Ep #58: My Meditation Celebration

Welcome to the Co-Parenting with Confidence Podcast. I'm your host Mikki Gardner, and this is episode number 58, My Meditation Celebration. [music] Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name is Mikki Gardner, I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother and I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well, get ready and let's dive into today's episode. Welcome friend, I'm excited to be here with you today and we are going to celebrate all things meditation. Why? Well, because it's something that I do every day. It's something that I find a ton of value and benefits from and I wanna talk with you about it. So what I ask you to do is just keep an open mind. Maybe you've meditated. Maybe you've never even thought about it. Maybe you're like, what is that? Wherever you're at on the journey, I just want you to listen to this with an open mind. And if it resonates if you feel called to do it, if you feel like hmm, that's interesting, just follow whatever feels good for you. So recently I was sitting with a friend who was going through a really hard time after an accident. And I just went through something very similar in January. And one of the things that I walked away from that time of recovery and surgery and time after the surgery and all of it, was how grateful I was for my meditation practice. You'll understand more after we go through this episode. So when she said to me, "Mikki, I just want to feel better." She was feeling so depressed, so low. And so my first question is the question I always ask when someone says I wanna feel better, right? Or I'm stressed out or I'm overwhelmed, I ask, are you meditating? And she gave me the eye roll, which is the response I get 99% of the time, right? And the response that I used to get the, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's really good for you and I should do it, but... " Right? So we talked a little bit and she said to me, "You made a lot of sense here. I know that it's what I need to do. Can you just come and remind me every morning?" [chuckle] Right? It would be so easy if someone would just come and remind us every morning. But friends, what I need... What I wanted to tell you is that sometimes we have to do that for ourselves. Right? The growth, the learning, the going through the uncomfortable. It's actually a solo journey. As much as we want someone to come along and do it for us, right? And there's a lot of times that we need help and support. But the day to day practice, the actual feet on the pavement, that's solo work. That's what I was reminding her of. So let's take a couple steps back here, right? Because I kind of just jumped in there. So I wanna go back a few years, right? All of my life I have been a people pleaser, I have been an achiever, right? Doing more, getting more, having the bigger job, all of the things, right? All of this was tied up in my identity, trying to understand who I was. And was I good enough? Was I loved? Was I worthy? These were the questions that I didn't know I was asking but I was always asking. And that was throughout my life. Then I come into relationships as an adult, right? And I get challenged, I become a mom, oh and I get challenged, right? My son triggers me and I would yell. I would swear to myself I wasn't going to lose my temper, right? And before breakfast had even hit the table I was yelling. And I just couldn't figure out why I couldn't keep it together. I was always trying to do more and more and more just to be worthy, just to be seen as enough. Just to get the love and attention that I was seeking. Then I went through divorce. And that whole experience shattered me, right? And it left me feeling very untethered. Conflict was always something in my life that I was frankly terrified of. Right? That's where the people pleasing came in. Always trying to do and figure out and manipulate so that I didn't have to get into conflict, right? If I could just change myself or other people we could avoid all of that uncomfortableness. And I also always had this feeling that I was missing something. Shouldn't there be more? Is this all there is? Why does it feel so empty? And so I would try to fill it up. I would try to multitask. I'd try to do all the things but all I ended up was fragmented and constantly trying to clean up the pieces. So I had found meditation I think the first time through yoga while my marriage was ending. And I came to yoga with a friend reluctantly one day. She had been staying with me during a very, very difficult time. And she said, "You know what? I really need to go to yoga, I'll be back in two hours." And I said, "Okay, I'll be okay, I'll be okay." [chuckle] She walked out the door and I'm like, "Can I go with you?" Could not be alone. So I went to yoga, and I'm still doing the same practice today. And it has been a lifesaver. But through that it opened up some doors and an introduction was made into meditation. And since then I started and stopped to practice a million times. And then I would find myself at the bottom of the barrel. At a point of feeling shattered trying to pick up the pieces yet again. And I would go back to meditation. But it was like that, it was on off, on off. But a couple of years ago, actually two years ago this week during the pandemic, and that really divisive election and all the things that were going on, I felt like I was just a balloon lost in the sky getting blown around. And I was just making decisions on a whim. And I was showing up in a very disconnected way and I was feeling awful. So I just made a decision, right? Through the pandemic, through everything we were learning, I just decided I'm gonna commit to meditating every day, for 30 days, that's it. I didn't really have any grand plan beyond that, I was just decided, what could it hurt? What if I just tried? So 30 days turned into 60 days which turned into 90, and 120. And then 360 and then a year and a half. And two years ago this week marks two years of consecutive meditation every single morning. And that also included my surgery morning. So those subsequent mornings I might have had some pain killers, so it might have not been the most amazing meditation but I still showed up sitting in my hospital bed. The morning of meditation I remember getting up at 4:00 in the morning to get a meditation in before I went to the hospital. And then I meditated each day there too. Because it had become habitual for me. It had become something that I rely on. Something that I lean on for comfort, for safety. And so even in those moments, even those days when I totally could have given myself a free pass I still did it. And so I really just wanna celebrate, right? 