Meditation and yoga trends are everywhere. Literally, everywhere. It seems the mental and physical health trends are the new ‘in’ thing this season, where everyone is jumping on their cycles or rushing to purchase an assortment of yoga mats.
I can’t hate on them, because I too became enamored in a craze encircled around body/love/self/identity/world/happiness/mental/spiritual/emotional empowerment. Pretty much, this was an exclusive circle and I wanted to be part of the in crowd.
I had been practicing meditation for months, purposefully put into my schedule after I found myself having restless nights after stressful days. One day I thought to myself, “Well, you’ve mastered individual yoga, you should try group yoga.” I honestly think it was probably the incense burning a little too strong.
I signed up for a group meditation class and remember getting there 15 minutes early to ‘warm-up’, as if meditating BEFORE meditating was going to help me any. As we all began to walk into the room, I remember looking around and snickering in my head. I got this, I’m such an expert and these are all newbies. Piece of cake. We sat down, our instructor came, and it began.
What actually began, I don’t know. I never got there. 15 seconds into our meditation, I realized the person sitting behind me must have had a case of the sniffles. The sound of a dripping nostril squeezing its snot back into submission wrestled at my ears. Next, I could hear someone to my left moving their feet different directions, I assume in an effort to get comfortable. Deep Sigh, you can do this. I continued to keep my eyes closed, focusing on my eyelids and attempting to zero out all thoughts but the sound of my instructor. But it never happened for me.
I soon realized that all of the musical distractions around me were making me incapable of focusing on the sole task at hand. I was not, in fact, the expert but the sad chick who couldn’t get past the weird bodily noises of other people. & that’s when I knew it: group meditation was just not for me. Despite the idea of joining together for a common cause, I have learned I have so much more focus and stability when it’s just myself (yikes, if that’s not a cry for help). At the end of the day, don’t follow the group. Do what feels right for you, by you, with you. While everyone else zeros out in group, catch me in my tiny apartment zeroing out on my sofa to a playlist I made for myself. #Boss.
Images: Getty
