How to use meditation to help you make your next move
Letting your vision for public service evolve
Have you lost your job in public service or a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging position, or some other area hit by rapidly shifting societal change? Do you feel like the good work you were doing was cut off midstream and you’re not ready to let your commitment to it end?
After sticking to my vision after in the very public firing I told you about in the article, “Your work was never just a line item,” I knew I wasn’t done making that vision happen. I took a new job — not exactly the one I would have preferred — but it enabled me to work on the thing I really wanted to do on the side.
Soon, doing that work on the side wasn’t enough, and I searched for and found a different job that I thought was all I was dreaming of — it allowed me to do more creative, innovative things without as much impediment — or so I thought. I’ll tell more of this story another time, but suffice it to say that people in that organization only tolerated a certain amount of innovation and I was drawn into the work of maintaining “what always was.” I started to get miserable. At least that job was short-term, and both of us decided it was the right time to let the contract run out.
At that point, I was more and more convinced that I was called to bring together the pieces of myself that were kept separate — my yoga practice and teaching, my passion for developing leaders, and my ability to make change in organizations. To help facilitate the process of discernment about my next step, I enrolled in an advanced yoga teacher training. As part of that, I took a six-month meditation teacher training. In it, I learned the contemplation meditation.
The contemplation meditation helped me form the vision for the small business you now see me starting. It helped me to tune into my inner voice and the higher power I believe guides me to discover what my next steps were.
How to do the contemplation meditation
Grab a journal and something to write/draw with, and make a comfortable seat for this meditation. Do you struggle to get comfortable in meditation? If so, look at this 2-minute video first:
Journal for a while to create a question about your next steps to live out your vision. Make it specific enough to address your current situation without limiting it too much.
Use these journaling prompts if helpful:
What are my next steps about …
What am I learning and unlearning right now?
What am I passionate about?
What worries me most right now?
What are the biggest questions I am facing right now?
Make a comfortable meditation seat, or lie down. Keep your journal nearby to jot down thoughts or images.
Set a timer for 5 to 20 minutes (or longer if that’s comfortable for you). Add three bell sounds in between the starting and stopping bells to remind you when to move onto the next part of the practice. (I use the Insight Timer app because you can make customized timers like this in their free version. Or you can keep resetting a kitchen timer or the standard timer on your phone for each section.)
Notice your breathing for 1-5 minutes.
Bring the question about your next steps to mind.
Drop the question into your mind. It might help to imagine it dropping into the space between your eyebrows for 1-5 minutes.
Drop the question into your heart. It might help to imagine dropping it into the center of your chest for 1-5 minutes.
Drop the question into your soul or the cave of the heart (or whatever word works best for you.) It might help to imagine dropping it into your navel center for 1-5 minutes.
Notice what thoughts, images, words or feelings arose for you. Write those things down in your journal.
You can do this meditation just once or repeat it for a few days or weeks until you begin to get some clarity about how to move forward. Over time, guidance about your next steps will likely emerge. It did for me. I got clear about why I was increasingly frustrated with organizations that resisted change so much. I also caught the vision of myself as a healer, helping people recover from burnout.
Would you like a fully guided meditation contemplation meditation?
Become a paid member of the Defy the Trend community and get one of my guided recordings of the contemplation meditation.