Meditation Part 2

Meditation.  Part two.  After attending a few Yoga Nidra classes over 5 years ago now, I started meditating on my own.  Guided meditations.  Laying flat on my back.  So used to being busy doing one thing after another, I found it difficult to remain motionless and awake in the beginning.  I was just so used to constantly ‘doing’ that ‘non-doing’ was very painful.  It seemed like such a waste of time.  I still kept at it, not really knowing what I was supposed to be accomplishing.  The nothingness behind it was lost to me as I kept thinking about it as something that I was actively pursuing.  After a while, if anything, I just began finding it relaxing.  It also seemed to help with my exercise recovery so I just went with it.  Listening to the audio instructions guiding me through.  Immobilized, eyes closed, simply staring into the darkness.  Ever so slowly, I felt myself beginning to open.  Becoming more comfortable with simply being.  Experiencing brief feelings of leaving my body.  Disappearing.  Peacefully floating.  It sounds weird and it’s difficult to explain, but I began feeling this powerful yet calm positive energy embracing me.  Meditation can be so many different things.  So very personal.  The original prayer.  Like in endurance sports such as cycling, it takes an enormous amount of time and practice before you begin noticing the positive effects.  The paradox being that it shouldn’t be done as a means to an end.  It should simply be done because it’s who we are.  Meditation was slowly becoming the yin to my cycling yang.  Improving my recovery.  Improving my riding.  Not in terms of numbers, but in terms of the depth.  We think of cycling in terms of legs, heart and lungs.  But in reality, our brains are what tie the whole experience together.