'Cause I didn't think I could do two consecutive years. And trust me, my brain's all over the place. If I can do it, anybody can do it. And what I wanna do is talk about what is meditation, how does it benefit us, what are the effects and what I've seen in my own life. I just wanna offer you my perspective so that you can decide if this is something that maybe would help you. So whenever I am first starting out to look at something or research, what do we do? We ask the Googles. So the definition is meditation is a noun. The action or practice of meditating. Okay, so what does that mean? I found a couple definitions that resonated. One was from Mindworks and it said that meditation as a spiritual practice is more about working with the mind and training in awareness. Okay, that one didn't help me. So now we go on to another one from Everydayhealth.com. Meditation is the practice of focusing one's mind for a period of time noticing but not engaging with thoughts. Okay, we're getting closer I thought. And then I found a quote that I really love, that I've always loved. It's by the Buddha. He said, the mind is everything. What you think, you become. And this one really stood out to me because this is why we meditate. So the basic concept of meditation is that it's a practice that connects our mind and our body. If what we are thinking we become which is true, that is how it works, we have to be aware of those thoughts, so that we can then be intentional. So meditation is really this practice of connecting our mind and our body. Because most of the time we just live in our minds and we think that is us, right? So really we want to get into our body with the purpose to help increase both our physical and mental peace and calm. The power of meditation is that it lets you become more aware and more purposeful in your actions. And who doesn't want that? Right? Meditation is something that we do because it actually impacts us in such a positive way. And they have found there's again so much research, so so much research that they're finding now. But only 8 weeks of daily meditation can decrease negative mood and anxiety and improve attention, working memory, and recognition memory. This is huge. It really is about the more we meditate, the more we impact our brain in a positive way. We increase our mood, we decrease anxiety. We become able to be more focused. More purposeful. More aware and more powerful than we ever could be without it. So that's just a tiny bit of what I found online. But what I wanted to talk about is what I've noticed in my own life over these 2 years of consecutive meditation. And again the science is showing us that again in only 8 weeks you can see benefits but that doesn't have to be 2 hours a day. If you meditate for at least 10 minutes a day, 10 minutes, that's it, you are receiving these benefits when you do it over time. So what is meditation? A lot of people... There's a lot of different ways that people think about it. There's a lot of different types of meditation. Everyone thinks about it in a different way. I was trained in Vedic and then TM, that's transcendental meditation. I also use apps that have been really helpful for me in tracking, keeping me on target, offering me guided meditations, sometimes I'll do semi-guided, some I do on my own just in silence. Really meditation to me is a very fluid practice. Sometimes I need something different than I need another day but it starts with understanding the fundamentals. And one of the best apps that I know of to do this is, Headspace. I love Headspace. [chuckle] Andy, I should know his full name. But Andy from Headspace, he's a former monk who started this and wanted to bring meditation to everybody. He has a great voice, I find it so calming and I go back to those all of the time. I've done many many many of the lessons that they have. So I'm gonna put in the show notes all the different links to the places that I reference so that you can try them if you want to. But I really do love Headspace. And my son uses Headspace too. They have great resources for kids. And here's the benefits, moms. When we want our kids to be calm, cool, and collected they will learn this watching us do it. When we are doing that, they are able to do it. Right? So meditating helps everyone in the family and I'm gonna go through those benefits, but I digress. So what is meditation? For me, the biggest way that I understand meditation is sitting in silence to be aware of our thoughts. Why? Well, because we have thoughts... We have over 85,000 thoughts a day, I think there's probably more now that the science is proving. But when we may have that many thoughts we cannot possibly be aware of them. So we're like a goldfish swimming around in water and the thoughts are the water. We aren't even aware of them. Someone taps on the bowl and says, "Hey, how's the water today?" You'd be like, "What water? I don't know what you're talking about." Right, we're just totally unaware of them. So meditation offers us a practice and a place