For October's challenge, we're asking you to get healthy, from your feet to your teeth to your brain.
Welcome to The GOOD 30-Day Challenge (#30DaysofGOOD). Each month, we challenge our community members to do something that will improve the world around us—and our own lives. The challenge for October? To get healthy. In an effort to help us all rise to the occasion, we're going to assign one small task every day. Each morning, we will post the challenge on GOOD.is and Twitter, along with a testimonial from someone on the GOOD team who's already completed it. We invite you to complete all 30 mini-challenges with us! Today, we challenge you to:
Meditate for 15 minutes.
I’ve been advised to meditate by friends and family for as long as I can remember. I’ve also been repeatedly asked how one should meditate. Apparently being ethnically Indian makes me expert on all things related to meditation and yoga. However, I am neither an avid meditator or yogi. While I’ve dabbled in both, its always seemed to take too much of a concentrated effort to incorporate meditation into my day-to-day life.
The 15 minutes or half-hour that I try to allocate to sit in silence and “listen to my thoughts” always gets bumped to the bottom of my priority list. So for this month's challenge, I thought I’d give it another shot.
After a hectic and meeting-filled day at work, my mind was anything but calm. When I got home, I cleared a space, took a deep breath, and tried to clear my mind (all the things I’ve heard are essential to “meditation”). Five minutes into my meditation quota my mind was still far from calm—worries from the day raced through and I was even thinking about how amazing Ryan Gosling looked in Crazy Stupid Love (clearly not things you should be thinking about as you meditate!). Needless to say, my 15 minutes were soon up. But when I opened my eyes, I felt refreshed and surprisingly rested.
The 15 minutes I spent were far from calm and clear, but they gave me a moment to stop, breathe, and take it all in. It made me realize that meditation is not about creating a perfectly blank mind, but about creating 15 minutes of time just for you. Trust me, this perspective has definitely bumped up meditation on my priority list.
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Ready, set, go! Good luck completing today's challenge. Share your experience on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook by using the hashtag #30DaysofGOOD, or let us know how it went in the comments section below.
Tomorrow's challenge: Read labels on products you use.