It’s my experience that people who are tied to movement need unmoving mediation even more than others. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and commonly our strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin.

If you are very strong in movement, and it is wise to exploit that, but it is also wise to explore it’s opposite.

What sitting meditation does, that no other practice does, is island the mind. It takes the attention away from any hypnotic crutches–music, movement, chant, etc. and offers us the challenge of seeing our thought-habits in their nakedness and working from there. It is always a challenge. It is often frustrating. It commonly reveals to us who we really are, and that can be discomfiting.

For all of these reasons, meditative practice is called Raja Yoga. It is the king (raja) of transformational practices, the one that gives the greatest boons, and–although it is simplest–is often the most difficult.

Make your Raja Yoga simple. Do it first thing in morning. Set your alarm. Sit until the alarm goes off. Set the alarm again. Write gratitude thoughts to fill the (somewhat!) emptied mind with nutrition, until the alarm goes off again. Wa-lah! You have completed your meditation for the day.

This blog post originally appeared on http://prasanayoga.com/ thank you to Eric Shaw.
Photo by Lesa Amoore