If you’ve never meditated, you should definitely give it a shot.

It can be intimidating, scary, overwhelming, along with many other things. It was this way once for me, too. It’s a practice that none of us need to go anywhere for, we don’t need to spend money to do it, and it doesn’t take that much time to do.

Yet time after time I hear people making excuses for why they couldn’t or didn’t.

This was me too.

I had wanted to jump into the world of meditation and mindfulness for so long. I would choose a day, time, practice, resource to “dive in” and then fail to stick to a schedule. A long period of time went by like this before I said enough is enough. I had this desire to travel down this road but I wasn’t even disciplined enough to start. This was a problem for me. One day I decided I was sick of the excuses and sick of claiming I had interest in something I obviously didn’t show any interest in.

My very first meditation was a guided one, I used the app Headspace to get started and now I refuse to miss a day of meditating.

I won’t miss a meditation for several reasons.

Meditating creates capacity for ideas and inspiration that I normally wouldn’t have room for. This is a biggie, our minds are full of thoughts and background noise 24/7. There’s always something buzzin’ around in my brain, and often times the things that are buzzin’ do not matter to me whatsoever. Meditating helps me create space for the good stuff.

Praying is your time to talk to the Universe, meditating is the Universe’s time to talk to you. I use Universe, God, and Love all interchangeably. The Universe is speaking to us all the time, the Universe is guiding us in the proper direction and helping us continue down the path of purpose. When we meditate, we can clearly tune into this communication to hear the Universe loud and clear.

It’s healthy to just shut it down. When I meditate, the background noise stops. And for that duration of time, I’m not thinking about the things that typically race through my mind: paying the bills, cleaning the house, finishing that project. This is my time for complete stillness and peace.

I made a promise to myself to leave the excuses in the past. Even on my busiest days, I realize that I ALWAYS have a free 5-10 minutes to spare. I think about the time we wastefully spend scrolling social media, watching TV, and doing many other lame things that we somehow “make time” for.