I’m a huge fan of meditating. It’s so good, right?
Its benefits to your mindset and creativity are nothing short of amazing and increasingly crucial to your relationships and your business, whether you work in corporate land or own your own business.
There are many apps out there to help you get started and improve your practice. I use Headspace but you only need to Google ‘meditation apps’ and you will find one.
My meditation practices focuses on the breath in the body. If I get lost in a train of thought, I put my attention back on my breath. Also, the sheer pleasure of breathing for it’s own sake is a beautiful thing.
But sometimes I notice at the end of my meditation, I can feel spacey and ungrounded. It’s likely the spacey quality means that the meditation has effectively calmed the thoughts, but I don’t feel integrated into my body. Boo.
This is one of the reasons I’m firmly convinced that meditation can be different for men and women.
From an essential point of view, the masculine seeks to be empty, while the feminine wants fullness. We each have masculine and feminine within us, but as a woman, I lean towards wanting fullness, in this case integration of body and mind.
A great antidote for me the spaciness is toning the vagus nerve. I wrote about the vagus nerve here.
High vagal tone is like good muscle tone—it’s associated with health and a slew of other benefits.
One of the best benefits is it activates both the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous systems and when these work together, they give you the calm, focused feeling and being in a state of flow.
There are many ways to tone the vagus nerve. My favorite is to chant OM. You can also hum or sing or pump your naval to your spine. Exercise and meditation both help.
Another way is to experiment with focusing on one of several areas of the body while you are breathing: the heart, three inches under the naval, or the yoni.
So if you are experiencing this spacey quality, play with toning the vagus nerve or focusing the breath on a particular area.
