Things I Thought Were Silly Until They Completely Changed My Life: Meditation

When it comes to self-help and growth and self-transformation, there is a wild variety of methods, modalities and protocols and filtering through them can be incredibly overwhelming. And some of them can feel so silly or even completely ineffective, especially if not done correctly; there are a lot of layers to filter through. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is fantastic in a lot of ways because variety is necessary for a varied world, but finding the ones that are right for you can take time that most of us don’t have.

But I did. During 2020, my job at the time went to work from home and I suddenly had two extra hours in my day and I used that time to dive head first into self-improvement. I wasn’t happy with how I felt or how much energy I had during my days or how my internal, emotional environment was affecting my life. So I watched documentaries and podcasts and participated in seminars and I tried the methods I learned about, keeping the ones that helped me and letting go of the ones that didn’t.

With that in mind, here are things that changed my life so much that I’m still doing them five years later.

Meditation

Meditation is a gigantic topic and I’m not even going to try to cover everything on it. Countless books have been written on it and I have read a couple, but I found that the most effective methods (for me) were the ones I created myself once I understood what meditation actually is.

Over the years, when I’ve talked about this with others, I’ve heard countless people confidently state that they “aren’t good at meditating” or they “can’t stop thinking” or their mind just keeps racing. They are under the impression that mediation is clearing your mind completely of thought.

But it’s not. In fact, if you have attempted to meditate, only to discover that your mind is racing with thoughts, then you’re actually doing it correctly! The true goal of mediation is to become the observer of your thoughts and your body and your person. To observe the default programming that runs in your mind without you realizing it, because understanding it is the only way that you can start to change it.

Physiologically speaking, this is done through changing your brain waves from the Alpha and Beta frequencies, which cover 8hz to 30 hz, down to Theta waves, which is 4hz-8hz. Alpha and Beta are where we are actively doing and focusing; I’m in Alpha waves right now as I’m writing, for example. (See The Science of Brainwaves from NueroHealth Associates for a good breakdown of brain waves and what they do). Theta waves are conducive to intuition and emotions, and so this is where we want to be during meditation and this is accessed through calming the mind and relaxing the body.

To be clear though, a calm mind isn’t necessarily a silent mind. In my experience, this is where most of us get confused. I certainly did when I started my practice years ago. Calming the mind, in the way I’ve used it, is more akin to taking a step back and paying attention to what is going on in my mind. However, it’s important to point out that relaxing the body has to come first; it is very difficult to have a calm mind in a tense body as they are thoroughly intertwined and symbiotic.

Meditation really should begin even before you take up your preferred position. I sit sometimes, I lay down (in savasana, for yogis), or sometimes I go for a walk. I operate with hyperactivity, so sometimes I need to move my body in order to relax it and be able to focus my mind. Before I do any of this though, I decide what I want to do in my meditation.

What do I want to do? It might be a surprising question to those who think that mediation is supposed to be thoughtless and silent. Still, yes, but not thoughtless. Think for a moment about everything that our brains are doing inside of our skulls simultaneously any time you’re awake. Not only are we breathing, but we’re seeing and feeling and moving muscles and hearing and making connections to memories and forming language and simply processing massive amounts of data. When we are able to stop all of the extra input from our physical bodies, we can use our minds more powerfully, in a much more focused way. So, before we begin, it’s best to decide what we want to do with all of the extra processing power.

With an intention decided, find the position that works best for you and close your eyes. Using an eye mask helped me for longer, deeper meditations. Begin to focus on your breathing, not necessarily controlling it or deepening it, but try to simply observe how it feels moving through your body. As you do this, allow your muscles to relax, perhaps even take stock of the levels of tension in your body, starting with your toes and going all the way up to the top of your head.

Okay, now your body is relaxed, but you’re hyper aware of how many thoughts are bombarding you constantly, all the time, everyday, every minute of every day, without your express consent. Good. What are they? Look at them. Feel the feelings that run under the surface but are hardly ever acknowledged. Look at the foundations of anxious thoughts. Where do they come from? Why do they keep pestering you days, or even years, later?

These aren’t fun questions. I wouldn’t say that mediation is a particularly fun activity most of the time, but it is helpful, effective and accessible to everyone who takes the time to pursue it. Asking myself why I kept having the same thought and allowing myself to face the uncomfortable histories of my life and sit in the discomfort they kicked up has allowed me to properly place them in the past where they belong.

Instead of carrying my anxiety and doubt and self-hatred and thoughts of unworthiness around with me all the time, I asked myself why I had them. I sat in the 360° memories in my mind and held the face of my ten-year-old self and told her that she didn’t have to accept the anger being spewed at her from an unhealed parent. She didn’t have to accept the words of jealousy and insecurity projected onto her from siblings and parents and peers. She didn’t have to accept the idea that she was less worthy of life simply because of her clothing size.

