Blog
How Meditation Helped Me Come Off Of Sleep Medications (Guest Blog by Sarah Kleiner)
I’ve experienced insomnia for much of my life, and can recall having difficulty sleeping for as far back as I can remember. My mother will be the first to tell you that I was always the child that had a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep – even as a baby.
When I was 18, my father passed away and I experienced life changing depression and insomnia, unable to function in school or daily life.
Resistance is Futile
One year ago, I had just opened a meditation studio in the commercial district of my neighborhood in Atlanta. I was living in my teeny sub-500ft ‘career transition’ apartment, and I needed a space to work with clients and teach my meditation course. I was so excited to finally have a place of my own to teach, host workshops, and hold weekly group meditations. I re-signed a lease at my teeny apartment, which was in an ideal location and also fit my budget, given the expenses of the commercial space.
My New Secret Weapon
In August, 2017, I was invited to teach my 4-Part Course in Conscious Health Meditation at a conference for women physicians in Colorado. The chance to teach my course to physicians in the conference setting was a huge professional milestone for me. Little did I know how important that weekend in Colorado would be for me personally.
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?
How Menstrual Cramps Taught Me About the Mind/Body Connection
One of my missions in life, particularly in this post-medicine meditation stage of my career, is to help people understand the power of the mind-body connection. Too often in my medical career, both patients and docs interpreted ‘your symptoms are stress related’ as ‘you are a wack-job and a faker’. Here’s a personal story that I love sharing with my clients to illustrate just how much control we have over our bodies, and just how attached (consciously or subconsiously) we can become to our symptoms.
Fear vs Intuition: How Can You Tell?
Have you ever wondered why our FEAR voice (also called the inner critic, or ego) gets SO loud whenever we try to make a change in our lives? Have you ever gotten so inspired by something, only to be immediately flooded with your own negative thoughts and critiques about your idea, to the point that you just give up?
A Little Softening Goes a Long Way
I’ve been thinking a lot about the pitfalls of rigidity recently. Strict adherence to a certain set of beliefs, or a certain pattern of behavior, without allowing anything else in. It keeps finding me, in conversations and in personal experiences. Since I started meditating 7 years ago, I was pretty much convinced that my particular type of meditation was the answer to all of life’s woes. There wasn’t anything that wouldn’t get better, eventually, with enough meditation. I appreciated that other people had practices that worked for them, but I secretly thought to myself that I had it all figured out, and they didn’t. ‘If only they practiced this type of meditation, they would…’
Zen and the Art of New Orleans Jazz Fest (or, Everything I Needed to Learn About Life, I Learned at Jazz Fest)
Jazz Fest in New Orleans. It’s my favorite place in the world, the highlight of my year. It’s not exactly what people think of when they think of spirituality, though. This year I brought a new friend with me, and I was telling someone, after the fact, that she was such a great Jazz Fest companion because not only was she awesome, but she was able to take care of herself so well. That prompted them to ask me: “what on earth happens there that she needs to take care of herself? Isn’t it supposed to be fun?”.
For you Princess Bride fans out there, Jazz Fest is like the fire swamp. Sure, there are obstacles, but once you figure them out (where to find air conditioning, how to find real toilets instead of porta-potties), you can live there quite happily for some time. Here are the top 9 life lessons I have learned at Jazz Fest:
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: