Too Busy To Meditate? That May Be An Indication Of How Much You Need It.

Dec. 18, 2009 - PRLog -- It’s ironic that the #1 reason (I hear) people don’t meditate is “I am too busy.”
“I will start meditating when things calm down a bit,” “I will start my meditation practice when things are less hectic, when my children get a little older and there is more peace and quiet in the house.”  Hey, this is exactly the time you need to be able to access your own inner peace and quiescence not when you are living on a white sand beach with only the sound of the surf to disturb you.  

Everyday we find ample time to worry, plot, or fantasize about our future and / or past. We spend dozens of hours “shoulding” and “woulding” all over the beautiful landscapes of our minds. We find time to check our emails fifty times a day, read the hundredth article about Tiger Woods or continually update our Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter pages and yet honing our serenity skills has somehow fallen off the to do list.

I am not suggesting stopping any of the above. Although maybe it is time to reassess our relationships to our email – wasn’t email supposed to make our lives easier, maybe free up some time? When did we become a slave to the ‘ding’ of our Inbox? But I digress.

Being busy wouldn’t be such a problem, an epidemic, if it didn’t go hand in hand with so much mental, emotional and spiritual havoc but it seems ‘busyness’ too often is synonymous with being overwhelmed and stressed out.  Historically, we are now literally busier than ever and only taking on more and more. From more responsibility at work to trying to spend more time creating meaningful real relationships with our kids, partners and friends, being busy is not going away nor is the emotional and mental toll it is taking on us.

Being present is the antidote to busyness.

The degree to which we feel overwhelmed, off-center, generally stressed-out is proportionate to how much presence we have in our lives.  When we are not present (aka, preoccupied by the next item on our to do list or engulfed in the worries of what we should or would be doing if only the planets were aligned) negative ‘busyness’ feelings, like anxiousness and fatigue, start to creep in, until over time they have become a low level but steady undercurrent to our daily lives.

The shape our minds are in – healthy, calm, cantered, and focused - is the foundation from which we experience our world.  If our minds are ‘busy,’ unable to stay focused, steady, and calm our world, through our actions and reactions, starts to feel the same way. Meditation, remedies the inner busyness by creating a ‘less busy’ more present state of mind.  We learn by experience to be present in meditation. Once we have given ourselves the experience of being present we are more able to integrate presence into our hourly, daily, weekly and entire lives.

With a little consistent attention to creating a calm, focused, present mind, we start to fully experience the moment, moving from one task to the next without all the inner dialogue torturing us or taking us away from what is at hand. We experience each moment and within that presence, the anxiety and stress begins to dissolve. Meditation creates a state of mind that helps us to be present and move consciously throughout our day – to just live our lives.

So, in fact the busier you are, or more accurately the busier you feel, may be a direct indication as to how much you need a daily meditation practice.  There is a great Martin Luther King Jr. quote about the power of prayer that could be said of meditation as well, “I have so much to do that I shall have to spend the first three hours in prayer.”


Simone Riml

Simone has been practicing yoga and meditation for over ten years and teaching for the past eight. She is the Co-founder of Meditation Village, www.meditationvillage.ca, an online meditation and support center where people learn how to meditate using a simple step by step day by day mindfulness meditation program delivered in mp3’s to gain real and lasting benefits of a daily meditation practice.

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Meditation Village is an online meditation and support center where people learn how to meditate using a simple step by step mindfulness meditation program delivered in mp3’s to gain real and lasting benefits of a daily meditation practice.