Meditation is more Fun than Salad

Salad has a PR problem. Carnivores mock vegetarians for ‘eating rabbit food, or ‘grazing like a cow.’ Unfair, maybe, yet the fact remains that many people consider salad boring. Healthy but boring.

Unfortunately, meditation has acquired something of the same reputation. Lots of people think that meditation is good for you, but not fun. Like salad, or exercise, or not binging on Netflix.

As you may know, my mission here on your planet is to inspire as many Earthlings as possible to meditate twice a day regularly. If Earthlings believe meditation is boring, my task becomes harder.

It is all a bit absurd really. Salads can be delicious, exercise can be exhilarating, and the idea that meditation is boring is simply not true, or at least it doesn’t have to be.

The Periphery of Your Love

So how do we make meditation fun?

I remember having a long discussion with a friendly film director in Los Angeles. He’d been meditating twice a day for 40 years. When I described what I do in meditation he looked disconcerted and said, “what I do in meditation seems similar to what you do except with the love taken out.”

Sadly, he was correct. Some meditation systems appear to leave out the most essential ingredient of a joyful meditation practice: Love.

I believe that meditation, at its best, is about love without limits. Your practice can become a way to connect to the source of love within yourself, and to increase that feeling so that the periphery of your love expands.

Don’t Think, Just Feel

If you want your meditation to be enjoyable, start by getting into the right emotional state. Don’t worry so much about not thinking. (that almost never happens anyway) Just make sure you feel something good.

After one meditation workshop I led at a Silicon Valley company a woman approached me afterwards, her eyes brimming with emotion.

“I’ve been trying to meditate by just watching my breath for two years. It was like herding cats. This experience with the chanting music and love focused meditation was the first time I’ve felt anything!”

Exactly. Music evokes emotion, especially mantra chanting – that is what it is intended to do. Kirtan, or spiritual chanting, is designed to awaken and cultivate a feeling of universal love.

Non-Boring Meditation

If you make a salad with just green leaves, with no heirloom tomatoes, or avocado, or delicious olive oil, it might taste boring, like plain leaves or grass. Rabbit food.

When I was in the wildlands of Australia, I wondered if just eating leaves is a bad thing. After all, some animals like leaves. Koala bears live exclusively on eucalyptus leaves. I thought, ‘Koalas are pretty cute, maybe they’re onto something’, so I tried eating some eucalyptus leaves.

I can report that eucalyptus leaves are incredibly horrible. Koalas are clearly insane. Also, they are not real bears.

Conclusion: Humans can do a lot better than practicing a form of meditation which they find boring.

Other conclusion: Humans should definitely not eat eucalyptus leaves.

Try This At Home

To make salad fun, add heirloom tomatoes, or avocado or olive oil. Make it nice.

If you want to make your meditation fun, add music, and mantra singing and make sure you keep the love in there.

Unlike eating eucalyptus leaves (I found out that they are actually not safe for humans to eat!) you can try this at home. Check out our Bliss Timer app: www.BlissTimer.com

Or perhaps you would like to invite me to run a workshop for your college or company. www.TheMonkDude.com

Meditation can be fun, I promise!