Every last one of us has been (and is still going) through an incredibly traumatic event, one that has at times made it feel like there are no safe spaces left: a worldwide pandemic. Whether or not we have collectively acknowledged and reconciled this is the stuff for future historians to figure out. My guess is we haven’t even begun to come close, as it’s still going on, but the world moves forward regardless, too selfish and stuck in its ways to do otherwise. To that end, some of us have had to devise ways of dealing with the stresses and worries that accompany the seismic changes at work now, and I’m thankful that for me one of the coping mechanisms has been meditation.
The beauty of meditation is that it can be done anywhere, at any time, in almost any format that works best for the practitioner. You can do it first thing in the morning, or last thing at night, or on a quick ten-minute work break in the middle of an office day. Once you learn to access a form of mindfulness, meditation becomes a valuable and integral tool in coping with a world that has, for most intents and purposes, seemingly gone mad.
As a tried and true Virgo, I appreciate a more rigid and defined schedule, opting to engage in my twenty-minute daily meditation right after I finish the work-day – when working from home it affords a demarcation that divides work from home, and allows a full decompression from any tension that has built-up in a work-day. This method has been in place for a solid three-plus years, which has given me practice in understanding how it works. The moment I start the deep breathing I can feel my body and mind relax, and I immediately begin to inhabit the present moment, eradicating worrisome thoughts and the meddlesome wandering of the mind.
During periods of stress or anxiety, I can usually start the deep breathing exercises, and more often than not it will take a bit of the edge off of whatever is going on at the moment. If I’m in a place where I can get away for a few minutes, that brief moment of mindfulness bordering on meditation becomes a safe space – a space I can conjure in more circumstances than I once thought possible.
