Breathe Yourself New
Let’s take 3 deep breaths together
In through your nose
Out through your nose
In, no rush at all, slow and full
Out, through your mouth, maybe with a sigh or yawn
In, luxuriously
Out, settling in to a new state
What just shifted in you? How do you feel differently?
I call it The Melt.
First my face softens and relaxes the tension I didn’t know it holding. Then my shoulders drop a few inches, then my chest relaxes and broadens. My heart opens.
Breath by breath.
Notice, how that shift took some time. How differently you felt after 3 breaths, than after just the first.
Imagine how you’d feel after 5 or 10 minutes of that kind of breathing.
Welcome to meditation.
Which has 2 sets of affects: the body, and the mind. The body relaxes with this more present breath. And the mind focuses.
The mind doesn’t necessarily clear, but we become aware of what thoughts are swirling, rather than being caught up in their swirl. We can than face the option of choosing to stay with those thoughts, or to release them, if only for a moment.
I’ve called this episode Breathe Yourself New, because meditation does usher us into a new state of body and mind.
But it might better be called “Breathe Yourself True” because that’s another, maybe less comfortable, gift of meditation.
We face the reality of our lives, and our minds. We get to know ourselves, today. The people we are in this moment.
This week I am offering a sale on the Meditation Albums I have created over the last couple years, which is linked in this show notes of this episode, and you can also find them at nicolemeline.com/programs
So I’ve been thinking about the benefits of meditation, and why we resist it.
Why it’s both so easy and so hard to practice.
Which all adds to why we’ve never needed it as much as we do now.
Our most valuable commodity today is our attention.
EVERYTHING in our world is trying to get our attention.
And our online life, which exists alongside our analog, in-person life, always beckons us. Temps us to drop out and drop in. Drop into that social media app, that entertainment app, even podcasts or audiobooks.
All of these digital options can be wonderfully nourishing and community-building, or they can endlessly distract us from what is really going on, often subtly, in our hearts and minds and bodies.
Part of why meditation can be so hard to practice is that the moment we become still, we realize just how much we are addicted to distraction.
We start to FEEL.
We start to register feelings that might be too big to know what to do with them.
Uncertainty, longing, grief, regret, shame, hope…
Big existential questions about the significance of our lives,
our place in the universe
All the stuff a TikTok video or just an endless list of little to do’s distracts us from.
Why meditate? Because some answers can’t be found on Google.
Some answers are waiting for you in the cosmos of your spirit.
But the best news, the best news, is that like most hard things, we’re made to grow into them. We adapt to them, and level up to a new normal.
The first time you meditate, or first time in awhile, there might be that overwhelming swirl of big feelings and scary thoughts.
The second time, you start to befriend all that. Start to get to know it, and have tea with it.
That’s one way to think about a goal of meditation: to befriend the feelings you otherwise run from. Or numb from.
To have tea with your demons.
And then the next time you sit to breathe, you start to create a home frequency of peace and calm, and humor, which is, I think, the key to everything,
And you begin to teach you body to come back to that.
So you begin to live in the parasympathetic nervous system - the rest and digest mode - rather than the sympathetic fight or flight mode that our world of endless alerts and notifications trains our nervous system to live in as a default.
Meditation helps us to create a new baseline. A new home frequency.
What’s your current home frequency?
Your default energy, mind and nervous system state?
How would you describe it?
What thoughts tend to be on repeat? What anxieties? Worries? Stressors?
One measure of the quality of your home frequency is whether you tend to react or respond. If you are operating at a calm, grounded, mindful home frequency you’re more likely to take the wise pause before responding to the unexpected.
The home frequency I’m going for is what Ram Das, one of our great and comic mindfulness teachers, calls “loving awareness”
Isn’t that beautiful? To look at everything—ourselves, every person we encounter in a day, every task we’re doing—with
loving awareness
Focused presence, drenching ourselves and our people and our work with love. More of that please. Talk about what can change the world.
And just 5 to 10 minutes a day of meditation can train you to cultivate this calm, grounded, mindful home frequency. This loving awareness.
There are so many forms of meditation. My favorite is visionary - focusing not on nothing, but on what we want to be, what we want to become, the world we want to create — within ourselves and also externally in the world. An intentional point of focus. I call it bathing in the future, which is also the name of the previous Alter podcast episode, which is one of my guided meditations on the Resourced Meditation Album.
So if you’re wanting to begin, or re-begin a meditation practice, I invite you to my Meditation Albums.
Each one is a collection of audio meditations leading you on an inner journey to explore the wilderness within.
Each meditation is less than 10 minutes, and leads you into a sacred space of peaceful attention and innovative insight, cultivating the calm and potent presence that nourishes our own creativity, and everyone we encounter.
The Cocoon Album is meditations for transformation, to begin your next chapter
The Catalyst Album is meditations to ignite your creativity
The Walkabout Album is meditations for fresh perspective
The Resourced Album is my new offering, meditations for manifestation, inspired by my Sourced course on becoming abundant
The Weighty Album is another new offering, one that has been requested for a long time, a collection of the 28 daily audio mediations for my course Weighty, a 6-week reset for your body and spirit
And the All In Collection is a discounted bundle of all of these meditation albums
Shop meditation albums at nicolemeline.com/programs, or through the Meditation Album link in this episode’s show notes.
Give yourself and your beloveds the gift of calm space this holiday season. Because
The quality of our lives depends
on the quality of our presence,
which depends on the quality of our breath.
Let’s cultivate a calm and potent presence of loving awareness,
As we alter, together.
