The Power of Meditation.

My awesome wife bought me a Tibetan singing bowl for Christmas. She had no idea I was about to start this 30 Days of Meditation challenge but her timing could not have been more perfect!

Have you noticed that everywhere you look, people seem to be talking about meditation these days? I think during the holidays it must have come up at least six or seven times through various news reports and/or media features. In fact, it was a message that kept repeating itself for me several times throughout 2014.

Meditation was foreign to me until a few years ago. It was something I learned about through my sister Sheri when she was battling cancer and how she was using it to heal herself both mentally and physically. Though I recognized at the time that it was something important that I should find the time to do, I didn't. Oh, I talked a good game about trying to do it, but in the end, I simply didn't make it a priority.

Until recently.

Sometimes the messages that keep showing up in our lives become hard to ignore. This past year I must have heard about meditation hundreds of times and met through various speaking opportunities of Ripple events dozens of people who brought up the subject and its impact on their life. When you keep getting thumped in the head enough times maybe it's time to start paying attention.

Meditation for me has always been somewhat elusive. The stillness that people talk about and the ability to quiet the brain is something that until recently has been hard for me to fathom. You see, my brain never shuts up. It's constantly chattering about what I need to do, this idea or that idea, or who I need to be helping. Its incessant babble is exhausting and the older I get the more I realize that it's doing me no favors. In fact, in a lot of ways, it's wearing me out both physically and mentally.

So I've committed to finding time to learn how to embrace the practice of meditation. In fact, I've challenged myself to find time over the next 30 days to meditate once or twice per day to see what happens. Each day I am recording thoughts and observations from each meditation in my journal and hope to discover some things about myself while learning to explore myself from the inside out. I'm hoping to record my observations and see what kind of changes I find occurring in my life and see if there's really something to this daily practice so many people are talking about.

There are so many great articles, books, and podcasts detailing every aspect of what meditation means and what it can bring to your life. I've read a few blog posts, listened to some great podcasts, and may even pick up a book or two to dive deeper into the practice if, in fact, these 30 days deliver even half of what I expect them to. So far so good, 3 days into this challenge, I'm finding myself calmer, more relaxed, and despite a nasty cold, stronger physically in some odd way. I can't wait to see what happens from this point forward. I'll be sure to BLOG a few times about this month to let you know how it's working out for me.

I'd love to hear from any of you who've experimented with meditation and what, if anything, it has done for your life. Please leave me a comment or feel free to Tweet me @rippleon to engage.

In the meantime, here are a few fantastic resources you might be interested in checking out on the subject:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/leaders-meditation_n_3916003.html

http://www.tm.org/blog/people/executives-who-swear-by-meditation/

http://www.ceo.com/tag/meditation/