💗 Meditation Monday 🧘‍♀️ - Gold Within the Silence
18:12 Share

Welcome to Meditation for Anxiety. I'm Katie Kramitzos. I'm the creator of the Women's Meditation Network and your guide here. I am so grateful you've taken the time to be here with me right now. This episode is made possible thanks to the generosity of our sponsors. And after a message from them, we'll begin today's episode. If you'd like to listen ad-free, become a premium member by following the link in the show notes.

Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Smart Travel doesn't just cover points and miles. They break down all the financial aspects of your trip, whether that's the best days to book, how to avoid hidden fees, or which fancy travel credit cards pay off and which ones are just an expensive flex. If you want your travel budget to work harder, then dive into the best deals, products, services, and more with Smart Travel from NerdWallet, wherever you get your podcasts.

I don't think I'm alone in admitting that dinners take up way too much brain space. The planning, shopping, budgeting, prepping, cooking, and serving are a lot to handle on a daily basis. Not to mention everyone's opinions about what ends up on their plate. Luckily, Wildgrain has become a huge help. Wildgrain is the first bake-from-frozen subscription box for artisanal breads, pastries, and pastas. Wildgrain's boxes are full of

Thank you.

Are you ready to bring all your favorite carbs right to your doorstep? Be sure to check out Wildgrain so you can begin building your own box of artisanal breads, pastas, and pastries. For a limited time, Wildgrain is offering our listeners $30 off the first box.

plus free croissants in every box when you go to wildgrain.com slash WMN to start your subscription. You heard me, free croissants in every box and $30 off your first box when you go to wildgrain.com slash WMN. That's wildgrain.com slash WMN or you can use the promo code WMN at checkout.

What's the one thing about your health that you wish someone had told you years ago? For me, it was that our gut is the foundation of our overall health and vitality. It's not just about digestion. The gut affects everything from your energy levels and your mood to weight management and even longevity. And this is why I love Bioma. Most gut supplements contain probiotics.

or probiotics and prebiotics at best. Bioma contains all three essential ingredients your gut needs, prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics. Each ingredient is science-backed and third-party tested. So in just two capsules before breakfast, you can ensure the foundation of your health is nourished for the day.

So visit bioma.health and use the code WMN to get Bioma with an extra 15% discount. This is a limited time offer, so don't miss out. Claim your extra 15% savings today. Your gut will thank you. Good morning, ladies. Welcome to our Meditation Monday. I'm Katie. I'm the creator of the Women's Meditation Network. If this is your first time meditating with us, welcome.

If you are here with me every single week and you are listening to all of our free guided meditations across our podcasts, thank you for coming back here with me. Oh my goodness. Before we get started with today's meditation, and when you come on, please say a quick little hello. Let me know where you're meditating from today. So I wanted to share something really cool with you.

So on our property, we have a creek that runs through our property. And this morning I was getting ready for our session today and you won't believe what I saw. I saw a river otter. I have never seen one in our creek before. I think he's gone. He might still be there, but you can see our creek down below.

And he was down there and I got him a little bit on video not much but enough to see that there was a river out of there. It's just these moments that like ah remind me about the deep beauty of life and all of it like all of it. How beautiful is that this extra creature this beautiful creature that I get to be privy to to witness this morning. Okay so

Today's meditation is going to be a little bit different. And as I'll get quite often, I'm sure I'm not the only one. All right, let me make sure I'm getting into it. Sorry for the hiccups. Quite often, my mind wants to fight, wants to fight meditation. It fights it.

sitting down, closing my eyes and focusing on my breath. The first couple of steps of getting into meditation, right? It really fights it. Does yours? Does yours do that too? My mind comes up with all the excuses. Oh, let me just send this one text. Oh, let me just listen to this one message. Oh, I need to go do A, B and C, right? So this morning my mind was fighting meditation. It was fighting stillness.

It took me about an hour to finally like, I verbally get really like, "Ugh!" And I kind of like throw my phone to the side and I'm like, "Okay, stop it!" And then I will close my eyes and come inside and oftentimes that's, it doesn't stop there. Like I'll still reach for my phone, I'll still get up, I'll still be like, "I gotta go to the restroom. Oh, I gotta go get a drink of water." So, primarily I wanted to tell you that it's okay that your mind does that. That's its job is to create all these thoughts and to try and distract you and that's okay.

