Today I meditated for an entire 20 minutes. For me, that’s a long time, as someone who struggles to still.

Here’s what went down for today. The first 10 minutes was basically a paired muscle relaxation (PMR), tensing muscles (e.g. hamstring, glute, bicep) and releasing them, silently and mentally whispering the word “relax” to myself. I have been practicing this on and off, inconsistently the last year, first learning about the effects of PMR on reducing anxiety; this practice was introduced during my dialectical behavior therapy group.

After this paired muscle relaxation exercise, I transitioned to another “breathing” exercise, focusing on the breath and again, classically conditioning my body and training myself to relax the nervous system on command. It goes like this: inhale, hold the breath, count to 4 seconds, slowly exhale. Do this 10 times in a row, which makes up a single round. After the round, repeat a mantra, something to the effect of “Whenever I say easy easy easy, my body goes completely relaxed.”

There’s multiple motivations to reinstate my meditation practice.

First, “have you started a meditation practice” is more or less the first comment that you’ll receive upon joining the Stretch Therapy forum.

Meditation goes hand in hand with stretching and as important (and dare I say: more important) than stretching itself. The idea is to increase your awareness, allowing you to be mindful of where (throughout the day) you hold tension; in what areas, in what muscles. Only then can establish new habits, new patterns that replace the (now) unnecessary — perhaps at one point in time, the tension served a purpose — tension.

Second, I’m currently on the path of becoming the greatest dancer I can possibly be. Not by anyone else’s measuring stick, but my own.

And I recognize as part of this journey, one of the biggest hurdles is the mental side of dance. The psychological challenges are ones that I’ve avoided in other disciplines, including tennis. I was once a good tennis player, on that path of being a great tennis player, but I could never “perform” under stress (for reasons I won’t get into here). The same stress feelings followed me in other activities including playing guitar, singing, and now in dance.

Furthermore, I believe that the self-induced stress predominately stems from what Michael Gervais calls FOPO: fear of other people’s opinion. I won’t go into too much detail of that here (check out my book reading progress) but I strongly believe that if I stay the course of practicing mastery, stay the course of mitigating the impact my worry thoughts about what others think of me, that something great will happen.

What is this greatness that I am visualizing?

I’m not sure.

But I can feel it.