Heavily Meditated
Sunday, August 16th, 2015
Coming to you live from my new home in Lawrence! I am beyond happy to finally be here and (mostly) moved into this huge, beautiful house with seven of my best friends. What even is this life?
In my hometown, where I stayed for most of the summer, I was suffering massive writer’s block, lack of inspiration, and frankly motivation. Now that I’m back in my true hometown for the year, these waves of inspiration have just been hitting me in the face. This wondrous shirt from Qtee accurately portrays how I’m feeling right now as I attempt to ride out this life high for as long as I can. Seriously, thanks, Qtee I’m obsessed with customizing your shirts to my liking. YOU GUYS, they have shirts on all my favorite topics — cats, pizza, coffee, yoga, travel, mermaids, you name it. I literally customized 3958743920 shirts before I came to the final decision of this one. I love how all the prints come on nearly every shirt shape, color, and how fun it is to customize the colors. So entertaining. Ultimately, I picked this relaxed slouchy style in my favorite color scheme because that’s who I am as a human being.
Anyways, I’d really like this new time in my life to be cleansing to my being and spirituality in every way. I want to raise my frequency with each step I take, and I thought I’d share with you the little ways I’m going to stay focused, together, motivated, and most importantly, happy this year.
First of all, I’m going to meditate everyday. It always seems so easy to devote ten minutes of your life to doing absolutely nothing, but it’s not. I always start off strong, and then one day it’s a, “I’m too tired today, I’ll make up for it tomorrow” kind of thing, and then the next day I’m too busy, and my routine falls apart slowly, until I become my formal spiritually frazzled self. As horrifying as routine is to me, it’s vital to my mental survival. So I’m going to meditate once when I wake up for ten minutes, and once before I go to sleep for ten minutes. Is two times a day really necessary? Probably not for most people, but this is what I know in terms of ridding myself of my own personal daily anxieties.
I know to most of you, meditation sounds cliché, cheesy, and/or useless. It’s not. I like to think of meditation as a prayer to myself. Whatever religion you hold, and whatever god you believe in, of course I support your prayers and rituals, but sometimes we forget to simply be. Sitting and existing exclusively by myself, doesn’t only decrease my long term anxieties and betters me as a human, but it humbles me and is a daily reminder that I, my consciousness, exist and that, is an amazing, divine thing to begin with. I am operating the most complex thing I know: the human brain, and sometimes I have to remember that sitting on a floor and just breathing is a miraculous thing in itself.
I’m also going to journal every dream that I remember right when I wake up.
I love dreams. I love manipulating my sleeping subconscious, I love lucid dreams, I am intrigued by the connection of REM to memory, and I am fascinated by what my dreaming mind mean to my awake life. I’ve always thought dreams were important — from the age I was able to communicate them. The older I became, the more I realized that writing down and remembering my dreams, causes to to dream, or at least remember my dreams better, making them more vivid, and easily manipulated. I couldn’t pinpoint and tell you why I think this is such an important thing for me, but it is. Yes, of course I still have nonsensical dreams about attending Paris Hilton’s party while her mom threatens to kill us all unless I sell Paris’s new line of shoes to everyone, but that’s the beauty of it all — the chaos and unpredictability. I’m going through a journey and so is my sleeping mind.
Does anyone else remember that really long period of time in my life where I only consumed raw foods mostly in smoothie form? That was the height of my mental awareness. Eating raw, simple food, in turn makes me feel more pure, and less chaotic and processed. You are what you eat, and I’m only eating smoothies for breakfast. Everyday. Easy peasy.
Also, WATER. My favorite liquid ever is coffee, and it is so easy for me to forget to drink water, it’s ridiculous, but I definitely feel noticeably better from the inside-out when I’m drinking the required amount for my body and beyond.
In the first psychology class I ever took, on Valentine’s Day, my professor was talking about social psychology and the basics of it; one thing really stuck with me. The five people we spend the most time with? We become like them — developing similar demeanor as well as mentalities. It terrified me. That was the year I started cutting people out of my life who weren’t vibrating at same frequency as me — the ones who only created static. Since then, I’ve made it a priority to stay mindful of those I’m sharing my energy with. This year is no different… maybe even a bit more harsh. This year, for me, is definitely about surrounding myself with inspiring, positive people. Starting with my roommates, and ending with my friends and potential love interests. In order to grow, we have to leave certain things behind, and as scary as it is to let go, even scarier is plateauing.
Also, you know that weird voice inside your head that kind of narrates your life almost? Okay, maybe nobody knows what I’m talking about and I’m just completely crazy, but when I’m reading a massive novel that I’ve really invested myself in, the voice of the book will almost start to seep into my subconscious and affect the way that voice sees things and reacts to them. That being said, I do read a lot of lighthearted, enlightening literature, but I’ve also been known to enjoy all of the Stephen King books in the land, as well as accidentally binge read the entire 50 Shades of Grey trilogy. You can only imagine how this reading material affects that voice in my head… so I’ve kind of made a goal to read some good-for-my-soul-bettering-myself literature more often; however, I’m not replacing my favorite Stephen King novels — just adding to my reading palette.
Yoga and stretching are also important to me physically as well as mentally. When I get out of my stretching for at least fifteen minutes a day everyday, and getting through at least one yoga session a day, I falter. I have rheumatoid arthritis, which doesn’t help the fact, but keeping that routine in there gives me a sort of physical clarity as compared to my sore, stiff, old person feelings when I stray from my mat for too long.
Oh my gosh, I’ve covered dreams, but have I even mentioned sleep yet?! This is so important, to me specifically, because of how much I suffer from insomnia. From sixth grade I have been this awful creature of the night who could not sleep for the life of me. Meditation helps with this for me immensely, and I’m prescribed a number of scary medicines as well, but seriously, I am trying so incredibly hard to develop a healthy sleep pattern that involves more than five hours of sleep a night. It’s awful how noticeably sleep affects my life.
I will sleep seven hours a night.
I will have a routine.
Last, but not least in the slightest, I will write daily. Whether it’s through the use of writing prompts, deadlines, or simply journaling about my strange daily life, I will write. As writers, it’s hard to start writing. Picking up a pen and putting it to paper is vulnerability, because once you do that simple task, you face all your demons. Will I fail? Is this going to be better than my last piece or worse? Probably worse, right? Is anybody going to like this? Is anybody going to even read it? Will my clients be happy? Why am I getting paid to do this? How did I ever get paid for this? Why do I suck? Why did I choose this path? Who encouraged this?
But the feeling at the end, when you’ve finished a piece, and might even be proud of it, it’s all worth it for that deep breath you feel like you finally deserve to take.
So yeah, that’s how I’m holding onto my sanity this year. I am in no way telling you this is what is absolutely right, or what you should be doing daily too. Basically this is just a list of things I want to improve on, and if you want to improve on these topics as well, cool, tell me. Let’s have a conversation. What do you do to keep your own sanity?
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Wondering & Wandering