5 Weird Ways to Meditate

Beyond Sitting Still

You know you should meditate more. After all, this ancient contemplative practice has been shown to lower blood pressure, make you more empathic, increase your attention, and change the size and shape of your brain. And lord knows, you need ways to cope with stress.

And yet… It can feel so hard to find your way to the cushion and sit.

Some of the reasons I’ve heard from my clients why they don’t meditate more is that they have trouble sitting still, they don’t have 10-20 minutes to themselves to sit quietly, or they get bored. Which are all legitimate obstacles—I’ve faced each of them myself.

That’s when I remind them that there is no law written that says you must be sitting on a cushion in a quiet room to meditate. Getting creative with your meditation practice helps you get started, or keep going during those times when life seems to be conspiring to throw you off track.

To that end, here are 5 weird ways to meditate. May they help you slow down and get quiet even on your busiest days.

Kate Hanley is a mind-body coach, yoga teacher, blogger, and author of The Anywhere, Anytime Chill Guide. Visit her at MsMindbody.com.

Clean

Legendary meditation teacher ThichNhatHanh writes about “washing the dishes to wash the dishes” in his classic meditation primer, The Miracle of Mindfulness. To transform your household duties into an exercise in mindfulness, let go of the need to “get it done” and instead let yourself become completely absorbed in the physicality of the task itself. If you’re washing dishes, that means savoring the feel of the water on your skin, the sound of dishes clunking in the sink, the lightness of the bubbles.

My favorite household meditation is sweeping—feeling my weight transfer back and forth as move around the room, hearing the swish of the broom on the floor, seeing the pile of crumbs I sweep up without thinking, “We are slobs!”

These meditative activities are multi-tasking at its best—you sweep the cobwebs out of the corners of your mind as you sweep up yesterday’s crumbs.