Juanita Lepage MSW, RSW, BHP

Counselling & Energy Healing

grief

To Meditate Or Not To Meditate: Easy Ways To Get Started Or Restarted

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I have been an on again-off again meditator for years.  I have always envied those individuals that have made meditation a regular habit in their lives.  When I met my husband, he would meditate daily for 30-minutes to an hour every morning and evening. He would invite me to join him, but at the time I thought it looked pretty boring to sit silently for that long. He too goes through periods of meditating and not meditating.

Over the years I would read about people such as Ram Dass, Yogananda, or Michael Singer who had mystical and transformative experiences meditating, and I thought, “Well of course if you’re having that type of “wow/life-changing” experience, you would continue to meditate”. Or I would think, “Of course if you’ve chosen the spiritual vocation as your life path, these transformative experiences would happen”. And then at the same time I would read about stories of people who meditated for years and never had that “wow” experience while meditating.

So, if I can’t get a Guarantee of that “Wow Factor”, Why Meditate?

So, without having the “wow” factor goal in mind, I wondered why meditation would be so highly recommended for individuals.

  1. Physical, mental, and emotional benefits

Calmness, focus, centeredness, happiness, better health, and self-love are all benefits of meditation.  It seems that as each year goes by, more and more research demonstrates the healing benefits of mindfulness[1]  or meditation for more and more things. Pain, mental illness, stress, and burnout is just a few of the things it can help with.  Just google “research meditation” or “research mindfulness” and you’ll notice a plethora of information at your fingertips.

When I taught Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to teens and adults, mindfulness was a key component to this therapy. The main benefit of mindfulness in DBT is to help a person pause and connect with their thoughts & emotions and how they are using this information to interact with the world. Many other types of psychotherapy involving mindfulness have been created too, with the most famous probably being Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) created by Jon-Kabat Zinn. In other psychotherapies, the word mindfulness is never mentioned, but it is used in practice to help a person connect to their emotions and bring awareness to thoughts.

  1. Spiritual benefits

If you’re on a spiritual path, meditation seems a key part in going deeper into one’s spiritual journey whether it be with a religion or a more general spiritual path.  Meditation allows a person to connect beyond themselves to something on a much grander scale – God, the universe, specific religious individuals such as Jesus or Buddha, and more.

Where Do I Start (or restart)?

 

Books

  1. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are, was one of the books that inspired me to start meditation. It’s an easy read with short chapters. This book is especially helpful if you’re interested in the Physical, Mental, & Emotional benefits. If you’re a person who is interested in being mindful but doesn’t want to sit quietly in meditation, this book provides many other options.  You can do anything mindfully. Really.
  2. Want a book that also captures the spiritual benefits? Michael A. Singer’s The Untethered Soul  is succinct and you can tell from the depth and simplicity of this book that he is a seasoned meditator.

YouTube Meditations

There are a lot of guided meditations available on YouTube, it can be a matter of trying a few to find your favourites.

  1. Tara Brach is my favourite person to listen to for a guided meditation. I love her voice and her variety of meditations. You can find many selections on her website or on YouTube.

Apps

There are many apps related to mindfulness and meditation. After not meditating for many months, I tried the 14-day trial with Headspace.  This was a great way to hear if I liked the person’s voice for guided meditation and try out some of their meditations.  When flying on Air Canada earlier this year I found some of their meditations available on the online entertainment system.

After the 14-day trial I decided to buy a subscription for a year (They offer a great discount after you’ve completed the trial).  I really appreciate the options to have a 1 minute or a 30-minute meditation.  Also my screen can be dark and it can keep playing (unlike YouTube). Some days I’m happy if I meditated for 1 minute. Other days I want to meditate for a longer time.  They also have great packages for different topics such as sleep, restlessness, worry and more.

Summary

If you notice in your life that it feels busy, even a few minutes of meditation a day can provide benefits of restoration and calm.  Often between sessions with clients a take a few minutes to connect to myself and shift my energy from the past client to the next one.

I don’t use the word mindfulness in most of my sessions, but often I’m helping clients to connect with themselves in a deeper way to find the solutions that they seek. Many of us like to spend time in our minds, and while we would benefit from connecting with our bodies or our emotions, we are often not practiced at doing so. We are often on the move.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found something to inspire you to start or restart your journey with meditation!

 

[1] Meditation is a form of mindfulness. There are many ways to be mindful without meditating, but meditation is a popular method of mindfulness.

Keep Calm And Talk About Death

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I recently saw a photo of someone wearing a t-shirt that said, “Keep calm and talk about death”.  Cheeky. I liked it.  In many parts of North-America, death is a delicate topic.  People don’t know how to talk about it.  So, every once in awhile I read a book about death.  Here are three of my favourites.

Books:

  1. Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity Travelling the World to Find the Good Death (perspective from a mortician)

If you like a book with a bit of humor, this is an excellent book.  Caitlin explores how a few different cultures deal with death including the United States, Japan, Spain, and Indonesia.  This is a great book to help reflect on what you want to happen to you body when you die.  Personally, I had always thought cremation, but a natural burial with the idea of giving your body to the earth seemed like a better fit for me after reading this book.  This book also reflects on the culture of grief in different countries.  In North-America we have lost ritual and ceremony and conversation about grief.

  1. Paul Kalanithi – When Breath Becomes Air (perspective from someone diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in his 30s)

I remember listening to an interview with Paul’s wife after he had passed away. She talked about how her husband didn’t feel like a victim when he was diagnosed with cancer, just minutes prior to becoming a neurosurgeon.  She is a doctor too and reflected that bad things happen to good people all the time, so why couldn’t something like this happen to them too? This book is wise, poetic, reflective, and moving.

  1. Atul Awande – Being Mortal (a surgeon and son’s perspective on death)

This book is about what happens when a person is elderly and needs more care than can be provided in their current environment.  Atul explores the complexity of choosing nursing homes or keeping elderly parents at home.  He wisely compares the pros and cons of both from his own experience.  People can feel guilty about choosing one option over the other, and he helps minimize the stigma of your choice.

Hamilton and Burlington Area Resources

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Rachelle McGuire, Director of Bob Kemp Hospice.  If you are currently struggling with grief it can feel very isolating, and you are not alone in this feeling.  In Rachelle’s workshop she talked about shifting the culture and conversation around death in north America.  She talked about shifting grief from a clinical problem to a natural response to circumstance.  Individual therapy can be helpful, but community involvement with others who have been through something similar can help normalize your response to grief and connect with others who have been there too.

The Bob Kemp Hospice has a great list of other resources on their website for those in Ontario or the Hamilton area. Sometimes being with others who have had a similar experience as you can be very healing and sometimes a group can be too intimidating.  You know yourself best – choose the best fit for you.