January always gets talked about as a fresh start, but for me it usually feels more like a restarting. Or maybe a remembering.
I have been restarting my meditation habit. That is probably obvious, given that this clinic is called Mindful Wellness and that stress sits among the four pillars we build everything on.
Meditation has played a big role in my life for a long time. I first started exploring it during a very difficult period in medical school, after reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.
Around that time I started going to a meditation class in the Lower East Side. When I later moved to Los Angeles I continued, eventually taking an MBSR course and later becoming certified in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
At this point in my life I work with a meditation teacher, and for the most part I have maintained a regular practice. But not perfectly.
What happens when you stop and cannot start again?
You wait for a feeling that does not arrive. Over the last month or two I found it hard to get up and meditate in the morning, and honestly even to work out. What I eventually noticed was that I was waiting for something inside me, a signal that said: okay, now you should do it.
I kept waiting. And nothing came.
Maybe it was stress, maybe business, maybe just an increased mental load.
So how did you start again?
Not the way the story would usually go. The motivation never arrived. Meditation is not really about waiting for the right feeling, it is the practice of seeing our experience more clearly, and what I started to notice instead was the waiting itself, and the spaciousness around it.
So I made a very simple decision: to meditate in the morning again, regardless of whether I felt like it.
Why does meditation help with any of this?
Because it lets us see the reactivity of our own mind, and our mind loves to be reactive. It loves to wake up and reach for the phone, get the dopamine signals, drink the coffee, and start the rituals of checking email and messages.
Meditation and mindfulness let us sit with all of these neural programs. It is the practice of just being with them, our reactions to them, the body sensations that come with them, all of it.
It has only been a few days back, but I already feel the difference. More spaciousness. More clarity.
Still far from perfect, still very much living a reactive life, but a little less so today than yesterday.
