Meditation Teacher Training

Several years ago I attended with Yogi Master Dawn Yager - check her out here.

One of the best things that she taught me in this meditation TT was about the highs and lows, peaks and valleys really, of happiness and sadness. It is quite simple, listen. 

She drew a straight line and had us also draw a straight line (shocker: she loves to draw, therefore, we love to draw). She asked us what our best moment of our life was and to mark it as high as we wanted above the line. Then, she asked us what our absolute lowest point was. What was the saddest, worst ever feeling we have ever had? Mark that as long or as deep below the straight line. Then we had to mark maybe two or three more events that correlated to "happy" and "sad" feelings above and below the line. 

She then explained that for as high as we can feel, for as happy, successful, giddy, accomplished, etc, there will always be an equal and opposite emotion to match it below the line (BUMMER!). This is awful! I am such a positive person and I love to be happy and bubbly, what do you mean I can feel this same passion towards positivity as negativity?! I am not a negative Nancy, I am positive Patty Damn it! Nope. Swami Ambikanada says NOPE. 

The whole point of this is meditation right? So practicing meditation and calming the mind, calming the monkey brain, silencing the committee's chatter, this helps us stay more even. It wrangles these crazy feelings and emotions and keeps us closer to the line. It helps us become less emotionally reactive and distracted. By meditating and harnessing that energy, in turn, it also helps us decrease the amount of expectations we have. We all know that expectations are the root of all disappointment and if you didn't know this, there's another blog that that here. 

Do you meditate? It's not that hard, but it's also not sleeping and it's certainly more than humming with your legs crossed. My favorite form of meditation is called Tratak. You basically set the scene and light a candle at a far enough distance so you don't strain your neck or eyes to look at it. Then you stare at this candle until your eyes become heavy and then you cycle through refocusing your attention to this candle moment by moment. The flickering of the candle I find interesting and I never really let that go. I grew up right next to the fire place as a kid and have always love that feeling so Tratak for me is something I really enjoy. However, you may not and that's A OKAY. There are several other ways of meditating! I have had a meditation practice for up to 12 weeks, two separate times and thoroughly enjoyed it. Then family and habits got in the way and I slowly gave up my healthy habit for other hobbies and LIFE got in the way. But, you know what they say. If you don't have time to meditate, that's probably the best time to start it and why you need it.