21 reasons for families to consider making daily meditations a priority, today.
Why daily meditations matter for the families of today.
Today’s family structure in North America and around the world looks very different than what it did 50 years ago. From my experience, families with kids get so caught up in getting things done, they lose out on taking care of their individual needs. Parents often feel exhausted and tired from working and taking care of the households and forget all about their own needs. Daily meditations can help align priorities for families everywhere.
Kids watch parents not taking care of themselves everyday and follow suit. The lack of support within extended families and larger community does not help this issue. All in all, parents and kids are overwhelmed and dealing with anxiety on a regular basis. In fact, anxiety related disorders affect 40 million people in the US alone (over the age of 18). Source
As a parent what I find even more disturbing is that 25% of the population between the ages of 13 and 18 years, suffer from anxiety. If they (the anxious child) goes untreated they could potentially create abusive patterns towards themselves and others. Source
Daily meditations for families help alleviate some of the mental agony that busy families face.
From my experience daily meditations helps calm the nervous system down enough to bring a sense of calm to the person. Meditations help clear up your mind and also become aware of the thoughts that are causing you anxiety. Once you know what’s causing your anxiety, I suggest you journal or write about those thoughts to gain a clearer perspective.
Daily meditations can help you not only get clearer on your goals, they can also help you understand why you might not be achieving some goals.
In this post I will only share the benefits that I have experienced because of my meditation practice. For more research based benefits, you can always google “benefits of meditation” to get some scientific stats.
Daily meditations have many benefits but here I discuss the benefits that I experienced through the 40 days that I practiced meditating.
Healing the mind
1. Time management. My decision to meditate daily was definitely challenging as I had not carve out 15 minutes and make sure I was alone at that time. The challenge was not just finding the ideal 15 minutes. I had to make sure that my stomach was not full just before the meditation and I was neither sleepy nor tired right before meditating. And this is why I decided to do the meditations at 6:30 am – just before the family woke up.
2. Stress management. I found that daily meditations helped me manage my stress better. I found myself focusing on solutions rather than the problem itself.
3. Neutrality. Before I started meditating, I would get affected by everything that happened around me – including the chaos in the world. Even watching the news would throw my whole day off. Daily meditations have helped me distance myself from problems happening around me. It’s not that I am not concerned for the people that are living in war zones, or the women that are being denied shelter or the children that are being abused. I am just not letting all of those happenings cause turmoil within me. It’s easier to help someone when we do not become part of their problem.
4. Surrender. I learnt to surrender my plans to ‘God’ or ‘the source of all creation’, and focus on taking action instead. You know those people that over plan? But never actually get down to doing the work? That was Classic me. Well now, I have learnt to plan just a little and focus on implementing the plan in stead.
5. Self-awareness. When I meditate, I am able to tap into my conscious mind and hear myself talk. This helps me discover why my life is going a certain way. I often write about why I might be having certain thoughts as thoughts are a great indicator for what experiences and memories we need to release next.
6. Setting Intentions. After each meditation, I set my intention for the day. This routine of setting intentions helps me realize how I want to feel all day. So for example, one day I might want to feel peaceful and that’s the intention I set. I usually find that setting intentions at the start of any day (even without meditating first) can be a very powerful way to get what you want. #lawofattraction
7. Flow of Inspiration. Daily meditations helped me discover what I am inspired to do. I only started this blog because I was inspired to. I do not have an agenda in mind (except to help people in whatever capacity I can) and I actually do not worry about where this goes. All I know is I will be inspired to serve for a greater good and not just my own. With this mentality, inspiration I receive becomes the work I do
8. Patience. With surrender, came patience. In the past, any last minute changes to plans would set me off and I would become irritable and upset. I have learnt to become more patient and I understand that change is the only constant in my life.
9. Manifestation. As you remove distortion from your field with meditations, you start to attract what you want. So to set up goals is quite fun because when I set up a goal of say losing 10 pounds, my mind will bring up any patterns I need to clear to be able to lose those 10 lbs or become stronger before I lose the weight I need to.
10. Law of attraction actually works! I found the law of attraction to be a laughable concept before I started my practice. When I had first read the secret, the book had seemed scammy to me. I even tried some of the techniques it spoke about but nothing I wanted materialized. My meditation practice has made the law of attraction work for me. During my meditations, I am able to choose what I think about and thus manifest.
