Meditation Practice during Intense Change

It has been a few months since I wrote a post. The previous posts have been more general information. In this post I would like to share a more personal perspective on having a meditation practice during times of much change.

It is during times of massive change in one’s life, that a meditation practice can be very grounding and helpful. When everything is going well in one’s life, no one is sick or dying, jobs are great, kids are doing well, etc, there sometimes is not a great desire to meditate, since stress levels are low.

However, that is a great time to start to meditate, since it will help build your immune system, and mental health, for those more turbulent times when you do need it that stability and solidity, and on occasion equanimity, that comes with a long-term practice.

In the past three months, I quit my job without having another job lined up, and we’re selling our house and property. We also adopted another dog, bringing up our total of rescue dogs at this time to 4. Meanwhile, my wife is quite sick with her lung disease (which is the main reason we’re moving to a desert climate). A steady job, with sick leave and medical benefits and good pay is not easy to give up, in exchange for a life of uncertainty.

However, this is one of the things that a meditation practice helped me with; to become familiar and more comfortable with change and uncertainty.

That said, I did save during my past years, and both my wife and I were good money managers, and frugal in many ways. So that when this day came, we’d have a cushion or buffer. Quitting one’s job in a strategic way is different from quitting a job in a more spontaneous way. That said though, my attachment to the security of a regular job and the familiar work family is still a struggle internally. Physiologically, I also notice changes, such as increased stomach acid production and resulting pains in the past couple of years building up to this change. It is as though the body is reflecting this mental resistance as well.

Due to the amount of work required to get this property in shape to sell, the average day  has been about 12 hour, week in and week out. Each day nevertheless for me has  started out with 45 minutes to an hour of sitting meditation. Followed by a walking meditation (dogs need their walk anyway), and also a moving meditation, Tai Chi, as well as some stretching to help my core, shoulders and back. The importance for me in starting out the day with taking care of the body-mind. With a sitting meditation, is that this is a opportune time in which the body and mind are still in a state of awakening, a little less hyper then the rest of the day.

Once awake, the mind comes up with lists of things that have to be done, as well as the pressure to keep moving, so that income  can come again soon. The body wants to get moving and take action on these instructions from the brain. As someone who’s job in the last 15 years or so has had a mostly sedentary job in front of a computer, being physical, moving around, and fixing things has been a very welcome change. Nevertheless, when you have a house that needs a lot of things done, things still can get stressful, with this constant sense of urgency, with more money going out, and very little money coming in. As well as the smell and cool air of fall approaching closer.

I’ve found that adding a couple more mini-meditations, or a 10 minute relaxation in the middle of the day, can be very helpful in balancing the workday as well. I probably did not do this enough, instead being completely absorbed in each task and forgetting about the time passing, until it would get dark on many days.

The meditations themselves have also had a different quality to them, the silence that is there periodically interrupted by a mind wanting to bring up another thing that needs fixing, and a sense of unknown about the future. All in all, this is an interesting and exiting time to pull up the anchor, and see what’s out there in the vast ocean of possibility.