If you’ve struggled to consistently meditate, you’re not alone, and I hope today’s practice can inspire you! This is a five(ish) minute practice where we’ll notice external and internal sensations of the body. It is the first of a series of five minute meditations that’ll be coming your way.
Here’s the full why behind this practice…
When I started meditating in 2015, I desperately wanted to be the person who sat perfectly still for 30+ minutes daily. I wanted to find calm, stillness, and a break from my inner monologue. A picture of ease, walking through life gracefully self-aware.
I thought if I could sit in lotus long enough, this would all happen.
What I quickly realized is 30 minutes felt like an eternity, I can’t sit in lotus pose at all, and the mind doesn’t simply go quiet. And so I became discouraged, telling myself that maybe I wasn’t cut out for meditation. I was stuck on the surface level.
But, I kept coming back because of the glimpses I caught.
Glimpses of calm, glimpses of stillness. Happening here and there throughout different meditations. I found myself feeling more aware, more present, even if just for a second, there was a sense of growing ease with my thoughts. Slowly, still not in lotus pose, I started to see a path towards mindfulness opening up.
The truth is, at the start of my journey, I didn’t want to do the deeper work that meditation (or all of yoga) offer a doorway into.
In 2017, I was regularly talking myself out of meditating most days. I pursued what I thought were advanced postures and pushing my body to it’s physical limits. And while I’m grateful for asana being my introduction to yoga, on its own I didn’t get the same glimpses. I knew there was something missing in my daily practices and so I started to come back to meditation, but I found it hard to be consistent.
Then in 2019, I committed to five minutes a day for 90 days.
It was the 90 days before I would graduate from my 200HR YTT, and I felt a little untethered. Yoga was opening so many doors, and I was finally starting down my own path towards healing. There was internal resistance though, a fear of change and not truly wanting to let go. So my commitment to meditation for 90 days, was a commitment to cultivate more mindfulness and clarity.
I started at five minutes because I knew I couldn’t argue myself out of it.
There was always five minutes in the day to sit and pause.
Five minutes didn’t require a fancy seat, dedicated room, or altering my schedule.
And I could go on and on about all the lessons those 90 days taught me, but here’s the core: that I could show up for myself, rooted in compassion.
By releasing the pressure for meditation to look a certain way, balanced with some accountability, I planted the seeds for my practice to grow.
Those seeds are the inspiration for this five minute practice. I want this to be something that feels approachable no matter where you are in your own path. I’ll be creating more meditations in this series, so if there’s something you’d loved to see, let me know in the comments (or by replying to this email if you’re in your inbox).
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