There is a term for this process in self-healing circles: shadow work. It’s the process of stepping into your shadow, the part of you that is comprised of the pieces that you thought you had to get rid of or hide in order to get what you needed to survive. If you grew up in a highly religious household, like I did, there were a lot of aspects of myself that I felt like I could never show or express or I would be told that I was bad or evil or a heathen. I knew, for example, that I wanted to write erotic romance novels when I was young, but I was so ashamed of even being a sexual creature, I certainly couldn’t openly express my desires in written form! That was a sin, and so I would be a sinner if I did that!

The power of meditation for healing is strong though. Despite denying my true self for so long, after I went through my shadow work, I finally started to write my authentic voice and stories. I am incredibly happy to say that I finally published my first, full-length erotic romance novel in April of 2025! (available here, if you’re interested!)

Another way that I used meditation to clean up my mind was with word association meditations. I’m a huge word nerd, so it makes complete sense that this method would work really well for me. However, it’s much more about concepts, and your relationship to them, than it is about just words or vocabulary.

What I do is this: I sit or lay down, focus on my breath as I take deep, slow breaths and consciously allow my body to relax. Once I am relaxed and only active in my mind, I visualize a chalkboard or whiteboard and I “write” words/concepts that I know I am struggling with, like money. So I’ll “write” the word “money” on the “board” and then observe the immediate associations that I have with that concept, but I always come back to the initial word/concept in between. So, if I were speaking, I would say: Money, Greed. Money, Shopping. Money, Generosity. And so on.

So by this exercise, I see that I have some mixed feelings about money. Although I did associate it with generosity eventually, my very first conceptual association with money is greed. It belies a deeply seeded idea, given to me as a young person, that people who have money are greedy. Some are, some aren’t, and this is my perspective now, but I had to work on it. I had to consciously go through a process of letting go of that judgement of people who have more money than they need.

When I originally did this meditation, it helped me understand that I actually had a fear of becoming wealthy and having it change me and I have for a long time. I remember fearing it when I was about to move to New York City to pursue a career in acting and musical theater; my eighteen-year-old self even wrote out a promise to myself–which I signed!--stating that I wouldn’t change my character if I became famous. Now that I am pursuing writing as a full time career, I equally need to heal my energy with regard to money because bills still have to be paid and so I need to accept the possibility of making money from my books and writing, and then accept that it could end up in some kind of fame–or maybe just notoriety!

I did this word association with many ideas that I struggle with: Fat, hope, sin, success, etc. It really helped me understand my relationship to the world around me and it gave me a launch point for other modalities and meditations to work through what I’d uncovered.

The last kind of meditation I want to detail is something else that I created on my journey to feeling better in my body. It is a full body appreciation (or gratitude) meditation, where I focus on every different part of my body, one at a time, and I express gratitude and appreciation for its function in my body. This was inspired by one of my first psilocybin experiences when I looked at my hands and recognized, for the first time in my adult life, that my hands are simply incredible and they do so much for me and I take them for granted every day! I was already aware of the stereotype of psychedelics users just staring at their hands, but I finally understood what was probably difficult for them to articulate whilst tripping: our hands are amazing.

For this meditation, if there are problem areas in your health (not health advice, just what I do), send even more gratitude and love and even forgiveness for not functioning properly to those physical areas. As you go through the list of your anatomy, focus your awareness on the area of your body as you express your gratitude; anatomy charts are readily available online to familiarize yourself with the locations of your different organs.

So I would like to close with a guided meditation that you can read while in a meditative state and fill your body with gratitude and appreciation.

Full Body Appreciation Meditation

Thank you feet and legs for carrying me and moving me

Thank you toes for balance

Thank you ankles for giving me bounce

Thank you knees and hips for giving me movement and flexibility

Thank you spine for your stability and range of motion

Thank you arms for carrying and moving things

Thank you shoulders and elbows and wrists for your range of motion

Thank you hands holding

Thank you fingers for feeling and for your dexterity in doing everything I need

Thank you eyes for seeing

Thank you nose for breathing and smelling and filtering

Thank you mouth for talking and tasting

Thank you teeth for processing my food, my fuel

Thank you ears for hearing and listening

Thank you skin for feeling–and keeping me together!

Thank you bones for your structure and protecting my heart and lungs

Thank you bone marrow for producing new blood cells

Thank you muscles for allowing me to move

Thank you connective tissue and tendons and fascia for keeping me together

Thank you blood for powering my muscles and moving fresh oxygen around

Thank you heart for pumping my blood and letting me feel my emotions

Thank you lungs for breathing and alchemizing air

Thank you diaphragm for making air flow in and out of my lungs

Thank you stomach and intestines for processing food and absorbing its nutrients

Thank you kidneys and liver for filtering out waste

Thank you pancreas for producing insulin and regulating my blood sugar

Thank you uterus for self-cleansing and ovaries for giving me the power to create life

Thank you genitals for expelling waste and giving me pleasure

Thank you brain for receiving and translating and remembering and creating

Thank you body for working in harmony and symbiosis, thank you to every cell, every atom and every photon that makes up my matter.