Why is meditation a must in your morning routine?

Hi All!

I wanted to share two incidents that happened to me this past week which made realize how important daily meditations are in helping me cope in this modern world. Real life examples like these makes me feel enormous gratitude for the impact or magic that daily meditations create in everyones lives. I am hoping the two incidents below will provide examples to help understand what I mean by the benefits that you get from doing daily meditations.

I am going to start with something that happened to me on Wednesday.

Wednesday morning I realized that I forgot to charge my car on Tuesday night when I came home from work, because it was raining and I thought of hooking up the charger after an hour but totally forgot about it. When I realized this on Wednesday morning, my first thought was how am I going to get to work? We have two cars—one is a van and the other is an electric car. I asked my husband if he was carpooling so I could take his van, and he said NO-NO. He was taking the van and he had to leave early to attend a meeting at 8:30 am, which means he also needed help to drop our daughter off. Usually, my work hours are from 7 am to 4 pm. I was like, there is no charge in the car and I had to stay with Divya till 8:30 so I decided to take a half day so I could get my car charged and possibly work half of the day from home. I sent an email to my team saying “I am taking a half day PTO and will probably be working half of the day from home or might come in.” So at 11 o’clock, I decided to go in because I had two important meetings and they were expecting me to attend them in person. What I realized was we must watch these surprise incidents that pop-up in our day to day lives and try to go with the flow by being flexible. The story did not end there.

On Thursday morning, I went to the office and saw my close colleague and friend. As soon as she saw me, she said, “You know Chandra, yesterday I took half a day off and worked from home for half of the day.”

It occurred to me that I had been like my friend, and so I said to her, “Let me tell you my story,” and I started to share my experience. And my friend laughed at how close both of our stories were. Her story occurred on Wednesday morning, when she realized that she had forgotten her laptop at work. She drove back to the office, took the laptop bag with her, only to then realize that she had brought the laptop bag but not the laptop, so she had to make another trip to the office to take the laptop home with her so she could do some work at home. But around 11 o’clock one of her friends called and said she needed help with her kids so she ended up taking a half day.

So another person joined us and he spoke about my friend saying, “Oh! I think she has a lot going on and is stressed out,” and I said “No-no-no, it is not about stress. We don’t want to surround ourselves with any energy or emotional vampires. We want to go with the flow as things happen.” So he started to laugh, then we all agreed that we are amazing people.

The lesson to take away from this example is not to bring anything negative into a situation, it would be like a filter and block you from performing at your optimal level. This experience has made me realize how necessary it is to go with the flow, to learn and to experience the magical things that can unfold.

I gain such strength through my daily meditations, and I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am for the time I invest in them. For example, in the situation I mentioned, I was not thinking, “Oh! What do I do? Why are these things happening to me? What happens if I take half a day off? What would my colleagues or boss think? Oh Jeez! I am stressed out with life.” It is so important not to entertain thoughts like this, and by considering this particular situation, I realized how different the end result would have been if I had entertained these thoughts, and none of them ever occurred.

Time went by and on Thursday night my son got sick. Friday morning I woke up and my husband asked me, “Can you take a day off? Jay is sick and I have meetings to attend, one at 8 o’clock and another one at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I can’t run the show.” I said that I have to go, which made him really upset. I explained, “I have to go to the office because this is the last month in the fiscal year where a lot of shipments happen and people are expecting me to be in the office.” I offered to help him with our daughter, Divya, so he could attend his 8 o’clock meeting without any problems. In addition to his two meetings, he also had to drop off his van at the service station in Westborough, which is close to our home.

He was stressing out about who is going to drop him off at home after he drops off his van. He called a friend and asked to borrow his car and I said “No, no, no, you don’t want his car; all you want is someone to drop you off home”.

Another thing he asked me to do was to make a quick trip to the store to get some bread and Gatorade for our son, Jay. Without thinking, I decided to do this. As soon as I entered the store, the first thing that caught my eye was the Gatorade in an isle super close to the checkout, and I felt very happy as if I was meant to make this trip. I quickly bought the bread and Gatorade and returned to the house. I then dropped Divya at the bus stop and as I was getting ready for the office, Ravi came and asked me, “Where is the van key? Where is the van key?” I said, “I know I took the van to the store, and it would be on the key hanger.” He said, “It wasn’t there.” I said, “It would be in my winter jacket or in my purse.” He said, “No, not there.” So, I was like, “Okay, give me 5 minutes, and I will come and look for them.”

I went downstairs and looked around but could not find the keys. We have a second set of keys. He brought the second set of keys but was upset, because we could not find our regular keys and he thought I had misplaced them. I could see that he was still upset that I was not taking time off to take care of our sick child. One thing I kept observing inside me was that my mind was in an observer / witness mode, not in reactive mode. My focus at that point in time was to find the keys, and whilst searching for them, I said to my husband, ”If you want, I’ll pick you up from the service station and drop you off at our house and then I’ll go to the office.” This made him very happy. I kept searching for the keys by retracing my steps and could not find them anywhere. So at last I said, “Can you check in your fleece pocket?” And as soon as he put his hands in his pocket, he found the keys and we both started laughing. My car was fully charged and I picked up Ravi and dropped him off at our house. I then proceeded to make my way to the office.

Take a pause and witness some of the emotions and actions that occurred during this incident. Analyze how throughout the whole situation I was in a very quiet mode. I wasn’t judging the person or the situation; I was also not projecting unwanted emotions onto the person involved or blaming the situation. I was quiet; I was just witnessing his emotions and also my own emotions / actions.

I know that this kind of transformation in my behavior definitely came from my commitment to regular meditations. Every day I wake up and do my meditation before everyone else wakes up. My inner state and my inner quietness help Ravi and everyone else such as my colleagues or team members. It does not matter whether it is a family member, a friend, or even a stranger. It helps anyone to flip back into a normal peaceful state in no time.

If I would have gone spilling emotions by responding to his emotions, it would have taken a different way like two unproductive people in two different companies. He wouldn't of been productive at work and neither would I. I would of then passed these negative vibrations to my fellow colleagues and further negative things would of happened. This unpleasant atmosphere could have very well spread into the weekend too.

What I enjoyed here was staying at peace and just witnessing, not judging him and remaining in that quiet state. This definitely helped the whole situation around the house and also helped him flip back into the same normal state.

After going to work on Friday, it suddenly started snowing, and this made me wonder about the weather forecast for the week. On Tuesday, it rained and on Wednesday it looked so sunny from the inside but it was super cold outside. On Friday, it snowed. It is April now and it is still snowing. Unexpected weather changes like this and unexpected events in general, like the ones mentioned above, or similar situations at work, none of them bother me much when I do my daily meditations.

At the end of Friday, I felt this deep gratitude in my heart for my daily sessions and for the commitment that I make every morning to establish this one on one communication with my heart and soul. Through this meditation, I was so thankful that I found two incidents to share with pure souls like you. I hope you enjoyed reading this and have learned something from it too. I also hope my experiences inspire you to take 10-15 minutes a day to deeply connect with your heart and soul.

If you are really excited to attend a session, please check upcoming Meditation Offerings in my facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/DiscovertheSacredSpacewithinyou/events/?ref=page_internal