So I’m trying to learn how to meditate. Often when I’m traveling for work I have trouble going to sleep, and I thought I would learn how to meditate to help myself fall asleep at night. My main problem is my mind is typically racing with all of the things I’ve just done that day, and all of the things I will need to do on the coming day. When I was in college I didn’t have this issue. Ali and I would go to bed and we would be chatting and inevitably I would fall asleep mid-sentence or while she was talking, and I mean like 30 seconds after we laid down. It was probably 6 to 12 months after graduation before I started having trouble falling asleep at night. Up until this point I have been having Ali tell me bed time stories, my favorite is her version of Jack and the Bean Stalk. She has about 5 that she tells me, they are all based on children’s stories, and let me just say she has become quite the story teller. A couple of problems with this: 1. she often falls asleep in the middle of telling the story, and before I fall asleep (falling asleep while telling the story after I’ve fallen asleep is okay, for obvious reasons). Two, she never goes with me on business trips and so I’m left to fend for myself. Often I try reading, but I love to read, and I’m usually so caught up in what I’m readying that I don’t put it down. In the end, I’m left with the same problem, I stay up too late. This also happens if I watch TV.

What I came to realize is that my head is just too busy thinking, and it didn’t really need to be. It dawned on me that meditation may be a way to control my over active brain. When I was in Evansville back in February I went to Borders and bought a book on meditation. I just started reading it a couple weeks ago. The first 50 pages were all about why meditation was good, the different states or phases of meditation, etc — It was a chore to read. Finally a couple of nights ago I got to the first lesson, which talks about how to meditate. I’ve been practicing that, and so far so good.

In the course of reading the tedious part of the book I learned there are health benefits to meditation as well, most of which come from the fact that you are reducing your stress levels, and forcing (or letting) your body relax more than it otherwise would. These benefits are well needed if not deserved by my abused body, and so I’ve decided to actually attempt to really meditate, instead of using it as a catalyst for falling asleep.

I haven’t started the second lesson, yet, but hopefully it or another later one will tell me how to keep myself from falling asleep, so I can actually meditate. So far I’m just falling asleep shortly after I start.

At least I’ve hit my initial goal of finding a way to help myself fall asleep at night. I hope it continues to work, and isn’t just another one of these fly-by-night trends.