement, we can see how social media attention is not this at all. It’s conditional, constantly switching back-and-forth between apps, and pretty judgemental.
When we seek Love, which can be defined as this type of attention, we want to feel listened to, heard, & seen with openness and care.
This is when it’s might start to sound surprising…
- Although it is important that we do get this from our loved ones, We can and need to give ourselves this type of love and attention on a daily basis. As Doctor Who said, this is the only way.
- We must give our physical body our full attention on a regular basis to feel more peace & fullness. This means our legs, arms, torso and especially all the beautiful organs that keep us alive. These organs and this body IS US. And our body and organs carry so much emotions.
- This process of brining our full attention to our breath and our body is meditation.
We Need Movement (exercise)
Movement helps us on a physical, emotional and spiritual level.
Physical Health
For physical health it improves our brain health, improves gut health, improves our bone density, keeps our muscles strong and limber, circulated oxygen in the body, and the one we all know helps us stay within a healthy weight.
Emotional Health
Emotionally Movement increases our happy endorphins. We feel happy after we exercise.
When we move we feel empowered. This empowerment translates to feeling more confident.
Energy. From my observation of happiness, the correlator to feeling good is feeling like we have energy. Exercise ir
Spiritual Health
Going back to what we were talking about before, that our body needs love in the form of attention, There’s nothing like movement to make us pay attention to our body.
Brining exercise & meditation together?
There are so many years where I struggled with forming a meditation practice. And to this day there are times when I find it hard to find my breath and to pay attention to my body.
Exercise increases our breath, and increases the movement happening in our body. In addition it focuses us to focus on what I’m doing which is my body’s movement. All these things help us do what we want to do in our meditative practice, which is connect with our body and our breath.
From my experience I’ve seen myself have such a deeper meditation practice because of exercise. And have such a better exercise experience because of meditation.
Although I’ve always loved exercise, it still scared me at times. What scared me is when I felt disconnected from my body because an inner voice would try to motivate me to exercise harder or more “for my own good.”
And when I think about how hard it is for other for myself to meditate, I imagine that it must be hard for others. My hope is that the gift that meditation has given me can be shared with more people through exercise meditation.