Oct 25 • Dad Wellbeing
🧘♂️ Meditation is For Hippies!
During a pretty exhausting deployment in 2007 I was looking for ways to calm my brain that was wired 24/7, Google said meditation was the answer.
Easy.... 😎
It was IMPOSSIBLE!!
I lay on my bed and tried to breathe and empty my mind.
I could manage about 15 seconds before the monkey with cymbals was back making a ton of noise in my brain.
I tried again, and again, and again.
Not once could I manage, even after a few days of trying. So I filed meditation in my "dumb shit that doesn't work" section of my brain and left it for 15 yrs.
I declared to my soon to be wife, "meditation is for hippies!" 😡
After 10 deployments, marriage, 2 children, several friends being killed and seeing a lot of battlefield trauma... I was close to breaking point.
To speed the story up, I paid $5,000 to attend a veterans retreat in Mexico that used physician supervised psychedelic therapy.
THE single most important part of my treatment post-retreat was meditation.
It has been a game-changer!
I have missed literally two or three days of meditation since then and can easily go for an hour.
It turns out I was doing it wrong.
In Mexico, I learned to meditate properly.
I was doing the typical Dave thing and overthinking it. It is waaaay easier than I thought and helps to completely calm my body and the ADHD monkey with the cymbals in my head. 🐒
Try it!
Here are the steps:
- Breathe in through your nose whilst counting to 4, hold for 4, Breathe out through your mouth for 4, hold for 4.
- Repeat #1
Thats it!
If your mind wanders, THAT IS NORMAL! Just bring it back to counting.... rinse, repeat.
Don't beat yourself up about it. The magic is the breathing as it regulates and calms your central nervous system.
It's free.
It's easy.
You kind of have to breathe anyway.
It has no side-effects.
It can be done anywhere.
It can be done with your children.
It demonstrates to your child how to regulate emotions.
Sitting cross-legged in a leotard while listening to whale farting music is entirely optional.... 😂
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🧘♂️ Meditation is For Hippies!
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