Hello beautiful! I hope you're doing well and enjoying this unique day.
Today's blog post is about my journey for the past ten months to become a Certified Meditation Instructor. It's been a deeply fulfilling and inspiring experience. I was enrolled as a student at Aura Wellness Center, for their remote self-paced instructor class.
When I started the class, I had no idea how impactful it would be for me in my personal life. My main priority was to obtain a deeper knowledge of meditation so I could be a well-rounded meditation instructor. Although I knew I would benefit from all that I learned, including the 40 hours of logged meditation, the benefits were so much greater.
I experimented with many different facets of meditation: loving-kindness meditation, bare attention, mantras/affirmations, present-moment awareness, visualizations, having focused attention on a specific object, guided meditations, breath-focus, pranayama/breathing techniques, chakra focus, setting intentions, body scans, sound focus, counting exercises, labeling thoughts and letting go, mudras, walking meditations and more.
I meditated in different places, with different mindfulness tricks, and used many different methods. I meditated at the beach (a lot), under the stars, under the shade of large Oak trees... I meditated for shorter durations (15 minutes), and also sat for longer periods closer to 40 minutes. I meditated on good days, on bad days, through many seasons of life. I meditated on love for myself, and love for all humans. I cried some days while meditating, from joy and from pain & release. I meditated when I felt anger come up within me. I meditated when I felt ungrounded and lost.
Words simply can't describe all that I experienced, but I'll try my best to translate the experience.
Something that I carry with me in life is the concept of the more effort and energy that you put into something, the more you get out of it as a result. So I was very intentional with this process throughout it's duration. It wasn't perfect, and I did have times where I felt like I was procrastinating on making progress. But as I look back on it it was a personal journey that I needed to have, to become more disciplined in self-love, more grounded in self-love.
I had so many deeply beautiful experiences while meditating. The peace, freedom, and joy that you feel while meditating is a beautiful thing that all humans deserve to experience! And it's free.
I figure the best way to show my experience is to share my journal entries which detailed my specific meditative experiences.
One of my assignments was an essay on our textbook, Mindfulness in Plain English by Venerable Henepola Gunaratana. Venerable Henepola Gunaratana was a Buddhist monk, and also had his B.A., and M.A., and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (born in 1927).
I will post my entire essay in a later blog post, & I believe everyone on their meditation journey should consider reading this book. It's an amazing and enlightening read. You can check it out here: http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documents/Mindfulness%20in%20Plain%20English_Gunaratana.pdf
Overall it's been an amazing journey & I'm so proud of the woman on the other side.
I hope this was an interesting and worthwhile read for you.
If you have any questions about my experience, you can leave them here in a comment on this blog post or you can ask me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bluewellnessllc/ and I will answer them here!
You deserve to be radically healed
Thanks for reading, chat soon
Abigail
