A couple of weeks ago, while on vacation, I came across a website for the Online Meditation Crew. It is a group of people who get together via Twitter to sit in meditation. The people involved don’t necessarily know each other in real life, but they all share a common bond.
I have wanted to meditate for quite some time, but despite the occasional start, have never been able to make it stick. I started seeing this group as an opportunity to prod myself (or shame myself) into developing a practice regimen. As it was vacation, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to start anything, so I tucked away the website figuring that I would get back to it once I returned home.
I did pretty good. I had been home only a couple of days when I decided to look up the OMC again and see what I needed to do. I found out that the sitting on Wednesday was scheduled for 4:00. I figured that that would be easy to do as I was sitting at the computer all day, trying to get caught up on work. In the middle of the afternoon, I was getting pretty tired and suggested to Ellen that we go to Home Depot to pick up some of the things for around the house projects that we had been looking for.
We arrived back home at 4:10. First thing I noticed on Twitter was the people who had checked in for the meditation session. Damn, I missed it.
Still, I tried not to look at it as a setback, but rather an opportunity to follow along on Twitter a little more. The next day – Thursday – the call went out that the session would be at 2:00. I was bound and determined to make that one.
It was great. Great being a relative term. It felt really good to be sitting, and even better to be doing it knowing that there were others “in the room” with me. Just prior to 2:00 I “checked-in”, so I couldn’t hide behind the facade of anonymity or shyness. The practice itself wasn’t anything to write home about. I was just happy to have sat quietly for 15 minutes. I figure that once I get used to doing it, and it becomes a regular part of my life, that those details will come. I don’t need it to be perfect right out of the gate.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t call it practice, right?
