In this blog post we are exploring the idea around who exactly is RESPONSIBLE for our health and why do we struggle to do things that have been scientifically proven to help us?
Practices like Meditation – this has never exactly been my favourite pastime…(my brain is overrun with ADHD elves) but I know it’s exactly the medicine I need right now and yet my resistance is strong!
So why on earth am I challenging myself to do it every day throughout August? Keep reading to find out!
Saying bye to the crocodile
Following on from the last blog, where I shared my story about wrestling the stress crocodiles (metaphorically speaking!), it turns out many of you are out there wrestling your own deadly species too, often without even realising it.
This has clearly been a well-timed message, which I hope has led to a pause in all wrestling activity, allowing you time to reflect on the stresses in your life and decide whether getting caught up in the damaging battle against things we often cannot control is really worth all the effort.
Anyone else find meditation hard too?
Whilst my house buying stress has changed a little since I last wrote, it’s still there. My vendors took pity on me and gave me the keys before the sale had even been agreed, so I’m living here as a guest (very kind people!). I’ve personally been trying to support myself better, knowing that the only thing I really have any control over is my own thoughts and responses. I’ve decided that it’s about time I gave meditation a real try, I have skirted around the edges of this kind of practice for my entire life because, dear friend, I find it TOO HARD!
I’m not a natural meditator. My ADHD brain is off with the elves within seconds, which is why yoga has always been my natural home when it comes to relaxation. Basically, because I’m allowed to physically move!
But recently I’ve been so burnt out that I’ve actually needed stillness, and meditation has become much more of a support. I’ve found that if I put on some spacey, healing binaural beats (Spotify has plenty!), my brain seems to love focusing on the music, and it gradually begins to quieten down. I’m already feeling the benefit.
Meditation has had so much peer reviewed research published on the health benefits that we could fill a book with papers, but still I’d hazard a guess that most of us struggle with something so simple, citing, like me, ‘it’s too hard’ or ‘I’m too busy’. Making the choice to do this daily still feels like an effort, so I’m setting myself, and the community, a challenge to do some form of meditation every day throughout August. Read on to find out more about our quest!
Why isn’t good health motivation enough?
The thing that made me chuckle when I mentioned it to the team was this: we all loved the idea of a meditation challenge and explored how it could work, and then someone asked, “What will their reward be if they complete the challenge?” It struck me that our own improved health sometimes isn’t motivation enough – we seem to need more than that.
I ‘joked’ that we should give everyone £1,000 who completes the challenge, but it made me realise that this sense of needing motivation or reward to continue looking after ourselves – to make extra effort purely for our own wellbeing – seems to be something many of us find quite hard, and not something we, our culture or our society has ever really taught us was important.
This got me thinking…
What if the reward was better sleep, a calmer mind, fewer flare-ups of symptoms, a happier immune system, more laughter, or better digestion? Is that enough of a reward to see a daily challenge through to the end? Well, I’m keen to find out because the truth is we can’t financially reward people for looking after themselves. But I do wonder if our healthcare system were completely reversed, and people were paid to stay well by doing all the right things to help maintain their health, what a different state we would be in.
In the UK, our healthcare system spends millions of pounds on stress and lifestyle-related illness, much of which, with the right help and support, could be reversed.
A little experiment for August
So… I’m going to give it a go.
Every day throughout August. One short (or longer) meditation or Yoga Nidra. That’s my goal, and I’d love your support – let’s do this together?
We’ll report back together during a live group discussion on 1st September to see what we noticed along the way.
Our on-demand library (alongside our live timetable) is full of wonderful meditations from Annie McAuley and Richard Husseiny, and I’m allowing Yoga Nidra into the challenge too – what’s great about our library is there are no adverts, you can ‘favourite’ sessions making it easy to find a practice you love and there are thousands of classes to choose from.
Choose something each day. It doesn’t have to be the whole practice…even five or ten minutes is enough if that’s all you have. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about starting, staying curious, and seeing what happens over time.
Who’s going to join me?
At the start of the month I want you to make a note of how you feel/are experiencing the following categories:
Quality of sleep
Stress levels
Digestion
Presence of chronic symptoms
Ability to notice joy
Sense of being grounded
And general mental health.
We can assess again at the end.
Sign up below to take part (it’s completely free and open to anyone remotely interested) and let’s see if we can make a bit of difference to our own physical and mental health. Difficult things are often made much easier by sharing them with a community of others. So who is joining me?