The Ripple: Day 2 of 40 Days

This 40 day meditation that I am doing is called Burning Inner Anger. It comes from the Kundalini Yoga tradition, facilitated by the amazing kirtan singer/yogini Snatam Kaur. With a video broadcast on YouTube, she demonstrates and explains this meditation which combines pranayama (breathwork), mudras (sacred hand-positions), and mantra (chanting). So far, over 1200 people from 28 different countries have signed up as participants. The purpose of the meditation is to...that's right...burn inner anger, or release inner anger, on both a personal and global level. There is a power in numbers.

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I have done several of these 40 day meditations in the past, the first one assigned to me by a friend who at the time was studying, and is now teaching, Kundalini Yoga. This practice has helped me get through many challenging times in the last several years. And I am grateful to have it as a useful tool in my life. In general, I feel that meditation is beneficial on so many levels...decreased stress and tension and anxiety, being able to be more present in the moment in day to day life, generating an overall sense of well-being and happiness. But, I also feel that it has the ability to help us heal our hurts and grow as humans.

I am the type who prefers to cut to the chase when I am experiencing emotional pain, life's challenges, sadness, and other frustrations. I don't like to stuff or hide my emotions, for I know they will just build up inside and show their ugly heads again someday, again and again until they are properly dealt with. I also don't like to over-indulge my negative emotions or hold onto them as part of my identity. Rather, I prefer to deal with what I am going through by looking it in the face, seeing how it has affected me, accepting it as merely my present reality, forgiving, and then really and fully letting it all go. For me, this is the quickest, though not always the easiest, way to move through hard times and to start to bring lightness back into life.

Meditation has been useful in helping me do this, for it helps me create a safe space to be quiet, to sit with things as they really are, to accept this reality, and to give myself the love and intentional time I need to heal. Making the commitment to do a meditation for 40 consecutive days helps me maintain that focus, helps to ensure that I deal with all of the layers of built up gunk hiding in the dark corners of my being, and brings me to a peaceful place in the end that I didn't think possible at the beginning of the 40 day period.

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This current meditation has been great. I didn't feel that I had any major issues I needed to deal with when I started it though. I started it because I wanted to get back into a regular meditation practice for general well-being, and happened to stumble upon this group meditation online.

I sit in the meditation focusing on finding whatever anger from the past lingers inside my being, so that I can look at it, accept it, let it go and be freer of anger. It is surprising to see how many little things I am still holding onto, how much of this anger has a foundation in feelings of fear and feelings of being wronged. And so I am doing A LOT of unexpected forgiving of random people and events, A LOT of releasing. And I am noticing as I do this more and more each day, I am coming out of my meditations feeling lighter and lighter. Like I am not carrying as much of a burden on my shoulders. It adds up, carrying around all this extra residual anger. When we let it go, we are so much freer to move around with lightness in life! It leaves us with more room inside to be filled with grace and ease and light and love for all around us.

I do this meditation not only for myself, but for all of life. For we are living in times when there is A LOT of anger in the world. It is an exciting time, to watch people all over the world fighting for their rights, justice, freedom. Inspiring, really, to see so many standing up for what they believe in. It is hard to imagine that my small act of meditation can help create positive changes directly with some event on the other side of the world.

While it may, I think it is more probable that my small act of meditation can help create positive changes indirectly throughout the world, by working directly in my own immediate life. As I practice releasing my angers and fears, those things that hold me back from fully and openly loving others, I am able to be more present in my interactions, more intentionally kind and loving with others. I am able to share with others that inner sense of well-being that I have cultivated.

I have to believe that this has a ripple effect.

The more that people are bombarded with positive interactions with others, the more likely they will be to create more positive interactions with others. We are here to help each other. There is power in numbers. May our positive ripples spread wide and far!