{"id":15237,"date":"2022-05-10T14:14:42","date_gmt":"2022-05-10T19:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tm.org\/blog\/?p=15237"},"modified":"2022-05-10T14:14:42","modified_gmt":"2022-05-10T19:14:42","slug":"my-life-without-meditation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/meditation\/my-life-without-meditation\/","title":{"rendered":"My Life Without Meditation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is written by Karlie Everhart and originally published on her blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

 
\nI started meditating ten years ago. At the time, I had suffered from intermittent bouts of anxiety and was looking for a way to calm the surmounting pressure I constantly applied to myself. The only new-agey person I was familiar with was Gabrielle Bernstein, so I bought her book and her companion meditation CD and that\u2019s how I started. <\/p>\n

I listened to Gabby\u2019s meditation tracks until I got bored of hearing the same voice over and over and then I switched to the Calm app and random youtube videos of Oprah and Deepak Chopra. In 2015, I was trained in Transcendental Meditation (TM) and that is what I\u2019ve been doing ever since. <\/p>\n

Meditation has been a saving grace to me in many ways. It keeps me focused, grounded, and sane. Over the years, when I\u2019ve felt nervous, anxious, and scared I\u2019ve turned to meditation. I\u2019ve meditated in my car before job interviews, before big events \u2013 my wedding, my bridal shower, speaking engagements, and I\u2019ve meditated for months in a small broom closet at one of my corporate jobs. I would be let in by our IT guy every morning and afternoon to practice my TM for 20 minutes.<\/p>\n

I often get asked by clients or people new to meditation what the benefits of meditating are and I always stumble through some prescribed answer that I found on the internet, which is all true but feels a bit sterile to me. So let me tell you about what happened when I stopped meditating because I think that identifying what you don\u2019t want helps you to clarify what you actually desire. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m embarrassed to admit that over the last year I have fallen hard off the meditation train. I\u2019m getting back into it now, but this particular day a few weeks ago I didn\u2019t meditate and let me tell you how my day went. <\/p>\n

Despite the 8+ hours of sleep I had gotten the night before, I woke up feeling unrested the moment my eyes opened. I drove to drop something off to a friend, someone cut me off and then flipped me off, I gave them the bird right back \u2013 as if to say, \u201cgood morning to you too.\u201d When I pull up to my friend’s house I pull too close to the curb and destroy the rim of my tire. When I get home my dog excitedly greets me, trying to jump high enough to kiss me on the face. I shamefully scream so intensely at him to stop. The anger way too intense for the crime he had committed. After all, he was just trying to say hi. Finally, I pour my son a bottle of milk, holding him as he drinks it. He fills his fleshy cheeks with milk, something I didn\u2019t notice as his cheeks permanently look like he\u2019s stored a month’s worth of nuts in them \u2013 a feature I hope he never loses. And then he proceeds to spit his entire mouthful of milk in my face, spraying me like a sprinkler. As I stand there soaking wet, milk dripping off my chin and onto my brand new dress, my son is laughing his ass off as if it was the funniest thing he has ever seen in his entire life because after 14 months, it probably was. I admit defeat. A full day of unfortunate events, all before 1PM. <\/p>\n

This is life for me without meditation. Life feels hard and clunky, I have a short fuse, low energy, exchange middle fingers instead of friendly hellos, I trade in moments of laughter for moments of defeat. I don\u2019t feel connected with who I truly am. I feel out of control. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve recently gotten back on the meditation train \u2014 choo choo. It feels good to be back, to be consistent, to be laughing, brushing things off, calm, connected to myself, unbreakable and enjoying every puppy kiss \u2013 even if I do get knocked over every once in a while. This is the impact of meditation.<\/p>\n

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\nKarlie Everhart<\/a> is a life coach and writes in her bio, “I have developed mastery in helping Millennial women through serving nearly seven years in the tech industry, developing myself in management while guiding and mentoring young women to achieve their career goals, earned a Master\u2019s degree in Spiritual Psychology with an emphasis in Consciousness, Health, and Healing and am a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation […], all because I never want another woman to be stifled by her own self-doubt.<\/p>\n

I am committed to giving women the tools to experiencing unconditional self-love, which feels like the biggest impact I can make.”<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life coach Karlie Everhart shares what life is like when she lets her daily meditation routine slide, and what how she feels when she gets back into it. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15243,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,53],"tags":[29,295,224,174,22],"class_list":["post-15237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditation","category-people","tag-experience","tag-meditation","tag-review","tag-tm","tag-transcendental-meditation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15237"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15254,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15237\/revisions\/15254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}