OtherThanThat

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Last spring a friend of mine suggested that we do a 21-day meditation challenge being presented by Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra. You sign up online, and each morning you get an email with a link to a guided meditation. I had just moved to Las Vegas, was embarking on an entirely new adventure so the idea of a daily meditation practice seemed a good one.

It was.

So much so that when a second meditation challenge came around in the summertime, I signed up again.

This time around, I’ve decided that I’m going to leverage this experience in a more public fashion. I posted to my Facebook and Twitter posse and quite a few folks noted that they’re going to try it as well. I wanted, however, to take that group engagement a bit further and talk openly about the experience and encourage others to do the same.

Thus this post.

Whether you comment on Facebook, Twitter or here is no matter, but if you have opted to engage in this 21-day journey, I’m hoping that you will be open to nudging that engagement just a bit further by sharing how it is (or isn’t) working (or not) for you. What challenges are you facing? Is it hard to be consistent? Any epiphanies? Bring it on folks…

With that, here’s what happened for me this morning:

Today’s start of the 21-day program opened with this question: “Who am I?” It’s such a crucial one on all levels. It speaks to the very essence of our lives and experience on this planet. Complementing this question was the meditation’s centering thought: “I am my deepest desire” …

To me this then begged the question: What IS my deepest desire? Who do I see myself to be? The message that came to me during the meditation was an interesting one. The word that floated into my mind was, gentle. I then came to think about the way in which I’ve seized this new path, with fervor and ferocity. There have been some real moments of challenge, and this morning it became abundantly clear that those challenges came in those moments where the ferocity became the leading energy rather than focusing the lead on gentle compassion. When I step back from pushing and instead muse on the next right step to take, the energy flows with even more power and strength.