Happy Monday! I feel bad for Mondays. While everyone is busy hating them, I’m going to make an effort to be mindful of Mondays. Poor Mondays. I’ll keep you.  Last year we talked a tiny bit about mindfulness and  meditation. I will be the first to admit that I’m not an expert on meditation.  I just know I feel darn good after a few minutes of peace and mindfulness.

I’m giving myself a meditation challenge and I thought I’d mention it here in case you want to play along.  I’m going to meditate every day for the next twenty-eight days. I’ve tried to get into the habit of meditating, but I always end up practicing before and after yoga only.  If I skip class for a week, I’ve gone a full week without focused meditation. I try to practice walking meditation whenever I think of it, but it’s less than once a day.

So here goes, guys. Twenty-eight days of meditation.  I’m starting small. My plan is to meditate for two minutes a day for the first week! I really want to succeed and I think if I get in the habit of sitting down and keeping my mind quiet for just two minutes a day, it will be a real victory.  The next week I’ll work on five minutes a day.  I don’t want to get ahead of myself so that’s all I have planned for now.  I’ll keep you updated.  Are you going to try it too?  I’ve been using this website to help get in the zen zone.

I also created a few images to remind myself to relax, breathe, repeat my mantra and meditate.  For the past few weeks, my mantra has been patience and compassion.  I hate when I cut someone off, get impatient or irritated so I’ve really been trying to work on that.  Wish me luck!

Katie here : Good luck, Sarah! I think this is such a great challenge! I finally did some yoga this weekend with a few minutes of focused meditation afterwards (after a couple of weeks without any), and it felt so good. I used a 20 minute class from YogaDownload that I had on my phone, so I didn’t have to leave the house and could easily squeeze it in during Alex’s nap. The point is, that short dose of yoga and meditation had me feeling good for the rest of the day and left me determined to fit more of both into my days, so I’m excited to take on this challenge with you… I’m going to make one of your images my desktop background as a little reminder to step away from the screen and meditate :-).