My Meditation Story – Dia Darling

Today we’re going to talk about meditation, which is one of my favorite things. And I’ve been doing pretty much my whole life, but I’m going to get into that later. So before we dive into my story, I just want to talk about some of the amazing things that I get from meditation, which first of all, is a huge anxiety release. If you’re listened to this podcast, obviously Creatives Crushing Anxiety, you know that that is a goal of mine is to help reduce anxiety. I have generalized anxiety, and it’s something that I’ve dealt with my entire life to different degrees. So when I really discovered meditation as an adult, it seemed like such a gift.

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I can actually remember the first time I googled meditations, was in college. I asked this guy if he wanted to go with me to my sorority formal via text and like two hours went by, and he had not responded. And I was just feeling so anxious and I knew I needed to get mind off of it. So I ended up YouTubing, a guided meditation. And that kind of started me on the pathway to greatness. It was really, really life changing. This was before I was building my own business, or had even thought of having a blog. So it was really interesting to me how big of a role this would play later on in my life, and how it really changed things for me. So from then on, it was every so often, if I felt really anxious and didn’t know what to do, I’d play a guided meditation. Later on, it became a thing where I was practicing visualizations, or if I couldn’t sleep, I would listen to a talk down. And it was the perfect tool because if you have anxiety, you know, a lot of times when you’re trying to go to sleep, your mind is racing and you’re thinking of all things you need to do tomorrow or all the things that could happen or things that happened that day. And it’s really hard to shut off that internal dialogue. So with the guided meditations, I would just be following the instructor’s voice and it would allow me to release today and unwind and fall asleep.

Obviously, with anxiety and depression, I’ve dealt with bouts of insomnia. Meditation has been one of the tools that I’ve always kept in my toolkit that I pull out. It does not work 100% of the time, but it does work enough that I keep at it.

What’s really interesting to me about meditation, besides the fact that it can calm your anxiety is how it just really let you check in with yourself, whether you’re listening to a guided meditation, or you’re just sitting in silence for a couple of minutes, which I completely count as meditation. When I was still at my nine to five, but trying to go on business on the side, I would set a 10 minute timer every day when I get home from work. to just sit in silence, and then I would journal before I would jump into basically my second job, just to really detach from that other part of my day, and to give myself a clean slate and to get things out of my heart and off of my mind, before I would try to do more work. If I didn’t take the 10 minutes I would be anxious, I’d still be thinking about the day, it was a mess. So whether it’s sitting in silence or listening to a guided meditation, it’s really good to check in with yourself. And that’s what I love about it.

The funny thing is, and I’m gonna get a little bit personal here. When I was in middle school… I went to a very, very small school, and it would be six months of being popular and then six months of being an outcast, like it was so back and forth, very fickle girls. I’m sure I was one too. But I remember one time, there was me and a group of three other girls and we kind of separated so 2 of us where best friends and the other two were best friends. And we had best friend bracelets. One day we were on the playground at recess, and two of the girls, including my best friend, come up and they said, “We decided we want to be best friends and you two can be best friends. So we want to switch bracelets.” And then they said in unison, “We’re dissing you,” because obviously it was the 90s and we all watched Clueless way too many times. that’s a memory that’s stuck with me. I didn’t realize this until recently but as a result of that I was obviously hurt. I would try to go to sleep and think about it. So I created this place in my mind where I could go. And it would be me turning off the day. And I would go into this visualized world where I had, like people that I would talk to and regularly, like regular people I interact with. And I was visualizing and meditating in this place that made me feel joy and also helped me detach from the anxiety, the stress and the rejection. And I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I did this as a child, or that, like, I’ve been meditating and visualizing most of my life without knowing what it actually was that I was doing, until literally a couple months ago when I listening to a guided visualization, and I was like, This reminds me of “Dia World” (the very creative name I made for the place I went every night in my mind). So it’s kind of a bit of escapism.

It does have so many benefits and it’s a great thing to have in your back pocket. And there’s so many ways to do it. You don’t have to sit in front of a Buddha statue for five hours in order to reap the benefits of meditation. Some days I meditate like three minutes, other days, I may do an hour. I also am completely fine falling asleep listening to a meditation. Sometimes it’s what I call a Medi-nap, where I lay down and I put on a meditation and I set an alarm in case I fall asleep. Because I know I just need to relax and unwind and meditation allows me to do that. Other times I’ll just take a 20 minute break during the day to meditate and check in with myself and give myself a break.

I also really love meditation for clarity. There have been so many times where I’ve been stuck on something. And when I take that step back, go meditate away from the computer, away from the work and the distractions, and clarity will just pop into my head. It happens a lot at night, to the point that I actually keep a notepad by my bed because I will be listening to a meditation and something that may have been plaguing me all day. I’ll have the solution. And I’ll just reach over and scribble it and then have to translate it in the morning. I wanted to share my story about how I got into meditation. So I would love to hear if you meditate, how you got into it and what

are your favorite parts about it?

Transcribed by https://otter.ai