Finding Flow in Meditation for the New Year

Last week I talked about being in the “flow” when it comes to feeling your authentic self and how it is useful for parenting. Being close to start of the New Year, you can access your “flow” to develop vision of your New Year’s resolutions or goals. When we’re in the flow, we have more clarity of our goals and resourceful solutions to reach our goals. It is important that when you start goal setting for the New Year, you are clear with what you want to achieve. To help you with that, I am going to encourage you to meditate to get in the “flow”.

To be honest, it isn’t easy for most people to get in the “flow”. What is the “flow”? Some people may describe it as being in alignment with God’s will or the universe. Some people may describe it as being in tune with the true self or the authentic self. Some describe it as a sense of energetic vibration or light and feeling of wisdom, peace, joy, and compassion.

One of the ways to get in the flow is to meditate daily. Yes, you read that right, DAILY. Not every other day, not 2x a week. Daily is important. When you meditate daily, you are carving a neuro-pathway to the “flow”.  The first few times your brain doesn’t know how to get there, but as your keep carving the path, you will get better at being in the “flow”. Similar to implementing a healthy diet, going on one-day juice fast isn’t going to make you healthy overnight but eating clean nutritious food every day for a few weeks will start to change you. It takes all your good habits to keep you healthy and it takes a daily meditation habit to get results.

There are many benefits for meditating.  Some of the benefits you will observe are:

1. Feeling more calm and less anxious
2. Less impulsive
3. More creative
4. Less yelling at your children
5. Greater awareness of your feelings and thoughts
6. Less reactivity
7. Lower blood pressure
8. Better relationship with others
9. Better mood
10. Better focus on achieving your goals

How do you start?

You can use a timer and set it to 5 minutes to start. You can have it chime once every minute if you want. Gradually increase it to 20 minutes over the course of 3-6 weeks. I often find the sweet zone of meditation occurs somewhere around 12-15 minutes. You can try using apps like the Insight Timer or Calm from the iTune App Store. There are both guided meditation and simple timers on both of these apps.

When you practice meditation daily, after approximately 2-3 weeks of daily practice, you may find yourself suddenly in “flow” and it will get easier to be in the “flow”. Getting into the “flow” is like a looking for a mental path through the forest. Our mind and body intrinsically know that the “flow” is out there but we have forgotten how to get there. When you practice meditation, you’re carving a road into your neuro-network to go into the “flow”. So the more you practice, the more obvious the road will be. From there, you can ask for clarity in your goals and vision you have for the New Year.

Let me know how your meditation practice is going and what challenges you experience. Subscribe to my email newsletter and I will send you my next blogs in my meditation series. Next week, I will write about common challenges of starting a meditation practice and easy solutions to overcome them. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at yeh.wendy@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.