How Meditation Changed My Perspective On My Diabetes
I became a yoga teacher for many reasons. One of them was because of the enormous mental and physical well-being that it brought to my diabetic body and that I wanted to share those same benefits with others.
What I didn’t realize was the huge impact that meditation itself would have on my day to day life of managing a 24 hour disease.
It started with me just taking a pause.
Closing my eyes and taking a deep breath whenever I felt overwhelmed.
Then it turned into sitting for a minute with my eyes closed and just feeling my body breathe.
Before I knew it, without even thinking about it, I was taking these moments of pause to come back into my body, and move away from the thoughts of the numbers and the devices and the food monitoring and all of the other stuff that comes along with managing diabetes.
What Meditation Has Taught Me About My Diabetes
I started to realize that I had a sense of calm instead of that judgmental reaction that comes so easily with diabetes.
So much so that dare I say, I started to think of diabetes as something that I just did, like brushing my teeth.
That may sound totally wild or unrealistic. But we have all these opportunities to react and be stressed; to judge ourselves and to be frustrated.
Meditation calms those waters. It relaxes those reactions, reminds you that a breath, even a pause, can change your day from a rollercoaster of overwhelms to an awareness of, “This is what is happening. I know what to do and then I will move on.”
Since starting my daily meditation practices, I’ve decided that diabetes is a constant companion that must be cared for. I’ve turned my thoughts from “I am a diabetic” to “I am a human being named Azure who has a sidekick called diabetes that is always with me.”
Yes, I (we) have struggles surrounding this disease. But too often we forget how much power we have inside of us and we let ourselves feel like we don’t have a choice to live our best life if we have diabetes.
But that’s simply not true. Take time in your meditation to feel empowered. To feel that you can and should move beyond the struggles and, instead, use each one to become stronger.
Wherever we are in our diabetes journey, we can still choose our best life. It’s not too late. It’s perfect timing. And it feels amazing. 🙏
How To Begin Meditating
In my last post, I talked about a few different external resources you can use to guide you in your yoga and meditation practices. But your body and breath are always great (and perfect) resources.
Close your eyes, breathe deeply, in and out, and repeat a mantra like, “I am calm, I am at ease.”
Focus on the mantra, on your breathing.
That's all it takes to heal and nurture yourself daily.
