This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 1663 Meditation. Make it what you want it to be,

a personal experience of meditation by Amy Palukowicz with If It Brings You Joy.com,

and I'm just a molecule personal narrator reading to you every day, including holidays.

And I'll keep this intro nice and short, so let's get right to it as we optimize your life.

Meditation. Make it what you want it to be, a personal experience of meditation.

By Amy Palukowicz with If It Brings You Joy.com.

Lately, I've been on edge, and not just, oh, I'm feeling a little funky, edge.

More like, if one more thing irritates me today, I'm going to break something, edge.

I've been trying to figure out what's going on with me as I'm usually a pretty level person,

and then it hit me. I haven't been meditating. Now, let me back up. When I was first really

introduced to meditation, other than just hearing about it peripherally as something monks and

Buddhists did, I'll skeptical. At a friend who meditated regularly, she took classes.

She went on expensive meditation retreats for 10 days or more at a time. She had some sort of

guru who was guiding these classes, focusing on pain and locating your, I don't know, malfunction

in life, problems, past life pain. These sessions lasted for hours. There was a lot of crying,

sobbing, weeping uncontrollably involved. I was done in groups. We would go places, and she would

have to excuse herself to go meditate in a corner for five minutes if she hadn't practiced it that day.

I thought, wow, that looks terrible. I'm never doing that. I will stay dysfunctional. Thank you

very much. All that being said, I've been a loyal yoga practitioner since I was introduced to it

during a dance class in college. I love the feeling of getting through a class only to sit in

Shavasana at the end, floating around in my thoughts. But even knowing that the whole goal of yoga

was to prepare your body for the meditation that occurs in Shavasana, I never equated that with

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