the pacific north witch

5 Witchy Tips for Your Meditation Practice  

Posted on by Shanna S Mathews-Mendez

Disclaimer: this article contains affiliate links to the books I love and my favorite yoga mat. If you click on the link to buy any of these items, you won’t pay more, but I will get a percentage of the sale.

You’ve heard about meditation. You’ve considered meditating. Maybe you’ve even tried it out a few times. But you haven’t managed to establish an actual meditation practice.  

The reasons are myriad, but they usually fall into a few categories: you can’t sit still. Your mind fills with thoughts every time you try it. You get bored. You don’t understand the point of it. You don’t have (read don’t make) time for it.  

Let’s address your reasons first and then get into your practice.  

Why Have a Meditation Practice?  

I tried meditation and yoga around the same time, in my early 30s, when I thought I wanted to be a super cool yogi hippie witchy woman. I went to a yoga class, got halfway through, and walked out. Then, I tried meditating, but my mind was too busy, and I gave up. It took me until my late 30s, and honestly into my early 40s, before I built a solid practice that made a difference in my life.  

So, I would say, from experience, that you should have a meditation practice for many reasons —- first and foremost just to calm your mind in a world determined to have you constantly stressed, distracted, busy, or all three.  

Most of the above reasons for not meditating are reasons you need to meditate. You can’t sit still because you have trained yourself to be constantly moving and doing a million things. Especially if you’re a mom, you’ve been conditioned to be a multi-tasker. What choice do we have? The kids have to be fed, the house needs to be cleaned, appointments have to be kept, bills have to be paid, and that phone call needs to be made.  

If you’re a working mom, it’s even crazier.  

The point of meditation is to give you a break from that. When you meditate regularly, you find yourself more able to slow down, enjoy the individual moments in your life, relish boredom and the creativity and imagination that come with it, and your mind opens up and empties out.  

In short, you meditate to get rid of all the reasons not to meditate.  

From a health point of view, meditation has been shown to lower stress levels and have real, tangible effects on your physical health as well. It has surely had a huge impact on my overall wellness.  

So, your biggest challenge is probably making the time. I cannot advocate enough for the benefits of waking up an hour before everyone else in your household to get in some gentle movement, quiet time, and meditation. It will change your day, which will change your life, and by extension the days and lives of your family members.  

Let’s get started.  

1. Read About It 

For me, the first step to anything I do is to read about it. I read about herbs and roots and teas and natural medicine long before I started playing with it. I read about running before I became a runner. Same with yoga. I even read about writing before I started writing professionally.  

Reading about something I am hoping to do inspires me to do what others have done before me, and it helps me prepare myself mentally for what is to come. Essentially, it preps my workspace.  

Then, when I get started, I have a sense of what to expect, so I don’t feel like a failure when it doesn’t work out for me the way my Instagram Reels say it will.  

The most powerful books I read that discuss meditation are:  

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron 

The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer 

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza 

There are of course many others, but if you started with only one of these books, you would get a sense of the power of meditation and ways to get started.  

What I Learned

To sum up what I learned from these books, I would say to remember that thoughts are naturally going to fill your mind when you sit to meditate. Treat them like television advertisements and allow them to simply pass through. Don’t hold onto them. As Pema Chodron says, tell yourself, “thinking,” when you find thoughts come in, and get back to a blank mind.  

Michael Singer suggests imagining yourself sinking deeper into yourself and going behind your thinking mind.  

Joe Dispenza recommends envisioning yourself lying in the room you’re in, then the room in the house it’s in, then the house in the city, the city in the state, the state in the country, the country in the world, and the world in the universe. This practice gives you a sense of both how large and how small you are in the grand scheme of things.  

If you don’t love reading books, especially nonfiction ones, try listening to them as audiobooks while you’re out for a walk or doing household tasks. I love reading, and I still find myself better able to listen to these types of deep, spiritual books than to read physical books.  

2. Create a Space  

Once you feel you’ve prepped your mental space, it’s time to create your physical space. Try to have the same physical space to meditate every day, whether it’s your office, your living room floor, or your kitchen table.  

You want the space to be clean, uncluttered, quiet, and empty of distractions.  

I meditate on my yoga mat after some gentle yoga every morning in the middle of my living room.  

If this means you need to make sure your space is clean the night before, before you go to bed, every day, then so be it. You will probably feel better going to bed with a clean house anyway.  

There’s something about having an uncluttered, clean space, that helps you unclutter your mind, which is the primary point of meditating in the first place.  

Some people like to light a candle or burn incense. I like to turn on my electric fireplace to warm up the room, regardless of the season. Warm spaces tend to lull you into a meditative state better than cold ones.  

No Words

You may want to set up a sound system, so you can meditate to low, mellow, vibrational tones, which can also help you meditate. Don’t listen to any music with words, which will only offer your mind something to latch onto and distract you from meditating.  

Some people like to use guided meditations, but I think I’m a purist. I prefer to go deep into myself with no one else around. If you do prefer guided meditations, or music with words, I’d love to hear from you in the comments as to why.  

