Category: Mentality

Posted in Mentality

A Laywoman’s Guide to Meditation

Posted on by Scoraluna

Where to start, why I think everybody should at least try it once and what all of that has to do with no longer wanting to give a fuck about everything. Put your seat belt on peeps, this is a long one xD

So, if you have read my “The Path to Self-Improvement” series, you probably already know this, but for those who didn’t: I’ve started meditating regularly during the past month.

I’ve always wanted to include meditation in my daily routine, simply because the few times I did try it, it always felt nice. However, I always struggled with keeping up with it or finding time for it every single day. That has now changed, thanks to the challenge that me and my friend Joan did for two weeks. I have included meditation into my daily routine and, in fact, have already noticed that I miss it, if for some reason, I don’t have time to do it on certain days.

Now, I am certainly no expert, probably not even intermediate yet, when it comes to meditation, but I wanted to write this post nonetheless because I noticed that it can be confusing af to know where to even start and there are a bunch of things that I find are important to know, regarding the topic.

How do I know, if meditation is for me?

Honestly, I think everyone can and should at least try to give meditation a shot at some point in their lives. In my opinion you can only know, if it is for you, if you have tried it. I mean, I guess if the concept of sitting still and focusing on yourself for a few minutes doesn’t appeal to you at all, then that’s also okay, of course. However, even then I’d recommend to at least try it once, you might be surprised.

To Guide or to be Guided that is the question…

…and probably a major one that you are likely to ask yourself at the beginning of your meditation journey.

Guided meditations are programs or videos where someone quite literally talks you through the whole process. They are most often targeting a certain topic and help you focus by telling you to pay attention to your body and your breathing. The benefit of such meditations is that it is easier to stay focused than it would be, if you didn’t have a voice that keeps bringing you back to the task at hand, when your thoughts inevitably decide to take a stroll.

Non-guided meditations on the other hand are great, if you just want to sit down and relax for a little bit without having to focus on anything. They are fantastic for “emptying your mind”, so to speak. However, while some people might immediately get the hang of it, most people, including myself, struggle to keep their mind from wandering during meditation, especially when they are only starting out. So it can be a quite hard to just sit down, focus on nothing and have your mind quiet down.

But why is that?

Well, I can of course only speak for myself and what’s going on in my mind when I try to quieten it down, but I tend to think about a lot of random stuff. Starting from all the stuff that I need to do that day, over what’s gonna be for lunch, all the way to what I saw on social media the day before. What usually happens then is that I wonder why I can’t focus and start to focus on why I can’t focus and that I should be able to and suddenly the whole calm and serenity is broken because now I am judging myself for not being able to focus… yeah… you get the gist xD

So I have very quickly realized that guided meditation is the way to go for me, and I’m very happy with it 😊

Where to start?

When it comes to non-guided meditations, that question is easy to answer: either look for some quiet background music you enjoy and that isn’t distracting to you or do it without any music at all. You’ll figure out pretty quickly what you prefer, I’m sure.

When it comes to guided meditations, however, the question get’s a little bit more complicated to answer. There are a ton of different apps and programs out there that offer you guided meditation, such as Headspace or Calm, to only name two, and at least I felt a bit overwhelmed by all of the possibilities in the beginning.

I found that the easiest way to see, if meditation is something you want in your life is by looking for guided meditations on YouTube. There are so many out there, targeting so many different topics and it’s genuinely a very good place to get started.

If you then want to switch to an app for whatever reason, I can recommend reading through some reviews and maybe looking for some comparisons between the different apps; or you can of course also download them yourself and check them out. Most of them do have some free features after all.

Why should you meditate?

Meditation has many benefits and most of them you’ll find out for yourself once you give it a shot, but for me there are two that stick out in particular. One is the fact that no matter what mood I’m in, meditation helps to improve it. Even if it’s just by a little bit but does help.

The second major benefit that I see in meditation is that it helps me focus on myself for a little while and not on my friends or family or strangers and what those might think of me. It helps me to shut those thoughts down for a bit and just focus on what I want for myself.

So, now what does all of that have to do with no longer wanting to give a fuck about everything?

Well that’s easily explained. Meditation forces you to focus on yourself instead of others. Depending on what you go for, you might even tackle certain topics that bother you and you might find that they become much easier to deal with, the more often you concern yourself with them.

So, if you’re someone like me, who used to give too many fucks about too many things, meditation can help you to center your thoughts and make you aware of what really matters. I personally realized that I was spending too many thoughts and too much energy on things that didn’t really matter instead of focusing on a few things that I wanted to matter. It helped me to take a step back from my life and reevaluate what I really wanted to spend my energy on in the future.

Of course, and I think that needs to be said as well, meditation is no miracle. It’s a process. And a process takes time and there will be better days and worse days. Old habits die hard after all and sadly, nothing will magically solve itself. However, I have noticed significant improvements in my life since I included it in my daily routine and that surely has to stand for something, right?

Have you ever considered including meditation into your daily life or maybe you are already doing it and want to share your own experiences? Let me know in the comments 😊

As always, stay safe and healthy, and thank you to everyone who is supporting this blog in any way, shape or form. You’re all incredible and I appreciate every single one of you ❤

~Luna

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Procrastination Frustration

Posted on by Scoraluna

Most of us know it, many of us do it: procrastinating. Including me, so in today’s post I want to talk to you about my experiences with procrastination and why it annoys me so much.

