My Road to Mindfulness
By Lauren Ziegler
When I first started meditating two years ago I would often repeat the mantra, "Heal my heart, heal my Crohn's" as my intention. I had just gotten out of a bad break-up and was newly diagnosed with Crohn's Disease, an autoimmune disease of the digestive tract. I was in both emotional and physical pain.
Adding to the mix, I was stressed out. As a career-minded young professional living in Washington, DC, a town of workaholics, I operated at a pretty fast and frenzied pace. Somehow I could always get things done, but this meant spending extra hours at the office and usually involved a lot of running: down hallways to get to meetings and out of work to get to social events, in a desperate attempt at work-life balance. (Certainly, my lifestyle impacted my health, but it wasn't so obvious to me at the time.)
Initially, I approached meditation in a utilitarian way: meditating will make me happier, healthier, and less stressed. While these things are currently true, the value of meditation has been learning to live in a more mindful way. Meditation does not automatically fix whatever thing you desire to change - it's much bigger and better than that.
One of the most important lessons I've learned is that we can't just get rid of stress; there is no switch to simply turn it off. I use the Headspace app to meditate, which defines stress as the gap between your reality and how you want things to be. This definition was eye opening: I was always wanting things to be different! Before meditating was a part of my life, I would swear to myself that if I could just make it through this week, things will settle down, or I'd wish that if I could only stop time for one weekend, I could catch up. Thankfully, through meditation, I've learned to embrace my present situation and not the fantasy of "If only..."
While we can't turn off stress, we can acknowledge how we are feeling through a technique Headspace describes as noting. When I have fifteen things on my to do list and an urgent request comes in, I no longer snowball my thoughts into, "Ah I'm stressed and I wish I wasn't and I wish I had more time." Instead, I note the feeling, even with a bit of curiosity: "Oh, I'm feeling knots in my stomach, I'm becoming stressed." And then the most important thing I do for myself is to keep living in the present moment. The real magic lies in that over time as we notice stress, we get less stressed out about being stressed. Equally important, we can begin to make changes that are within our control. For me, this included acupuncture sessions, carving out time to cook healthy meals, and learning to say no to the unnecessary.
I couldn't be more grateful to my past self for taking the meditation plunge. It has changed how I think about and approach life in unimaginable ways, and, as a plus, my heart and health are in a much better place. There are still moments when I experience stress, including the occasional "stress snowball", but when this occurs, I note the feeling and pick back up with whatever it is I'm doing in the present moment.
