My experience of 212 days of Daily Meditation and the Intention of guiding ten thousand sessions.
The words that come to mind as I sit here right now are: Quiet, Stillness, Magical, Miraculous, Synchronicity and Flow as I experience my life in this moment. On the 1st of June 2020, I started with the PfP SelvanS Daily online guided meditation group on zoom. To me looking back, it seems miraculous that on each and every day of these past seven months I could show up three times every day – no weekly offs, no holidays (except on Dussera and Diwali days) to guide all those who show up into a state of meditative presence. I believe that this has been possible only due to grace. A divine grace.
Every time I sit to guide a meditation session an inexplicable shift occurs within and it is no longer me, the person with an identity and life story sitting there, but a deeper presence that is flowing out in the form of energy and words that come out of me. In the beginning it was not so pronounced and I had no idea how this is going to shape up when I first started it. So let me tell the story from the beginning.
In April 2020 when all of us were locked down at home, PFP started fully functioning with everyone working from home. Before that, we used to have the daily morning assembly at work with a group session of energy movements (EM) before starting work. I started leading the daily EM on zoom for PFP team and then it expanded into an online meditation session which I did for 23 days. I had invited some others who participants of my healing or mentoring programs to join these sessions. In May we started working from office again and it stopped. Some people expressed that they miss the daily online meditation, which became the seed for the idea of starting a daily online meditation group. I said if we can find twenty participants interested to join, I will start doing it three times daily. The idea was that all twenty participants may not find it easy to show up at one specific time and so the three times daily sessions to enable everyone to sit to meditate at least once every day. I reached out and informed all my contacts and over twenty five people signed up and from the first of June we started off.
I did not have any structure or plan at that time. Slowly as we practiced every day, the six types of meditation practices – one fore each day of the week, took shape. On Sundays I used to talk about the practice for half an hour and then guide a 15 minute meditation practice in the end. This slowly changed into the Sunday long meditation practice that is for 35 minutes. Now we have the 7 different meditations for each of the 7 days of the week – read about it here.
I started writing in July and for the next five months I wrote one article every week covering various topics around a lifestyle arising out of the human spirit – looking at the physical life from a spiritual dimension. The topics and the message would just flow out of me effortlessly until I wrote and posted 25 articles on my blog (you can read it all —> here ).
The first three months I was seeking validation from my participants and constantly striving to increase the number of members in the group as a result of which it grew up to 70 members. Then I realised that the goal is not to teach meditation or convey the importance of a regular meditation practice. Although these were also part of the process, the most important thing is to stay present on the long journey of cultivating the habit of meditating into a lifelong practice. I stopped intensive marketing of the program and the membership dropped to 30 in the fifth month when I went through a period of self doubt and questioning. I even started talking about giving up the program completely or taking a few months break. I can see now, the divine grace that stayed with me and helped navigate this phase, at the end of which the figure ten thousand popped up!
In the past 7 months, I have guided 571 sessions – the total comes to 576 in which I missed 5 sessions due to preoccupation with attending marriages or other events. When it crossed 100th day, I was enthusiastic and announced it to everyone. Now unknown to me a deep rooted intention has emerged to continue this and cross the ten thousand session mark which will happen in slightly over ten years time! The moment I realised this intention and saw it as an achievable goal, a subtle shift occurred within me. A powerful healing energy seems to be flowing out during the sessions. People suffering with severe body pains experience becoming completely free of such pain after a 15 minute meditation session. Lot of people actually experience instantaneous lightness and relief from suffering after the Compassion and Loving Kindness meditations. Real life hurdles have cleared away after the Gratitude meditation sessions. I am witnessing these daily miracles more often now.
My message to my meditation participants – take your time, take breaks, let resistance arise, it will be a long journey with lots of hits and misses. Like the Ganges that will keep on flowing and you can choose to go take a dip whenever you want to, this program will keep on going and I will be present here all the time. You can come back and join – repeatedly – until you have a habitual lifelong practice in place 🙂