Do you meditate?

It’s something I’ve done off and on for a few years. For me, most recently, it’s taken the form of doing Yin Meditation on Sunday nights. If you are unfamiliar with Yin, it’s a restorative yoga practice that has you hold a pose for 5-7 minutes. While your body is busy stretching, your mind is free to roam.

Whenever I’m really struggling with a decision, or if I’m just feeling not right, off kilter, I try to get my butt to a yoga class. It helps. Centering my body, and centering my mind are a big part of me being able to make clear decisions regarding my business and my life.

The yin class I attend on Sunday nights at YYoga is one of the most popular in the city, and it’s taught my dear friend, Farzana. And Farzana has written a book that I want to tell you about.

The book is called I Cheat at Meditation, and I just finished reading it. In it, she outlines a very simple technique to meditate.

I hope I don’t need to outline for you the benefits of meditation. You’ve probably already read a million different articles about how good it is for you. It allows you to feel calm, clear, and focussed, and I can’t imagine any small business owner who couldn’t use more of that action in their lives, myself included.

Farzana’s technique is simple, and once you become more practiced at it, you can do it in a minute. That minute to clear and ground yourself can be taken before a big pitch, meeting, presentation, or just during the day when you’re feeling overwhelmed, and your brain is hamster-wheeling (which seriously cuts down on productivity).

There are 7 steps: set an intention, breathe, release your jaw, gather yourself, the eye trick, the actual meditation, and then coming out. Don’t worry–there are audio files that walk you through the process, starting with a 20-minute meditation, and then scaling down to just one minute.

There were lots of things I liked about this book.

It’s a short, easy read. I read it on a plane on my way to Chicago. I love Farzana’s writing style, too. I think many times when we think of meditation, we think of some old dude with a beard sitting in a loincloth on the top of a mountain. You can see from her photograph that she doesn’t look like that, and I can assure you, she’s not like that in real life, either. She’s very down-to-earth, and a lot like you and I, though she’s been meditating since she was 4. There’s something about the way this book is written that makes meditation simpler, more accessible. It also sings with Farzana’s trademark humour, which helps in the reading of it. She’s a snorter, and I could almost her her snorting in the pages of the book. The illustrations, drawn by Mo Sherwood, also add a light touch. Farzana myth-busts the process of meditating.

The technique is simple and accessible. There are these great audio recordings that you can just plug into and have a seat in a chair, and meditate. It’s really that easy.

It gets you from A to B without a lot of fuss. There’s lots of science-y stuff in here about neuroplasticity and brain waves. But really, as a small business owner, do you really care too much about that stuff? The why it works? Yes, to some degree. But mostly what you want is just for it to work. And it does.

In full disclosure, Farzana is a very dear friend of mine, but I also really genuinely enjoyed I Cheat at Meditation, and, more importantly, I got something out of it.

You can get a copy of I Cheat at Meditation here.

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