There are times when the benefits of my meditation practice really stand out to me. Today (8/21/2023) was one of those times. Here’s what happened….
David and I have been on our digital nomad journey for coming up on 5 weeks now. We discovered about 1 hour into our travels that we packed way too much! The conversations about sending stuff home started before we even landed in Ireland for our layover, and had escalated to full on planning mode by the end of week 1! How we were going to make this happen, we weren’t sure, but we knew that we couldn’t keep all the stuff we had and carry our heavy suitcases around for the next few months.
Luckily, we mentioned this to our Airbnb hosts at the time, and through some conversations with their daughter, we discovered the process of sending unaccompanied baggage through companies who specialize in that sort of thing.
Fast forward to today, when we were putting the finishing touches on our box for pickup tomorrow, and David discovered a detail that we had overlooked. We were supposed to use brown packing tape instead of sello tape (which we had to look up and discovered it was the clear tape that we bought and had already wrapped our box up with 🤣).
So here’s the moment! David shared the news with me, and I said “Ok, so we need to go buy some new tape.” And that was about it. No freak out, no heart jump. No, “Oh no! We made a mistake, what are we going to do?” Just a simple response, that resulted in a few quick decisions.
As it was Sunday, we had to make sure the Home Depot type store was open. We also had to make sure we had enough time to walk there because Uber isn’t a thing in this town, and we didn’t find any taxis waiting around to take us. So, we walked out the door, walked the 1.3 miles to the store, got what we needed, and had a nice stroll back to our Airbnb through a new part of town I hadn’t seen yet. We even stopped and sat in a cute square and got a drink.
So, what does this have to do with my meditation practice? Well, one thing that happens when you have a regular meditation practice is the part of your brain that reacts to emotions (the amygdala) shirinks. This increases the ability to respond, as opposed to react, to situations like the one I experienced today. Pre-meditation, that situation would have been quite stressful. I would have immediately jumped to a reaction, worrying if the store would be closed because it was Sunday, and it was evening. Would we have time to get it all done? What would happen if we didn’t? Any on and on….. But instead, I was able to respond, make some choices, take action, and enjoy my evening!
Thank you meditation!
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