hey, I’d love your advice about something…

I hear you. I’m a single mom 1/2 the time, which means little to none personal time. The other half the time, I do my best to work harder/do better/be better, which still means not a whole of personal time. So I hear ya – the idea of setting aside 20, 30 minutes a day to sit and do nothing sounds a bit outrageous….until you try it and realize that it actually creates more time. Cuz when I meditate, my mind is more focused, more productive and less likely to be reactive.

I discovered meditation purely out of necessity while in the hospital, though I had no terminology for it back then. I hadn’t grown up meditating. I’d grown up praying, and what I did was different than prayer.

I had just come out of one week in ICU and pretty much don’t remember a thing because I was so drugged up on pain meds. My accident had left my body without my left kidney or spleen, and my mom, a former Feldsher (Physician’s Assistant) in the Soviet Union, warned me of how much strain pain meds put on my remaining kidney, which was recovering and still in shock, trying to adapt to keeping my body healthy all on its own. She encouraged me to only use pain meds if I absolutely needed them. Being half Russian and stubborn as hell, I decided I didn’t need them at all. I refused all pain meds. The nurses didn’t believe me, but after 5 days of not requesting anything and refusing to press that little button that would deliver a dosage of pain relief, the finally removed the pain med IV drip.

What this meant, however, is that I had to figure out how to deal with the constant pain I was in.

I began with gratitude – I am alive. I have two eyes. I have two arms. I have two legs. I can hear. I can see. I can think. I’m not paralyzed. One day I’ll be able to walk again.

I also sought out mental distractions. I had a TV in my room, but couldn’t stomach it. Made me depressed, so I had it covered up. Instead, I devoured 10 books every few days.

In between reading, I discovered that if things got really bad, I could relax my body by focusing my awareness (meditating) on the smallest of visual distractions available to me –the patch of sunlight in the narrow window in the corner of my hospital room, or the shadow of a bird, passing by. My pain diminished. Slowly, with practice, I learned to transfer my awareness away from the physical and dull the pain by retraining my mind. The process got easier and easier.

I got so good at it that I was happy and smiling <most of the time.>  Let me clarify: I wasn’t happy about all the tubes coming in and out of me: in my throat, down my esophagus, one into my aorta, hovering just above my heart, oxygen tubes into my nose, multiple IV’s. Gradually, I lost all of these, each time one went away – another point of gratitude upon which to focus my awareness.

I was stationary in bed — my broken leg suspended in traction, partially held up by a very painful screw entering one side of my tibia and exiting through the other, staples all down my stomach. Every two days, the nurses would clean the around the entry point of the screw..that sucked. So did cleaning the staples down my stomach. That was painful.  But I got so good at focusing my awareness, that I was happy.

None of it mattered anymore.

I started cheering up the people who visited me.

I even had nurses who would come hang out with me after their shifts ended.I remember one nurse, in particular. She was so sweet. She’d come in after her shift and give me a manicure. We’d laugh. She used to tell me that I cheered her up. I didn’t know what to make of that statement until years later.

Speaking of nurses – God bless that woman and God bless all nurses. If you’re a nurse, you are a true hero. Thank you for all that you do.
Okay…I digress…

Without realizing it, meditation became my thing, which is probably why I’ve managed to stay employed as a private yoga teacher for so many years. Sure, I give incredible yoga and I also give incredible meditations.

So here’s where I’d love your feedback and advice…

I’m getting ready to record a few free meditations to give away to everyone on my list as a thank you for being on the list and a way to encourage you to meditate more frequently. Figure, about 8 minutes long or so…which are you most interested in?

— A body-breath-centered meditation that relaxes you all the way from you toes up towards the skull…  this is more of an evening/relaxing/savasana meditation

— An inner energy/light and chakra meditation that aligns and opens us from the inside out? This is more of a morning/wake up meditation.

Pregnant mamas, – I’m already putting together free meditations one per first two trimesters, and three during the 3rd trimester….so you are covered!

Shoot me back and email and lemme know whatcha think!

Thanks!