When I started meditating, it was out of sheer desperation. I was burning in a forest fire of stress. While drinking worked pretty well to shut it down at night, that didn’t offer practical solutions for what to do with the other hours of the day. Finally, out of care and concern, my kind manager bought our team access to a meditation program. I didn’t see how this would possibly help, but I was fresh out of other ideas, so I tried it. I was beyond skeptical – resentful even, but my stress had turned into a performance issue at work. I figured it couldn’t hurt, and meditation was literally the only strategy anyone had offered me.
3 years later, meditation has done nothing less than change my life. My relationship to my thoughts is transformed. Instead of being pulled around by negativity and stress, I’m better at recognizing thoughts as weather that comes and goes (still evolving, but better). Calm and stress meditation is how it started for me.
And now I’ll share with you the most soothing song in the world:
The soothing rhythm, the gentle spirit of generosity in the message – when I was too stressed to even focus on breathing, I would put this song on and think about giving it all away instead of trying to hold on. I trained myself to have a Pavlovian response to this song. I put on this song to calm down so often, that every time I hear the opening notes, my blood pressure immediately drops and my breathing slows automatically. Just hearing it helps me be calm, no matter how wound up I am.