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The Truth About Why I Left My Meditation Community: 5 Ways To Avoid Spiritual Bypassing As A White Person
We were taught, by the old white man, that by meditating we are establishing ourselves in Being, in pure consciousness, which is preparing us to ‘perform action’ in the world. We aren’t renunciates; we are ‘householders’, meaning that we have families and jobs and we live out in the world. We were taught that just by expanding our own consciousness, we were expanding the consciousness of the world around us. As we ‘perform action’, any action, in the world, we are making it a better place. And I believe it, to a point. We’ve all encountered people who brighten up a room just by being in it. And conversely, we’ve all been around those people that suck the energy out of a room as soon as they enter.
This all worked for me. Until a year or two after my teacher training.
Until it all started to unravel.
What's So Special About Conscious Health Meditation (and the REST Technique™)?
Forget the meditation stereotypes! Our philosophy about meditation is simple: it should be easy to do and quickly give you life-changing benefits. The technique for Conscious Health Meditation and the REST Technique is the same, with some minor differences to adapt to the learning format. All of courses use an effortless technique that does not require any focus, concentration or clearing of the mind. The technique triggers a physiologic effect in the brain and body.
What Are The Benefits of Meditation
I teach meditation to both healthcare professionals and regular people just like you. The type of meditation that I teach (online is called The REST Technique, in person is called Conscious Health Meditation) has so. many. benefits.
Personally, here are some of the benefits that I’ve experienced:
Meditation For High Performance: Not Just For Stress
As a meditation teacher, I meet people every day who have pre-conceived notions about meditation. People assume that we have to sit in an uncomfortable position with our backs straight and legs crossed, that we have to clear our minds of thoughts, and maybe even that we need to be hippies with flowing hair, meditating in a grassy field with birds chirping and rainbows. Most people realize that meditation can help with stress management, and maybe even with anxiety and insomnia. But did you realize that meditation is also used as a high-performance tool?
Great Expectations
We all have expectations placed on us. Some are external, and some are internal. Be the best parent, the best spouse, be skinny, wear the right clothes, have a great job, have work life balance. I feel like I wrote the book on setting high expectations for myself- I went to private school, I went to medical school, I got into my first choice for residency, and then I practiced medicine for 10 years in Chicago.
Burnout brought me to meditation. As a result, I was no longer a slave to my stress, to the events of the world around me, and to my reactivity to those events. I felt empowered. Here’s why:
Meditation: The World's Best Parenting Hack
Let’s face it- we love our kids, but parenting is one of life’s greatest challenges! Here are 5 ways that a regular meditation practice can help make our jobs as parents easier:
The Culture of Busy-ness
How many times have you told yourself, ‘I’d love to be able to _____, but I just don’t have enough time’? How many hours have you spent bemoaning the fact that we don’t have enough time to do ______, instead of just DOING it?!
Our motto for the type of meditation I teach is "Do less, accomplish more; Do least, accomplish most; Do nothing, accomplish everything". This is exactly what we want for meditation. Zero effort. Yes, it does sometimes apply to the outside world, but our technique is meant for householders, not monks....
Where to turn when you are flattened
My own #metoo stories have luckily been benign, compared to what women everywhere have been bravely sharing. And for me personally, they have not occurred within my spiritual community. But, as I’ve learned over the past several months, it seems as if there’s nowhere that #metoo hasn’t infiltrated. Spirituality, which in theory ‘should’ be evolved past these pervasive power dynamics and the behavior that accompanies them, is actually no different. I’ve learned that the hard way. No place is sacred anymore.
6 ways to manage holiday stress, Vedic-style
The holidays are coming! Whether you’re excited or you’re dreading all the parties and family time, here are 6 tips to help you manage stress and get the most out of holiday time:
1. Manage your expectations. If you expect apples to fall from an orange tree, you are going to be disappointed. If you expect your family to be anything other than, well, your family over the holidays, you will get needlessly upset over something you can’t change. Treat everything that happens as if you EXPECTED it to happen. That way, there are no surprises.
There is no quick fix
Last month I spoke at a conference about burnout in medicine. The idea is, if the doctors are less burned out, they will be better doctors, and then the patients will be more satisfied with the care they receive. And everyone will be happier. Win-win-win.
I had coffee with my former boss, who is a visionary leader, before I gave my talk. He asked me what I thought we should do about burnout. I suggested a Vedic meditation program for a group of physicians at the hospital, and he replied along the lines of, “yes, but then they have to become meditators. How else can we fix burnout?”