10/18 Whole Life Wednesday

Do you ever Zen out while rowing. Can rowing, running, hiking or cycling be meditative? Tell us what you think in the comments. 
It's Whole Life Wednesday and this week's Healthy Lifestyle Challenge is to meditate for 10 minutes daily. A meditation challenge has appeared in every WLC, and it's interesting to see some people really take to it and some people really hate it. What is it about sitting quietly for 10 minutes that brings some people joy and some people angst?
I started using Insight Timer, a meditation app, after my first WLC. I sometimes use just the timer and do my own quiet meditation, but most often I use a guided meditation. I have so much of my own voice and noise inside my head that I find it calming to listen to someone else's voice. 
I often wake up in the middle of the night with a whole suite of worries fluttering through my brain. When this happens I select a sleep meditation and within minutes I'm usually back to sleep. Sometimes it takes only a 5 minute guided sleep meditation, sometimes it's takes a 60 minute guided sleep meditation. With Insight Timer I have many choices to help guide me back to sleep. 
The instructions for our meditation practice are simple: 

1. Find a quiet place to sit, free of outside distractions.
2. You may use any form of silent contemplation you are comfortable with. Some options: a meditation practice you already have; sitting quietly and observing your body, thoughts, and surroundings without judgment; silent prayer or contemplation; or simply observing yourself breathing in and out.
3. Sit and be with the practice you choose for ten minutes.

The WLC and I think this is an important healthy lifestyle practice because:

"We spend most of our time judging and evaluating, consciously or otherwise. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it leaves little room for anything to make a new impression on us. We see something and we immediately know all about it — how it will limit us, what a person must be like, or our presumption of what we’re about to experience.

Already “knowing” is a practical thing, but it can limit your experience of the world. Have you ever met someone and quickly made some not-very-generous assumptions about him or her, only to later discover that he or she possessed far more positive qualities than your first impression allowed for?

The practice of removing immediate judgment — of your body, your thoughts, other people, and your surroundings — leaves you open to discover the value these things might have for you. A value you might otherwise completely pass up.
Therefore, meditation can be a practice in noticing the quantity and quality of the judgment you have.

It’s not about emptying your mind, shutting off thoughts, or reaching some mythical state of nirvana. It’s a chance to see how many of your choices are being made unconsciously by a mind that thinks it already knows the “truth” of everything.

P.S. There is no “perfect” in meditation — the mind does what it does.

Meditation helps to separate your “you” mind from the “machine” mind that pumps out constant decisions. If you don’t see those “machine” mind things when you sit down, don’t worry, in time you will (the voice that just said “I don’t do that” is the machine I’m talking about, by the way).
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If you see and hear a lot of machine-mind stuff, that’s a good thing, too — you’ll have material to work with. And don’t worry if your machine mind is loud. Your job isn’t to shut that down. Your job is to practice having the real you see and hear everything clearly so the real you can make your own call."

Other good meditations apps to check out are Headspace, The Mindfulness App, and Calm. 

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