If ever there was a month ripe and receptive to meditation, it is this one. January arrives and the best way of dealing with the post-holiday blues is to clean house and dive deeply into a meditation practice. Personally, I find it much easier to sit in still and quiet while the outside window reveals the gray and brown dreary landscape of winter as opposed to the vibrant verdant expanse of spring and summer. And so I sit, lotus-style, once a day, for about twenty minutes, slowing my breathing and entering a state of mindfulness.
My meditations most often occur after work, when I’m home, and the day begins to cross into the night. I like being in a meditative state when such darkness descends – it makes it easier to bear. There’s also something calming about it, the way the sky slowly and then quickly drains of its light and any color it might have conjured during the day. As the room dims, the candle becomes the central focus point, flickering its light and enveloping the surroundings with a gentle sense of warmth. It all conspires to further the meditative mode.
All such atmospheric conditions aside, it is not the setting or the scene that matters, as my eyes remain gently closed for most of my meditation. It is, first and foremost, the breathing that counts. Then it is the state of releasing my thoughts and making contact with the mindfulness that clues me into the present moment in heightened form. At the same time, I feel as though I have been taken out of the trappings of the daily grind, transported to a plane of peace and stillness, blessedly relieved of the worldly concerns of a day. It is here where the magic of meditation happens for me.
Accessing this space of blankness, where the mind has allowed all its worrisome thoughts – good and bad and everything in-between – to be recognized and then released, is the key to how meditation helps me beyond that particular moment. Inhabiting that mindful and yet beautifully empty place allows my mind and body to feel a sense of peace that it never gets to feel. It’s like the most exquisite, and healthy, drug trip, without any of the negative effects. Once I began to feel such release, I understood it was possible to access it at almost any time through being mindful. And so my practice extends beyond the twenty minutes, into the days and nights of a January where everything else feels dismal and depressing.
It’s a method of making it through the winter.