Another option for your space is to have your crystals with you if you collect crystals. If you are doing any chakra work, you might want to bring the crystal or crystals that relate to that or those chakras.  

The point of creating this space is to maximize your potential to be comfortable, feel safe, and put yourself at ease.  

At the same time, you don’t want to meditate in your bedroom or any other space where you tend to fall asleep, or you may end up going beyond meditation and into actual sleep.  

The goal, as Joe Dispenza explains, is to have your body sleep and your mind fully awake. Which is something you’ll only really understand once you do it.  

3. Wake Up 

So, you don’t want to fall asleep! 

And if you meditate first thing in the morning, which I recommend as a way to start your day, you want to make sure you’re fully awake.  

How do you do that?  

I like to wake up, walk around my house, turn on low lights, make sure my kitchen is clean from the night before, check on my space, turn on my heater, and roll out my yoga mat. My body is slowly coming fully awake with this physical and mental light work. 

Then, I brush my teeth, scrape my tongue (thanks Ayurveda), make my bed, and drink a full glass of water. I also put on my yoga clothes that I typically stay in for most of the day.  

All the Yoga

Next, I do about 10 to 15 minutes of gentle yoga. I run through a set that gets all my muscles moving and wakes my body fully up. I do poses standing, sitting, on my stomach, and on my back. I always finish on my back, and sometimes I work in some crunches or sit-ups to get core work in.  

Finally, I lie in corpse pose, turn my watch timer on for my designated time, and begin meditation.  

Unless I’ve been up for hours with a baby or a sick kid the night before, there’s little chance I’m going to fall asleep during meditation at this point.  

4. Start Small  

Now, I say “designated time” above because I now meditate for 20 minutes, which I think is the max recommended time for any standard meditation practice.  

The thinking of a lot of people is that you have to disappear onto a mountain in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for days or weeks at a time to meditate. That you have to do some sort of Buddhist retreat for a weekend.  

Some purists will tell you to meditate for an hour each day.  

Personally, I’m working on the Joe Dispenza meditation to “break the habit of being myself,” which calls for an hour of meditation because I have larger spiritual goals I am currently working on.  

But the truth is that for standard meditation, 10 to 15 minutes is a great daily practice, and 5 minutes is an excellent start.  

I’ve been having my 11-year-old daughter meditate with me when she wakes up during my yoga practice, and I just have her lie for 5 minutes of quiet time.  

That’s huge in this day and age of sound and color.  

So, if you’ve never meditated, or if you’re out of practice, start with 5 minutes and consider it a success.  

And if the whole 5 minutes, your mind is racing, consider yourself NORMAL. 

Just do 5 minutes of yoga and then 5 minutes of meditation every morning for a couple of weeks.  

You’ll find yourself, inevitably, longing for more.  

Increase your time to 10 and 10, then 15 and 15, and work your way up to 15 and 20.  

I have found that with 20 minutes of meditation, as someone who has been practicing for years, that even on my busiest, most distracted, PMS-fueled days, I can sink deeper into myself at least in the last few minutes of my meditation.  

Start small and take your time. This, of all things, is not a race. It is most definitely a marathon.  

5. Build On It 

From your first day of meditation practice, you will be working on improving what you do and growing from there.  

Be gentle with yourself. Have compassion for yourself. Trust the process.  

You will get there.  

Typically, I make myself a fresh, hot cup of coffee after meditation and head to my desk for some personal creative time.  

Today, I have added pulling Tarot cards and oracle cards after meditation for a little bit of divination. I love the idea I heard a while back that praying is asking, and meditation is listening for the answer. I don’t pray a lot; I kind of consider thinking praying, but I definitely listen when I meditate.  

Building and Adding Elements

Then, when I pull Tarot cards, I feel like I’m getting some concrete guidance after my meditation. I’m still zoned in and open to that guidance, as opposed to when I’m fully distracted in the middle of my day. The universe could be sending me big red signs right in my face and I would barely notice.  

(A larger purpose of meditation is to prepare yourself to also notice those big signs the universe sends you throughout the day.) 

After I pull Tarot, I journal on a piece of paper, as kind of a free writing practice, getting my immediate thoughts and the results of my Tarot pull down.  

This practice in total typically takes about an hour. The kids often wake up as I’m finishing Tarot and journaling and they’ll ask to pull a Tarot card or an oracle card.  

And look, I have fallen out of practice many times over the last several years, sometimes for months at a time, and I simply start back over with 5 minutes and 5 minutes. And I build from there.  

The Key to Meditation Practice is to Never Give Up

The trick to building anything in life, including a meditation practice, is to never give up. I find myself, when I am out of practice, saying, “I really need to get back to meditating.” And I know that’s the beginning of restarting my practice.  

You can’t shame yourself for not being where you want to be, or you’ll never get started. Shame is not an effective tool for progress or success. Encouragement is.  

So, consider this your encouragement to get started with your practice today.  

You can now say you’ve read about meditating. Get a book if you like. Choose and prep your workspace. Wake yourself up early. Start small. And build from there.  

Before you know it, you’ll be encouraging someone else to start a meditation practice, and they’ll be thanking you for it.  

And so it is and so it is and so it is.  

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