When I first made this list of 40 things, I had initially put Vipassana on the list. For those of you who don’t know, Vipassana is a 10-day extremely difficult meditation course. That’s right 10-days. A week and 3 days. For perspective, I was recently in India for 10 days. Everyone I know who has gone to Vipassana has had an amazing experience, but each person also said it was likely the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Given that I have anxiety attacks on the regular, my friend suggested I not be alone with my thoughts for 10 days. :o) Instead she suggested I try Oprah and Deepak Chopra’s meditation challenge. Having done ZERO meditation in the past and wanting to do something challenging, I wasn’t sure about this.
It was hard. Trust me, trying to make time for an hour long self-guided meditation daily was so.damn.hard. At first I tried doing it at night before bed and I’d wake up to a dead phone or my headphones still in, so I shifted to the morning. If you know me, you know that I never quite wake up at the same time each day. So that didn’t quite work either. What I found was, much like working out, I prefer the middle of the day for this. Doing the recordings before lunch or after lunch would break up my day really nicely. I felt calm and peaceful after a crazy morning and knew that the rest of the day would go better. I stuck through the 21-days, I filled out my daily journal and gotta say Oprah and Deepak both have amazingly soothing voices. Day 22 was hard though, I no longer had a recording to go to and therefore have fallen out of the daily practice. I know I should do it more (my ancestors were not wrong) but I’m finding it hard to do without a program. That makes sense for me too — I can’t just go to the gym and workout, I have to go to a class.
What I do though is wait for each new program from O&D to come out and I try to be consistent about it. The content is amazing and I think anyone would benefit from a 20-day meditation. Another friend had suggested I try out Headspace - I may have to do that because the bootleg meditations I have on my phone are getting repetitive.
Maybe for my 50-year goal I can try Vipassana.