How I started a Daily Zoom Meditation
For two years, I have been hosting a live meditation on Zoom. I didn’t set out to attend a daily meditation–let alone to host one–but it has become the centerpiece of my day. It began in March 2020 when my friend got a scary diagnosis and couldn’t sleep. My house was across the street from the hospital and down the road from her doctor, so when she got done with her new job of managing her health, she would stop by on her way home and meditate for thirty minutes. Sometimes we sat in an earnest knee-to-knee position. Other times she lay down on the ground under a blanket and I used techniques from regression and hypnotherapy to bring her deep into the stillness of her own heart–far below the understandable anxiety she felt.
It was serious business. Our mood was solemn as we started our trip out of daily life and into a pocket where peace and calm are intact. Two weeks later, the pandemic spread its wings and the world closed down. We moved our daily meeting to Zoom and gave it a fixed time. 5pm. In the first two weeks, she invited a friend and so did I and then those people invited others. Since then, I have hosted a guided meditation every day except for days when I am traveling. Actually, if I am on a road trip I pull over and do it. A few people have done it consistently since March of 2020, and others have stayed for only six months or a year. There are no rules. It is every day and it begins at five and ends at 5:35, 5:40 latest (that is on the days when I doze a little…don’t tell). You can come once or every day for a year. There is no fee. Most everyone has done it from a parked car and a lot of people have done it from the passenger seat of a moving car.
Hosting a daily meditation on zoom has weaved together the two threads of my day–daily life as I live it on the ground and the part of me that knows that everything is made up of energy. That is to say, the aspect of me that watches the app that tracks my 401K, takes care of my children, and tries to be better about recycling and the part of me that has touched on higher energy many times and knows that my true identity feels something like peace and love and is accompanied by a feeling of floating. Even though higher energy has aspects to it that are universal and people experience it in similar ways, within its vastness is my unique Paulaness, someone closely related to my five year old self with her sweet laugh and gentle shyness. In meditation, I remember that I am something other than my body and the particulars of my day.
Before hosting a daily Zoom meditation, I walked the part of me that was in daily life to a yoga studio, or a group meditation or to the private place in my house where I meditated. I left the mundane in order to touch the feeling of peace. With some agency, I embarked on a journey from daily life to a higher plane. Doing daily meditation with a group inside my apartment does the opposite. It brings higher energy to me, no matter what kind of shape I am in. And the moment isn’t always pretty or high minded. Chances are that right before I open the Zoom link, I have been opening Amazon packages or worrying about where my thirteen year old is because she is not home from school. The meditation meets me as I am without singing bowls, the separate room, or perfect scarf or posture. It is as if I am sharing meditation in my dirty pajamas with oily hair, all superior ideas of myself gone.
The sages say the important thing is to meditate, to go inward, and to do it regularly. Release all outcomes and don’t ask for a deeper meditation. This daily meditation has taught me that and also its opposite: to release all inputs, that is to say to come as I am and meet others where they are. This commitment forces me to stick to a schedule no matter how I feel and, in that, is the confirmation that meditation always helps. No matter where I am, I always feel better after. And the longer we have done it together the more of a sure thing the meditation is. Most days, I travel far deeper than I do alone in my morning meditation, which is weird given that I am talking half the time. I am not sure why that is. Is it the regularity of the time? The consistency of the group? The critical path established by all the previous meditations that leads me to expect that today’s 5pm meditation will be great too? It is a mystery. And I like it. You can join any time. Sign up for my free email newsletter and I’ll send you the Zoom link.