to sit and witness them. I always tell clients because they think that the idea is to have an absence of thought. Well, no, that's not really true, right? Because A, I don't know anybody that can quiet their minds and not have a thought, because that's just the way the brain works. What it's about is learning how to watch them. And here's the key. Because if you're able to see your thoughts outside of you, and you watch them go by... One of the analogies in Headspace that I loved is it's like sitting on the side of the road and watching the thoughts go by. Sometimes it's like a really slow move across, like wagons slowly moving across the planes. Sometimes it's like the autobahn with them going really, really fast. But here's the good news, your thoughts are not you. How do we know? Because you are the one witnessing them. So the idea of meditation is to create a point of awareness, a perspective where you can see your thoughts outside of you, where you can watch them, where you can witness them. And every time when you're sitting in silence with your eyes closed and you get lost in thought, you sort of sit there and you, oh, there I went with thoughts. And you brought yourself back. You realized that you were lost in thought, you just successfully meditated. So good job. [chuckle] Sometimes I will find that I'm successfully meditating 15 times in one minute. I just get lost in thought, lost in thought, lost in thought. When those thoughts are going really, really fast, but that's okay. Every time I find myself lost in thought, it gives me the opportunity to bring myself back to the breath, back to the calm and become the watcher, become the witnesser of the thoughts because I am not my thoughts. I am not all of those thoughts that tell me how awful I am, how I'm not doing enough, how everyone's against me. Any of those things. Those are just thoughts. And the more that I can create space between me and them, the more opportunity I have to respond versus react. And this is the big one, this is one of the biggest benefits that I have received form meditation is the space. The space between me and my thoughts. The space between me and the world around me. The space between all of it. It's like I have my own little personal bubble. The more I meditate, the bigger that bubble gets and the stronger I am. Right? I'm safe within that bubble because everything is happening outside of me and I have a choice. Right? When that bubble gets sort of very close or it dissolves or is gone I'm in a reactive state. Right, I think I have react to everything, I'm yelling, I'm in conflict, whatever it is, right? I'm sort of reacting in pinball mode. So what meditation allows is more space. When I sit for those 20 minutes every morning I'm creating and starting my day, creating space. Reminding my nervous system, reminding my brain, reminding me, not my thoughts, me, the divine part of me that I am there and I am safe. And that I can watch everything go by and choose how I want to show up. Choose how I wanna be in the world. So I wanna tell you about a little story that I experienced where this really, really came full circle for me. It was maybe about almost a year, not quite a year in. That space isn't overnight, I should say. 30 days after starting to meditate, I don't know that I noticed anything. 60 days, I felt a little bit calmer. A few months in, people started commenting on me, on my demeanor, on how I was showing up differently, how I seemed happier, how I seemed less stressed out. And then the summer rolled around, so I was probably a good 8 or 9 months in. And I had an incident with a family member where I got really triggered. And I won't go into the details because it's not important. But I found myself reacting, in reaction mode. And in that moment, I became really aware of me reacting. And then... So I had that awareness, right? That space started to build, even though I was reacting. I was having this other moment, where I could see myself from the outside. Then I became very, very aware of my leg because this person was right up in my face. And it was very confrontational. And I noticed my legs started to shake really, really hard, to the point that I remember thinking I would fall down. And the only thing I could think of in that moment was ground your leg. Ground yourself, stand tall. And I become solely focused on grounding my leg. And that shake went away. I grounded myself, and I kind of opened my eyes, and I saw it from a different perspective. And in that moment, I stepped back. And I changed the dynamic. I no longer was reactive, I became responsive. I chose how I was gonna show up and what the next steps were for me. That person didn't change. Nothing about the situation changed, I changed my part of it. And that's honestly what meditation gives us over the long term. It gives us the ability to respond to life in a different way. Because the fact of the matter is our life is always gonna go up and down. That's just the way that the world is, right? There's highs, there's lows. But what you do when you have that meditation and you have that practice, your perception changes so that your perception doesn't go up and down. We're no longer sort of following the big ups and the big downs, and all of the chaos and the drama. We have more stability, more calmness, more groundedness. And this doesn't mean that bad stuff doesn't happen. And it doesn't mean that you don't get really upset when it does. Absolutely you do, but by meditating more and more and more your perception changes so that you can always bring yourself back to calm and to peace quicker. And then you can decide from there. You create more and more awareness, more separation from your thoughts, so you have more stability in your perception of who you truly are. And again, back to people think that meditation is just not thinking while you're sitting