Week 2 Meditation Challenge Check-in
If you’re here you’ve been following along on our 30 day meditation challenge! Today’s day 16 so that means you’ve been meditating for two weeks! That’s really awesome. We want to celebrate all your success so far with meditation! It doesn’t really matter whether or not you’ve been keeping up with it faithfully, what matters is that you’re trying. Today we’re going to chat briefly about why I think it’s important to meditate, yes it’s great for your health- we touched on that during the last check in, but there’s more to meditation than meets the mind.
It’s my belief that meditation is also a tool that can bring forth new ideas. So why do I say this, well let’s think about it. When we are meditating all we’re really doing is giving time for our brain to go on auto-pilot. Instead of forcing your brain to consume something all day long, mediation gives the space for your brain to be still, and think. During this moment of stillness (filled with waves of thoughts, because we know those thoughts come and go) is were I think ideas are born.
Really think about, when you’re meditating and what’s happening. You’re allowing your brain to just be and in being ideas have the space to pop up. In a small study done in China where they examined exactly what i’m saying, they found that when adding short term mediations into everyday practice, creativity increased and over all mood improved! (1) While this was a small study the results show the there’s some power in mediation. The power to birth creativity in the form of ideas, the power to find different ways to solve problems, the power to see new perspectives of things that happen in life … it’s magical!
If you never gave your brain that space these new ideas might not have popped up. They might not pop up becuase your brain would be occupied with things like sliding through the ‘gram, catching up on GOT (terrible episode btw), busy finishing up a project for work, juggling multiple tasks at home, cleaning, studying for finals, doing laundry, making your to do list, the list truly goes on.
All those things that you have to do in your day to day life can sometimes prevent your brain from being creative. We need creativity, to come up with solutions for things and to bring joy to our lives, so what happens when we don’t give our brain the space to be creative…idk, but what I do know is typically us, people of color, rarely give time for our creativity instead we live in the hustle and bustle of life, jumping from one task to the other and then from one show to another. So while this isn’t the only way to spark creativity, it’s definitely the “easiest”.
This is why I love mediation, it’s accessible to almost everyone and can be done for as little or as long as needed and it’s an easy and fun way to birth ideas. Who knows, maybe during your meditation you’ll come up with an idea for blog, an inspiration for a new poem, or even a name for your side hustle. You never know what you can come up with when you give yourself time to just be. So I challenge you, if you haven’t meditated today, take a few minutes now and allow yourself to be. No TV, no social media, no book, no music (unless that helps you) and just explore what’s in your mind, it could lead to your next big idea!
