The thought of sitting in complete silence and doing nothing while your laundry piles up and the kids continue to dump the lego bucket on the living room floor may seem unbearable.
However, meditation is more than a five-minute break from the chaos outside your bedroom door, it is a time of introspection and awareness.
Maybe you have tried sitting cross-legged with your palms up and experienced no benefit- well we have something new for you to try.
Mom life is no joke. It is busy, unpredictable, and full of every emotion imaginable; including overwhelming joy.
But between the piano lessons and endless hours of meal preparation we get lost in our tasks.
Research has shown that meditation not only relieves stress but can bring you a heightened sense of being in the moment.
Our moments are fleeting, unique, and precious.
As a parent, we don’t want to miss a hug, giggle, or developmental milestone because we were too busy worrying about how we are going to make 30 cookies for the fundraiser tomorrow.
There are many various forms of meditation available through health experts or gurus, but three of them will hopefully bring the most benefits to the life of a busy parent.
1. Loving-kindness meditation
Metta meditation, as this form is commonly referred to as, aims at cultivating “an attitude of love and kindness toward everything, even a person’s enemies and sources of stress,” according to Medical News Daily.
While sitting in a quiet and comfortable space free of distractions, try to open your mind to receiving love and kindness from friends, family, and yourself, while sending out thoughts of loving kindness to others.
It has been shown to reduce anger, interpersonal conflict, and frustration by increasing a positive attitude.
Who wouldn’t benefit from that?
2. Progressive relaxation
Progressive relaxation is also called body scan relaxation, and it focuses on finding tension in your body and releasing it.
You may have noticed after getting into bed at night that you were clenching your teeth, or stiffening your back.
Stress has a way of holding the body hostage, and we all tense up in different areas when we are holding onto negative emotion.
Once in your meditation area, begin assessing your body from your feet all the way up to the top of your head.
Take your time to really gauge the feeling in the specified body part, mindfully releasing tension in areas that were holding onto stress.
Knowing where you were tense will also help you be more mindful of your state of being throughout the day.
3. Mindfulness meditation
Mindfulness meditation is arguably the most common form of mediation, using controlled breathing to be in the present moment.
This form could prove most useful for a mom because it can be done in 5-minutes or 50-minutes and helps you let go of the stress of that busy to-do list or the meltdown you experienced with your toddler at bedtime the night before.
Don’t wait for conditions to be perfect to try this, give it a whirl while waiting in line at the pharmacy or as you nurse your baby.
Take slow, controlled breaths, focusing on the inhale and exhale. Release thoughts of all else during these moments and just breathe while negativity and fixations flee from your mind.
Finding a good time in your day to make meditation part of your routine will provide you with the most benefit, but taking any time you can get as a parent will surely be better than nothing.
We all let time get away from us occasionally, but hopefully with a little practice in self-awareness our moments will be that much more bursting with the joys of life.