there. And again, that's a very narrow, small view as if not thinking is a goal, right? Really what we're trying to do, what the goal of meditation is connect to a different energy, to connect to source energy. Each and every one of us is that same energy. We're just balls of energy in a meat suit, walking around. If you take all of us, unzip the meat suit that we're all wearing, we would all just be pools of energy that pull into one another. Right? And so what we wanna do is tap into that energy, that source energy. And you do that through meditation. The more and more you do it the more you can access it in an easier way. A lot of my clients, when we start doing the work they get so excited because they have moments of awareness, when they can see really clearly what's going on, when we start to look at all the thoughts, and the patterns, the limiting beliefs, and the things that are holding them back, and the stories they've been telling themselves. And they start to have these amazing moments of clarity and they're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I did that again. But from this amazing place of I see it, I see why I did it. And I know how to change it. Right? That's a powerful place. So we have those one or two moments but what meditation allows us to do is have more and more and more of those moments. So we're having just strings of them. Right? And that's where calm, groundedness, and stability come in. So meditation isn't just getting out of the little thoughts that we have, it's really stepping into a more expansive perspective. Stepping into source. Whether you call it source, universe, God, I believe it's all the same thing. It's the electricity, it's the energy running through. We are simply the lamp that that energy runs through. And meditation is what offers us the opportunity to plug in to the power. And once we plug in that's when things really get turned on. But we have to be willing to sit and do the work to learn how to plug in. So stability, perspective, space, responsiveness. These are all amazing benefits that I have experienced and learned that no one told me about. That I didn't really know that that's what I was looking for, but that's what I was looking for. And I got them all simply by showing up every morning right when I got up for 20 minutes. No ifs, ands, or buts, nothing got in my way and it won't, right? I still continue to do it today because the number one benefit that I have found, the byproduct of meditation that I never knew is self-trust. Sitting every morning for those 20 minutes and I'll be honest, sometimes it's 10, if I have to be up really early or something's going on. But a minimum of 10 and more if I can. And sitting every day I learned that I'm gonna show up for me no matter what. And once I started showing up for myself in this little way every morning things really started shifting. Things started changing in the way that I feel, in the way that I experience the world around me. I was able to do more, right? Because I was plugged in. I was able to love more because I was loving more. It really is a domino effect, right? A snowball, that one act every morning snowballs into so many other ways, areas of your life. I won't even go into them, but so many things have shifted that I never even saw coming but they shifted from that one choice to sit every morning in meditation. So that's what I learned about meditation and I just wanted to offer it with you, and celebrate the win because I consider it a big win that I've gone two years. And I can't wait to do another episode in two more years and tell you what I've learned there, right? And in the meantime, I hope that you join me on this journey because there is all the evidence in the world of how this can help you. And I know you don't think you have the time I know, right? But you do. You just simply make a promise to yourself that for 10, 15, 30, 60 days, whatever feels comfortable, that you are going to meditate for at least 10 minutes a day. And Terri Cole always says RPM, Rise, Pee, Meditate. I think it's great. I threw in some vitamins and some water before I meditate but whatever works for you, it's just you set up and it's the first thing you do. Because when you show up for yourself first thing in the morning, totally changes your day. Now if you want help, I got you. Don't worry. All the links of the things that I talked about and more are in the show notes. So you can go and check them out. And if you want some help, if you're like "Okay, this sounds good, but I don't even know where to start," and it's not possible. And I just want you, like my friend, to tell me how to do it, I'm happy to do that. There's a link in the show notes for a clarity call. And you and I can get on that call. It's totally free of charge. No strings attached and you and I can walk through your individual situation and create a plan that will work for you. Thank you friends for spending this time with me, I really do appreciate it. I know there's so much you could be doing. And I'm so glad you're here with me. And if you would share this episode with friends or family in your life that might benefit I would be really, really grateful. So just take a screenshot of this and share it with them. And if you do it on Instagram, please tag me. I would love to connect with you there and hear what resonated with you. And more importantly, I would love you to tag me on Instagram and share with me what you are committing to. 10 days? 30 days? 60 days? Tell me what you're committing to and I will be there to help hold that space and that accountability for you. You are not alone and I promise If you just give this a try there will be amazing benefits for you too. I'll see you next week and in the meantime take really, really good care of you friend. [music] Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week. [music]