Starting the 21-Day Meditation Challenge

Today is the first day of the Chopra Centre 21-Day Meditation Challenge and the theme for this summer challenge is love.  Hmmm, thought I when I first heard about it but from the intro by Deepak Chopra it sounds very interesting. 

Meditation is something that I love to do, but I don't really do it for very long or at a set time.  Today is the first day I don't have to be at work until early September - one of the good things about working term-time only in an educational establishment - so I am challenging myself to do the meditation in the morning.  This might actually be a really good time to meditate for me as when the new academic year starts in September I will not be starting work until 2pm.  As I usually wake up early and find it hard to laze in bed these days (unless I have zonked out the night before and can't wake up early) it will be good to meditate, have breakfast and get on with the day.  I wasn't too sure what time the meditation would be arriving in my Email account, but it would appear to be about 7am here in the UK.

I was actually up about 5am this morning because I went to bed so early last night.  I am trying to break the habit of waking up about 3am which has partly become a habit from having a snooze in the late afternoon, or early evening.  Last night I managed to hold out until I was falling asleep at the mouse, so to speak.  Maybe I also slept better because I did a half hour meditation last night; spurred on my the thought of the start of the 21-Day Challenge.

Sometime I think that one of the reasons I find it difficult to get into a routine of doing longer meditations is because I feel as though I get 'lost' in them and then don't want to get on with anything else.  The micro-meditations that I do a lot are about concentrating on my breathing to centre myself again, but with a longer meditation I feel as though I can disappear into a white bubble where I can release the physical pain that I may be feeling, but also have the ability to experience just this very moment.  So why am I so reluctant to commit to this?

One reason could be that I don't truly believe that I am worth spending the time on.  I don't think of myself as being important and I suppose I really did believe it when my father told me I would never be anything or succeed at anything.  How powerful these memories can be to be able to pull you back to a moment in your childhood when a parent who has been dead for 34 years confimed your impression that you were noone.  I still have to remind myself that I am worth the time to do things that make me feel complete and worthy.  As the advert says 'because I'm worth it'.