11. Gratitude. Daily meditations allowed me to practice gratitude everyday. This one is a big one that my kids and I practice everyday. The goal is to feel gratitude everyday so as to attract more things to be grateful for. My kids and I always do this practice every morning and its a wonderful time spent doing something we love. Being grateful also makes us happier. Test it out for yourself. You can read about how to help kids meditate here
Healing the body
12. Breathe. Before I started meditating daily, I thought I knew how to breathe. During my meditations, focusing on my in breath and out breathe helped me appreciate the breath that gave me life. I started to express gratitude for my breath and in a few days started to breathe deeply during my meditations and the rest of my day. This helped calm my nervous system and induced a sense of calm all day.
13. Become Present. Being un-present or out of time is the reason why many people feel ‘lost’ and confused. Not being mentally in the now makes us unaware of all the messages our higher self is sending to us. Our intuition also takes a hit when we aren’t present in our bodies. A simple way to become more present during the day is to meditate daily. Focusing on your 5 senses during the meditation will give you access to the feeling of being present and soon that feeling will become your norm.
14. Power and Responsibility. My practice of meditation encouraged me to reach for the power within. I stopped blaming others for what happened in my life and took complete responsibility for how I felt and acted. This opened up possibilities for personal development for me that I am so thankful for.
15. Shedding weight. As I started to shed the emotions that were buried deep within my body, I also started to shed weight that I did not need to carry around. I found that I ate less and I could go longer between meals. I also started to drink more water, which helped me clean up faster. Even though some days I felt really tired from this whole process of shedding and releasing old patterns, overall I had more energy to complete my chores and take care of myself and my family.
Healing the soul
16. Self-Love. While finding time to meditate daily, I understood the power of self-love. In the beginning, I had to force myself to sit in silence to meditate. The reason it was so forced was because I didn’t really love myself enough to enjoy the process. #truth This was an important self-realization for me and I understood that to change my life, I had to love myself first. Self-love would mean that I would have to make some serious changes in my life to feel in love all the time. This meant giving up anything that was toxic for me. Unfortunately, this included many people that brought me down, foods that made me feel sick and my thoughts that kept me in a loop of self-pity and victimhood. Loving myself was probably the hardest change I have made since the start of my healing journey. #selflove #journeytoself
17. Kindness. Going inwards everyday and finding the patterns I needed to clear up forced me to see other people as beings also tied up in patterns they did not even know about. Instead of judging others constantly, I began to extend feelings of love to them. I am not free of judgement just yet, I have a long way to go. But because I am aware of my thoughts most times, I am able to self-correct and ask for forgiveness within.
18. Self-Improvement. With self-awareness comes an opportunity for self-improvement. It is quite difficult to ignore something that makes us happier and self improvement is that thing for me. There are many modalities online that help you improve yourself and change your habits. But I find that the most effective is going within and focusing on improving from within. By listening to my thoughts and watching my actions, I was able to make small changes everyday that were joyful and full of love. One such change was exercising my body to feel more flexible.
19. Connect with the source of all creation. During my meditations, I felt connected to the source of all creation or the universe and that feeling of oneness often brought me to tears. I have never felt so much love as I did during those moments. To experience that feeling of connection to source is very powerful and also the moment where anything is possible.
20. Forgiveness. The time I spent meditating gave me an excuse to force myself to forgive others and myself for any experience that caused anyone grief. This practice of forgiveness is very powerful and helps with releasing any resistance to change.
21. Healing. And lastly, over time I healed a lot of my childhood wounds and the pain I felt but never expressed. This healing enabled me to feel open to new experiences and ideas for helping others heal. Healing gave me hope for the future. You can read more about my journey with Fibromyalgia and how I healed myself here.
What happens when you meditate daily?
Every being is different. So the benefits you gain from daily meditations might be different than the benefits I gained. The make up of our bodies, minds and souls is also different so you might take 21 days to experience a sense of calm and I might take 60 days.
Try to focus on your own journey to inner self and show up even if you do not want to. I get lazy too and sometimes would rather read a book or watch a show on Netflix. But I know that making myself a priority is what got me to this healed state.
When you meditate daily, you will experience benefits, unique to you. So be open and surrender the outcome to the universe or your higher self. Keep showing up and make sure to share your meditation journey with us in our facebook group (link below).
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