Month: August 2017

Meditation to the rescue!

 

Fear blocked my dream: To write Worry Less Now!  

IT’S DUE IN SEPTEMBER 2017  

After I stated aloud my dream to write this book, I experienced a period of turmoil and resistance I refer to as the backlash effect. My whispered lies seemed to wake up and say, “What? This can’t be! There’s no way you’re going do that!” “You can’t get this honest about your life; people will think you’re neurotic,” and “You can’t handle it if people criticize you.” Suddenly, I found myself unable to write.

A quote from Goethe sums up the coincidences that followed soon after I hit that block: “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.”

Despite knowing about the many benefits of meditation, I had never been able to get the hang of it. I just couldn’t quiet my incessant thinking long enough to feel successful. Then providence moved in a surprising way.

• While at lunch with my friend Chris, who had just completed her first book, I shared my fears about my writing. She told me how meditating had calmed her mind and given her a connection to a source of wise guidance in her work.

•Soon after, I made a new friend, Mara, who meditates for twenty minutes twice a day. I became envious of her unflappable sense of peace.

•Later that month, a woman in my book club mentioned she recently began meditating as part of her treatment for shingles, and had not had an episode since.

•After spontaneously deciding to attend a women’s retreat, I found when I arrived that the topic was meditation! As the weekend progressed, I began to believe I could actually adopt this helpful practice.

•Soon after the retreat, a friend asked me to join her for Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey’s twenty-one-day online meditation challenge.

At that point, I looked up to the heavens, and said, “OK, OK!” and began to meditate most mornings.

I find if I skip my morning meditation, I have less serenity and bravery to deal with my challenges. For example, I recently began my day by reading many emails about a retreat I was leading. When I later went to my desk to piece together some new ideas for this chapter, I noticed I was tense and couldn’t find the right words. I then stopped, asked myself, “What’s wrong?” and remembered I had neglected to meditate.

Instead of criticizing myself, I gave myself kudos for noticing my tension. Recalling that it’ s never too late to start a day over, I did just that. As I entered the stillness, I could almost hear my body saying, “OK, the wise one is driving the bus now. We can stop the high alert.”

I received a wondrous result: I wrote the exact the words I had been searching for earlier. I was no longer stuck!

Gigi Langer is a former “queen of worry.” She’s also an educator, speaker, and author of Worry Less Now! Coming out in Fall 2017, the new book contains 50 powerful tips to defeat negative thinking, find inner peace, and be happy.