dream | act | succeed

Million of people world wide might be real experts when it comes to the topic of just doing nothing. But for me, I simply can’t do it even though it sounds so easy:

“You might just get up on a sunny Sunday morning whenever you wake up and simply do nothing productive until you will eventually fall asleep late at night.”

What sounds like the dream for a lot of people out there, is in fact my worst nightmare. Just doing nothing? No thanks! I can’t afford to stand still! I have goals to reach! I have things to do! I have projects that are waiting for me to get finished.

But sure, you might be right! Calming down is such an important thing about life as well. Every athlete needs to recover! We grow stronger not primarily in our training sessions, but later on when we recover and our muscles start to heal the wounds we have created. Therefore, I guess, I need to become able to relax on command. Just doing nothing for a while and let the world turn a couple of minutes without me.

CALM DOWN, TAKE A DEEP BREATH, REFRESH YOUR MIND!

If you want to be ready for the challenges life is throwing your way hard time, you might need to be able to take a break! To get your thoughts straight and sorted. Or how do you think will you be able to handle the high stress and intense pressurized situations in a race car cockpit, or in the office, or whatever you are doing?

Meditation and I, not the best partners yet. In fact, I still can’t even take a couple of minutes for myself and just think about nothing. My mind is as active as a nuclear power plant. Always trying to be productive. Always looking forward to doing more.

But is this really what is going on? Or do I simply claim to be like that in order to be able to do so much stuff every single day? Is this an inborn skill, or have I acquired that over time? Am I really such a workaholic by nature, or have I decided to become one and now just life the “dream“?

Having talked with many people about this topic already, we figured out that this is a kind of behavior I always had inside of me. As a kid, I would “work” for hours on my “projects” and build the next Lego castle or start to reduce my body weight significantly through daily sport sessions after school when being only 12 years old. I decided to get in shape, and well, from one moment to the other changed my complete life. The nutrition, my behavior and my daily routine as like this would be the most easiest thing to do in the world. And in fact, for me, it really is the most easiest thing in the world. Studying for school or later university? I would be able to study 12h a day and longer without any effort. But that can’t be healthy. Enough is enough! I need to be able to take a break as well, right?

But I can’t help it. There is this internal drive I have. It demands discipline and a hard working attitude towards life.

Sure, sometimes it’s not bad to have an internal drive like this! I can just do stuff. A lot of it! Without any effort, without any complains, without the need to convince myself. I can simply go on for ages, doing one thing after the other like I will do today. But sure, this might not be the most healthiest approach ever!

Our bodies need to recover. Our brains need to recover. We need to recover.

The daily stress I experience, the pressure I load on my own shoulders. This can’t be healthy! Especially in this ever changing environment we are all living in these days. COVID19 here and COVID19 there. People do not know how the future might look like.

Sure, I could go on like this forever, telling you the advantages and disadvantages of such an internal drive, but well, this is meditation 4.0!

What I need to do is to focus even more on the meditational side of life. I need to form a habit of doing this whenever I feel my internal drive to “drive” me crazy and just calm down a bit. Refreshing my mind and try to slow things down. Sure, as always in life this sounds way easier than it actually is, but in the end, it’s just practice, isn’t it?

Like racing, or running, or doing our workouts. The more we practice the better we will become. And the better we will become, the more easier it will feel to deal with things life is throwing at us the hard way.

I always want to move on in life and do more stuff, sure, but looking at this thing more closer, even a “standstill” of a meditation practice might in fact help me to perform better later on in life when I will need to do more tasks in less time.

The solution?

I will continue with doing my guided meditation sessions regularly and try to escape my everyday life here and there by doing extravagant stuff like having a walk in the forest or watching a good documentary without doing sport or anything else simultaneously. I guess, the key factor is the awareness of what is going on in my head. Not just doing a meditation session once a week and feel happy for finally having done it, but instead listening to oneself and develop a sense for what is really going on inside our heads and bodies.

Awareness

Sure, we can be aware about so many different things in life, but even if we notice something that is going on in the inside of our heads, well, we hardly challenge these emotions and try to find a solution that goes hand in hand with our body and soul. Instead, we might try to ignore them, fight them and transform our daily meditation practice sessions into a competition that we try to win.

Not the amount of time you meditate is important but the way how you react to the meditation session. Sure, we are not really used to such an approach in life. We only know statements like: faster, harder, longer and higher! But that’s simply the wrong approach towards meditations.

Calm down and reconnect with yourself. If you can keep a cool head while all the other people around you are starting to freak out, well, then you have really mastered your subconscious mind.

Have fun meditating and don’t forget your fancy buddhist monk inspired orange meditation robe. You neighbors will love it, seeing you in this thing walking barefoot in the morning dew.

See you next time!