Meditation: Try it, I Dare You!

Our day-to-day lives are chaotic and filled with distressing news, world events, and other causes for stress that we have no control over. Meditation practice has long been established as a path towards mental, emotional, and physical healing. The mind-body connection is one that is often neglected.

You may have tried meditation before and decided it is not for you for one of the following reasons:

• “I can’t make my mind quiet/blank.”
• “I can’t sit still for that long/I don’t have the time.”
• “I try, but I just get frustrated that I’m not doing it right/well enough.”

Meditation has a lot of misconceptions tied to it, and a lot of the concerns people have when trying meditation revolve around those misconceptions and set them up for feeling like failures. The goal of meditation does not have to be to reach the point where you can meditate for hours, with no thoughts, and full control over your mind and body to the point where you can levitate off the ground. We’ll save those aspirations for the Monks.


The goal of therapeutic meditation is simply to practice. Practice checking in with your body, emotions, and thoughts. Practice slowing down enough to be able to communicate with your body, recognize your emotions, hear out your thoughts, and spend some time addressing the concerns brought to your attention. We are not looking for a blank slate- we are looking for what we have been ignoring or neglecting.


Another great benefit to practicing meditation is learning how to engage or disengage with your anxious thoughts. The meditation linked below is called a “Leaves on a Stream” meditation. The idea is to practice observing your thoughts, especially the anxious ones, as they come up, acknowledge them, and then let them continue flowing downstream without attaching any judgment or action to them.


I encourage you to try it out! It is less than 10 minutes long and is something you can do from anywhere during your day. Now, it will not be something that you are automatically good at, and it may go differently each time you practice it, depending on your headspace when you start. However, the only objective here is to try. Try it, practice it, and keep practicing it. If you do that, you have succeeded! You will have connected with your mind and body even for just 6 minutes, and that is 6 more minutes of connection that you would otherwise have.


Despite my encouragement, you may not believe that meditation can make a difference, but I dare you to try it and be curious about what effects it can have."

Author: McKayla Kagie Robinson, MS, PLMFT
McKayla is a Therapist at Healing Reflections Therapy. She is currently accepting clients.
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