Benefits of meditation in my daily life

Benefits I get from meditation are a healthy distance to stressful things and trust in forces that shape our everyday life. It can be very demanding from time to time. It’s important to have ways and means to cope with that.

I work in a small company where most employees have several roles in parallel. My roles are in software design and development as well as customer relations. Schedules are hectic from time to time, yet I need to have a level of creativity and dynamism to make it all happen.

Then there is the family life. Supporting my wife and two young daughters, organizing daycare and school-related things, the pressure of loans on the house, student loans, car payments, bills.. all that and more in these financially challenging times.

All that translates to a lot of mental activity, trying to hold together all the pieces in the puzzle. It’s easy to get into a stressful and easily irritated mood thinking about the pressures of work and family life. There is also a risk of losing focus of all the good things: great people to work with, the love I get from my wife, watching my kids grow..

Meditation helps me to just witness the stressful things. It really helps to see them from a distance. I often compare a state of meditation to standing on a train station: trains (of thought) are constantly passing by, however it is you who should have the power to decide which one to board.

There is a special clause that is found in most business contracts. It is called a Force Majeure, or in legal terms an “act of God”. It basically means an extraordinary event (such as an earthquake, flooding or a volcanic eruption) prevents one or both parties from fulfilling their obligations to the contract. In a similar way I understand that my life contains things and events beyond my control. What lawyers seem to forget is that it can also work the other way around, for the better.

I don’t need to develop an ulcer trying to fight the powers of the cosmos, if I can let it work things out instead. Trust is required to live life that way. Developing that trust has been an important part of meditation, because this is what I live and breathe every day.

I need planning and action just as much as I need the desire for things to happen, but I don’t need to be a slave of those things. Meditation helps me to master those skills. And that translates to everything in my daily life.