1000 Days of Meditation
I first learned about meditation in 2007 when I started practicing yoga, then dove deep during my yoga teacher training in 2013, when I spent a month studying in India. We had separate meditation and pranayam (breathwork) teachers, and by the end of my time there I was able to sit in stillness and silence for over an hour.
When I returned to real life with daily stresses and a busy schedule, my meditation practice quickly disappeared, as I didn’t yet understand the benefits of intentionally taking a pause. Flash forward five years, I was miserable, unhappy, and burnt out as a young lawyer, when a near-death experience spiraled me into depression and PTSD.
I took medication, saw a therapist bi-weekly, and was doing everything “right”, but still was in a cloud of darkness until my therapist suggested an 8-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program to free myself from the depression and emotional distress. Each week included a guided meditation practice, taking us out of our ruminating minds and into our bodies.
I cried when a guided body scan helped me feel in between my toes for the first time ever, as I realized just how powerful tuning into ourselves could be.
Since then I’ve taken courses and explored different types of meditations from around the world. Each meditation can make you feel a certain way, like a choose-your-own-adventure. In 2020, I was starting to get back on my feet again, and joined a month-long course called Benshen. Part of the course was daily Kundalini meditations, including one for radiance, which claimed to help you be known for your spirit, drawing and attracting people and opportunities from shining so brightly.
In Kundalini, they say that if you do a sadhana (methodical discipline to attain desired knowledge) for 40, 90, 120 or 1000 days, you’ll receive different benefits. The extreme person I am, I extended the month's practice to the 40 days, then challenged myself to the full 1000.
To be honest, once I committed to the practice, it was simple. Over the 2.5 years, I have changed so many parts of my life to ensure that I meditated every single day. The biggest gift is how powerful I feel doing what I said I would, and letting nothing get in my way. Of course, it was challenging to sit for 11 minutes with my arms in the air when there were so many more “fun” things to do, but each time I sat down to meditate, I felt so incredibly proud of myself and at peace.
The other main benefit was simply the effects of meditation. Meditating allows you to slow down your mind, bringing awareness to your life and actions, and allowing you to do things differently. This practice has helped me change my whole life for the better. Once I started tuning into how I felt daily, I was able to do things that made me feel more alive and vibrant with ease.
Now I rarely drink, eat healthily, work out almost daily, and surround myself with people who lift me up. I care less about what other people think, and feel strong in my ability to make decisions in my life. I can’t imagine my life without meditation, and have already calculated how long it will take me to reach 10,000 days straight (24.7 more years!).
I’m going to continue this meditation until another intuitively comes along, or life shifts in a way that I need a different practice, but for now I am going to continue shining as brightly as possible through my beloved radiance meditation.