But before we dive deeper into my personal story and experiences, we first have to answer the question: what even is procrastination? Essentially, the act of procrastinating means to postpone something to “later” but the problem about this is nobody, not even you yourself really knows when this “later” is going to be. You just don’t wanna do it right now and so do other things instead. Those can either also be productive things like cleaning or doing work around the house or, and this is the more likely version of procrastination, spending the time watching videos, playing video games, being on social media etc. Now, I’m not saying that those are bad things to do, ef no, I do them myself often enough, and they are definitely great leisure time activities.

So if the activities themselves are not the problem, then what is it? It’s the time you do them in/ the activity you do them instead of. Say, you have a big project due soon-ish and it is so much work that you don’t know where to start. The smart and probably correct thing to do would be to just start, anywhere, doesn’t matter where as long as you do it, after all you can go back, revise your work and improve it. As a procrastinator, however, you do the exact opposite and just spend your time doing other things for so long that it gets too late for you to do the actual work and so you end up postponing it to the next day. And then rinse and repeat until the deadline is literally in a few days, you panic, have to pull an allnighter (or multiple) and the project ends up being rushed.

Sounds horrible right? Why would anyone do that to themselves?

Well, here is the thing, I don’t know. I don’t know, why I don’t get up early in the morning, do my work straight away and then have the rest of the day for whatever it is I want to do. It sounds like such a nice thing to have and yet I rarely ever manage to do so. I don’t even really know when I started procrastinating. I can only remember that I suddenly started doing it and have been doing it ever since. And man, does it suck! 😅

Getting instant gratification from doing all those leisure time activities when you’re not supposed to be doing them doesn’t even feel good. You feel unhappy, guilty and there is this little voice in the back of your mind that constantly goes: “you should be doing work, have you thought about your work?, why are you doing this? you know that you’re gonna be angry at yourself, if you keep this up”…. and so on and so forth. I know all of this and yet it is so hard to break this habit. It’s like being on a roller coaster that goes around and around and around and I’m already sick from the ride and I wanna get off it but at some point some part of my mind has decided that this is my life now and we’re gonna have fun on this ride!

Some people that are non-procrastinators will now probably think “but Luna, this seems to be just an issue of conquering your weaker self, you just have to learn how to be stronger than that!” and yeah, honestly? You’re right, it is absolutely just that. And I guess that is what frustrates me so much about it. Sometimes it works out: I get up earlier, plan out my day, take regular breaks and just get stuff done; and it feels fantastic!
There are techniques that work for me as well: bullet journaling really helps me out, so does breaking tasks down to smaller junks and I have also started to actively decide against working when I feel like I can’t concentrate or lack the motivation to do so, if I have the freedom to do so, of course. All of those things are helping but it would be so much easier, if I could just get off this ride and move on. 😅

I guess the only way out of this really is to keep working on myself and my mindset. However, writing this post, I have also realized something. Not all procrastination is bad I would even go as far as to say that there are even some kinds that are beneficial! Sometimes you might not want to rush into things that you might end up unhappy with/in. That could be jobs, relationships or other bigger choices in life that you might wanna think over again or maybe you have already made a choice, you ended up being unhappy with and now you want to change something by leaving it be for a while in order to pursue something that interests you more.

All of those are situations where you might want to procrastinate a little bit in order to find out what you really want or what really works for you and that is more than okay because if the opportunity presents itself, why not do something that really makes you happy?

~Luna

Still… can someone call a theme park worker, please? I’d like to get off this ride now.

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    Putting myself out there

    Posted on by Scoraluna

    On Tuesday the 21st of April 2020 I did something that I was really scared of.

    I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, decided to put myself out there and did my very first stream on Twitch. I know, right – crazy! I still can’t believe I actually did it. ^^;

    I was extremely nervous and a lot of thoughts were racing through my head: “is everything gonna work out technology wise? Are people even gonna watch me and do I really want them to? Am I gonna know what to say? Am I gonna be able to handle keeping an eye on everything? What are people gonna think of me?” and so on and so forth.

    So, you can see that I tend to worry and overthink things a lot and normally, those thoughts and the uncertainty of it all would have been enough for me to decide that it might be safer not do it but … I did it nonetheless; and it felt amazing! 😀

    Well, I was still super nervous and some things sadly did go wrong as well but towards the end of it I was starting to relax a bit more and by the time I was done with the stream, I was already looking forward to the next one.
    I also realized that every time you start with something new, you have to start at the beginning. There is no shortcut to new skills and that is good. You, me, all of us have to let ourselves be a beginner at… well, the beginning of learning how to do a new thing or activity in order to become good at it.
    It is rare that someone starts learning something completely new and they’re automatically good at at and we shouldn’t put ourselves down when we are not immediately perfect at something.

    Mishaps and mistakes happen, we are only human after all.

    Of course those things are specific to my situation but in general, I can really vouch for trying out something new, maybe even something you might initially be afraid of; as long as it doesn’t actually harm you or anybody else of course.

    I think learning to put yourself out there and possibly getting judged by other people for it is an important lesson that we all have to learn sooner or later because it is a valuable skill for life and can give you a huge confidence boost.

    Has there ever been anything you’ve been scared of doing and ended up doing it nonetheless?
    How did it feel?
    Please, let me know in the comments I love hearing these kinds of stories! 😊

    Take care! ❤

    –Luna

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