Meditation is all the rage these days.  To be clear, I think that’s great.  But I’ve also recently found, not surprisingly, that a lot of people are down on it and, in my opinion, their main reason for this is simply the fact that it is popular.  We’ve all heard that story before.

I’ve been exploring meditating for myself in a very modern sense of the word for about a year and a half now.  I started using Headspace App, and it was great.  After I had exhausted almost all of what it had to offer, I decided to stop subscribing the following year and have been using other guiding resources since.  I found some free meditations on iTunes U from the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) Lab at UCLA, and am a sucker for anything that is recommended on The Tim Ferriss Show and so have recently been using the Smile Meditation by Tara Brach  as a daily practice (abridged version here).  Transcendental mediation uses the repetition of a phrase or mantra as it’s fundamental source of focus.

I practice daily, with few exceptions, but not necessarily very intensely and not always very ‘well’.  The power of the thing is actually just doing the thing on a consistent basis.  Certain activities such as art also provide similar benefits to meditation, and not all meditation requires you to be seated with your eyes closed.

I believe that virtually anyone can benefit from adopting a regular meditation practice, and so I am bound to bring it up again here.  But for now I wanted to get this article out there along with the relevant links that I can share in the resources page, and get our first resource category started.