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Can we talk irreverently about meditation for a minute? Irreverently is my favorite way to talk.

Take note of your feelings right now and read this word slowly and with intention.

Meditation.

There are countless emotions, feelings, beliefs, notions, and rules wrapped up in this one little word. I wasn’t shocked to see the variety of responses that rolled into my inbox at the mere mention that I was spending some of my personal time in meditation. I got everything from extreme anger and personal offense to palpable joy and enthusiasm around the topic.

That alone seems a fair bit complicated for something that’s supposed to be zen.

And I don’t know about you, but there’s not a lot of comfort and ease going on in me when I am fighting my mind just to sit in one place.

So what’s the deal with meditation?

I’m so glad you asked!

Meditation, the simple act of sitting still and going inside of yourself, brings with it a load of well-documented benefits:

• Less stress (cortisol)
• More positive energy (serotonin, DHEA, GABA, endorphins, melatonin)
• More efficient sleep (which means more efficient healing)
• Improved immune function and response
• More sustained focus, memory recall, and attention.
• Better sex! (If that thought makes you feel some kind of way, it’s a lighted sign to address it in meditation because satisfying sex is a hell yes in my life)

I need more of all of that in my life. In fact, I’ll take a double order of that cocktail.

I think it goes without saying that not everyone meditates in the same way or for the same result, but I just said it anyway. At the very least we need to understand that meditation is an individual and personal experience. This practice is for you and you alone. Let’s let what others choose for them completely go for now. They make their choices just as you make yours. For the simplicity of this explanation, let’s all focus on our own choices as to how we spend our time.

In other words, focus up and remember what’s important here. You are what’s important here.

The way I see it, we can put meditation into 3 distinct buckets to help us understand it a bit better.

• Bucket 1: Meditation as a spiritual practice of devotion and deeper connection.
• Bucket 2: Meditation as a physical practice of conditioning and rehearsal.
• Bucket 3: Meditation as a mental practice of mindfulness and presence.

I’m going to be talking about these buckets a lot this week on social. I tend to take all of those buckets and turn them into one huge vat of meditation soup in my life, but you do you. There’s no wrong reason to spend some time alone in the present moment.

The present moment. I’m coming through with all the buzzwords today.

At one point in our lives, we forgot how much happens in the present moment. Instead, we spend so much time in debilitating anxiety over what might happen in a future moment, a complete fantasy, by the way. Or we spend our time in soul-crushing depression over what happened in the past, which is completely a product of your imagination. We used to pretend to fly as kids; remember that? We still play pretend as adults, but now we pretend that the moment we got fired from our job 17 years ago is happening again. One of those is fun, and one of those sucks ass.