Yesterday, @brandonwilson asked me this question in response to a post I wrote about practising meditation for slightly over 10 years:
Ten years is a long time. What are the 1-2 aspects of your life that you feel have fundamentally changed over that time period that you attribute to your practice of meditation?
What a great question. I thought all day, reflected on my practice, wondered about what impact meditation had for me. I realised, despite having done year-end retreats and recaps for my life, I had not done much for the state of my spiritual practice. Quite humbled and ashamed by that realisation.
It’s a great question but hard to answer, because it’s hard to tell where meditation starts and where everything else I did begins. Because I do sitting meditation as part of larger spiritual practice, everything contributes towards well-being. Not forgetting to mention other daily acts of mindful, healthy living.
Some other practices I try to do (with varying degrees of success of course!):
?? Working meditation - I use a mindfulness bell Mac app to remind me to come back to my breath every 5 number of minutes. Very useful to stop the disembodied experience of using a computer.
?♂️ Walking meditation - enjoying the steps as I walk, during my commute, or on the way to anywhere
? Eating meditation - choosing wholesome foods, savouring every morsel, and eating mindfully
? Mindful consumption through the senses and mind - shopping, screentime, speech, listening, toxic articles, etc
❤️ Mindful, conscious lifestyle - a moral code that’s Buddhist-inspired, from my time staying with monks
So sitting meditation is just one of the few practices throughout the day. It’s like different streams feeding into a larger river. Drinking from the river, it’s hard to tell which stream it came from. It gets especially difficult to tell when it comes to the bigger things in life, like personal/spiritual growth, breaking old bad habits or emotional knots. But perhaps, there are some smaller, more immediate/superficial and physical indicators could be attributed to (sitting) meditation. I could share more in later posts.