Taking time to work on our minds, and our states of being is important. Our “mental game’ is important in pursuing success. This preparation and mental maintenance can take many forms. A practice that is used by many people is meditation. It has been used with great success for centuries to help people manage and develop their minds. I have discovered it and been using it myself from time to time in my life. I am grateful that it is easy to do, and that it can come in many forms.
Most of my true meditation has come from using the Calm app. I mostly just follow the guided mediations they offer for free there. I started out doing it fairly frequently. It seemed to help me with some things. It helped me better manage my own thoughts better. By better managing my thoughts I was able to help get over some rage that was bubbling under the surface a lot of the time. I am much more calm after having done some of this meditation. These qualities have seem to maintain themselves even though I don’t meditate often anymore. Even though I don’t sit down and meditate often I still do things that have meditative qualities to them.
Many things seem to have some meditative like qualities and benefits to them. Going for long walks clears the mind and does some of the same things for me. Working out hard does the same thing, you must be very focused to lift a heady weight or you could become very injured. That is very much like a focused meditation in my opinion. Even things like cooking and chess can give me something resembling a meditative boost. It is cool that I can get that kind of meditative “bump” from lots of places.
This bump is what I want from my meditation sessions. I just want things to be a little better. I want to think a bit clearer and have a bit more energy, that is about all I want from this practice. I am happy I can get this bump in a lot of ways. A guru might tell you something different, but if something works, and it helps, well I’m going to keep doing it.