And today we're going to use this as a reason to practice being in the silence. Because inevitably what happens when we take the time to slow down, to pause, to come into awareness of observation of our thoughts, of our emotions. Inevitably what happens sometimes in a very mild way and sometimes in a hugely big way, we recognize our being.

we hear our true self. And today I'll tell you what happened to me when I finally sat down after our meditation. I'll go ahead and do our meditation first. So as you could probably hear, there are some nature noises around me. We have a lot of parrots, a lot of birds. So you're going to hear some of them in the background and that's going to be okay.

You and I are gonna sit here and we're going to I'm gonna give you very light and gentle guidance today I'm gonna give you more space of silence. So you're gonna hear some of the some of the sounds of nature Maybe you can hear the plane up above me Maybe you're gonna hear some of the noises around you in your space wherever you are today, and that's okay so your job is to be here and just be with your breath and

So you can surrender to the silence and find the gold that is within there. Okay? So go ahead and close your eyes and take a deep breath and let that breath sink you into this moment. Keep allowing your breath to go just a little deeper every time and exhale just a little longer. And just notice that as you slow your breathing down,

your thoughts might slow down just a little and your body melts just a little. As you ease into this space, see if you can just observe any thoughts that might be running through your mind. Maybe it's the noticing of the noises. Maybe it's the thinking of all the tasks that you have to do today. Maybe it's those random thoughts that don't seem to make sense. Thinking about what your daughter ate for breakfast.

the planning of the timing of how the day needs to go, the random memory from when you were six years old. Just observe them and see if you can imagine them just like a cluster of energy, a cluster happening outside of you with you coming back into your heart, into your breath, knowing that you are not them. Today we're going to practice surrendering to the silence, surrendering to the

part of us that wants to fight the pause, fight the slowness. And it doesn't matter why we're fighting, it just matters that we're here. There's nothing you need to do, nothing you need to strive for, just be. Just going to focus on your breath as your anchor. And for this next little bit, I'm going to be quiet while you just focus on your breath, focus on your body,

And if you get lost, if those thoughts start to take you away, just come back to your breath as soon as you notice. And then feel into what's here for you. When my mind starts to wander, or I find it attaching to stimulus that's happening around me, I like imagining the breath bringing me inside, me anchoring into my heart.

becoming one with the movement of my chest as it expands and contracts, expands and contracts. Breathe. What appears for you in this silence? What whispers do you hear? What visions do you have? What is coming directly from your soul, from your spirit? What awareness is? Arise. Now bring your attention back to your breath.

Allowing it to bring you right back here into the present moment and take one big deep breath as we conclude allowing that air to clear everything inside and then exhale and sink deeper into you. What did you hear? What did you see? And it's okay if it was nothing. It's okay if it was just a few more extra moments of silence and that

was what felt so good. So this is a practice I have to do often because like you my brain is always in overdrive. So when I felt that today and I felt myself fighting it, I did this meditation. Sometimes as a little hack, sometimes I will actually take my phone and set a timer for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever I might feel at the moment and I throw my phone across the room

And then I just force myself to be there until I hear the alarm go off. Sometimes I, you know, reset the alarm and want to do it longer. Sometimes that's plenty of time. But almost every time by allowing myself to just be in the silence, no matter how messy it is, no matter how fast my brain is going, no matter what emotions I'm feeling, I usually have some remembrance.

some sort of a seedling reminding me, coming up out of the soil, just reminding me of who I am, who my soul is, what this is all about. Some deep clarity about, you know, our connection. So what happened this morning when I did this, the vision I had was, you know, I use that visual a lot to come right back into my heart and just anchor into it right there. And energetically, I sort of imagine a space opening in between breaths.

And what happened today was this really beautiful image of just fullness. Like, because I woke up really sad. Like there was just a lot of emotion in me this morning. And immediately, it's not that it pushed away the sadness or pushed away the emotion. It just reminded me like, I'm whole. This is who my spirit is. And we're all connected. Like I just saw everything as being connected. This sort of like,

that we're all individual, but we're all connected. You know, we're all individual drops of a large ocean. And in that, it just, it brought me so much peace. It brought a smile to my face. The river otter came to visit.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this this morning. Remember, there are plenty of other meditations for you to access all for free on any of our 20 podcasts, womensmeditationnetwork.com or go search for Women's Meditation Network on your favorite podcast player. Maybe you heard some of the noises in the background here. There were sandhill cranes.

kind of flying over as we were meditating together. And obviously you can hear my loud birds. And maybe you heard a little bit of the wind through the trees. I love you. I hope it's an amazing day. And I hope that this time has been really special for you to anchor back into yourself, to surrender to the silence that's here, and to see the shining gold. It's just waiting for you to take a look. I love you.