Why I Meditate and My Recent Weeklong Meditation Experience

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What are you waiting for? Good night. On this very special kind of over-the-holiday season episode, I'm going to share a little personal note here about why I meditate, my recent week-long meditation experience, and what it's physically done for me. And I think a lot of you maybe follow come here for the, how do I exercise? How do I strength train? How do I lose the weight? How do I gain the muscle? How do I get fat loss off my belly? And hopefully stay for the mindset. Because of all things, if I could give you a decade of your life and health spin, all you have to do is think positively about aging and you've got it. So if you're struggling with that, if you are saying things like, I hate aging, this is for you. And this might just blow you away.

I'm Debra Atkinson, you're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman, and it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve.

So first of all, had you told this like active, very active, love to exercise entrepreneur with a two-armed company that she was going to not know the schedule daily before going to a 7-day retreat, meditate for up to 35 hours a week, get up and not have a matcha or a coffee to be at meditation by 6 AM on most days and 4 AM on some, I'd have heavily doubted that this was something I wanted to do. And yet, before my first week-long retreat was done, I knew that there would be a second. After 6 weeks of an online meditation course with a small group and a coach, I was able to make a 20-year-coming change that was long overdue for my personal health. And that was in the fall. And it was the next spring that I attended my first week-long retreat. My daily meditation habit was fairly consistent. So I would have to admit it wasn't perfect. There were days I missed, but when I missed, I missed it. Not just the, you know, that nagging feeling of, well, I said I was gonna do this and I didn't do that. It wasn't that. I had the, like, something is missing. Like there's an elevated way of thinking and feeling that I get through my day differently when I'm meditating. And that really, after that 6 weeks, was, the realization was for me, there's some things here that are in this part of my life right now that I can't get where I'm going bringing them along. So suddenly losing them was not a loss at all. It was a gain. So if you're looking to potentially make changes, but you're really finding it hard and you feel like you're anchored in cement, I understand that completely. So I, I share all of this to tell you, okay, so I was deeply ingrained in it, right? That was in the fall. It was the spring that I attended my first retreat. So I think September I was done with this 6-week training program. In April, I went to a week-long retreat And daily meditation habit was pretty consistent until September, I believe it was 30th of 2023. I got a puppy. That was my gotcha day for Moses. And it was, you know, like being a newborn parent. I don't know how long, how many times we were up in the middle of the night, but enough that it made, you know, telling him, oh yeah, no, at 4 o'clock I'm meditating. I'll, I'll deal with you later. That was not gonna happen. So we all know who's in charge when you bring a baby, whether four-legged or two, into the house. So I returned to meditation, but I wanted to completely immerse myself in it again. And, you know, I knew that wasn't gonna happen at the same level unless I, you know, had the get out of regular day-to-day life. 'Cause it's really hard to not be pulled back in and anchored to the habits and the things you see and sit in the same place and drink outta that same favorite cup. I'm guilty of that. I definitely needed to return. So I'm sharing this Why I Meditate episode to share really a little testimonial about meditation and the work specifically of Dr. Joe Dispenza. So if you have the opportunity to read a book or listen to it on audio, I highly recommend it. Questions I'm going to answer here. Number 1, of course, why I meditate, what happened in a recent week-long retreat that really kind of pulled me back in and anchored me to this, how meditation is not as woo-woo as some might think, and what it is and what it isn't. So during a recent week-long meditation this November, so it had been about 18 months since my last one. So November of 2024, and the previous one had been April of 2023. It felt like so, so much longer ago than that. I don't know why, but that's what it was. Something profound happened to me. So we do at these week-long retreats without hopefully giving it away. There are these healing experiences where people who are attending the conference, if they've got a health issue, they can volunteer to be what we call Healees. And then there are groups of healers who get together and we actually kind of support them and we're all focused on helping them. We don't even know what it is that they're dealing with and we don't need to. So it's like you can wish well someone, you know, and you don't have to know what they're dealing with, I just figure almost all of us are dealing with something, right? My chair, in the middle of a meditation, we were being led by Joe Dispenza. He was at the microphone leading a room of, I believe there were 1,500 people present. My chair began to shake. Now we had eye masks on, or eyes were closed, but I would have sworn someone had their hands on the back of my chair and was shaking it like violently. It's like it was moving. I was moving and I wanted to open my eyes and turn around and I was thinking, am I doing it wrong? Like, you know, is one of the volunteers trying to get my attention? And I knew just instinctively, of course they would not do that. I just like, I'm going to ride this out. And then all of a sudden, my arms, you know, we are hands open to the person who's lying on the floor amongst our group. And my, from my elbow down, my forearms began to move as if I were like dribbling basketballs in, in hands, just wildly. And it, I couldn't stop it. And I didn't start it. It just was going and it, it wasn't wild and flailing. It just, my elbows seemed like they were in place, but I have no idea how long it happened. I was just like feeling it and watching and I'm like, okay, I'm just going to stay with it. I'm going to stay with it because something's happening here. So suddenly that continued, my forearms are bouncing uncontrollably, the chair is moving. I was only mildly aware of the woman next to me on my right. I was the far left person, so there was another group, but not for like 6 feet away. So I had a woman on my right and I was mildly aware of her and taking some deep breaths. She actually might have been crying. Someone in our group was. I have no idea how long this went on, but a few minutes, I would guess. I wasn't scared. I was calm. I was simply conscious that something was going on. And when that healing was over and Dr. Joe concluded the meditation, I made eye contact with the woman on my right, and she very briefly said, I'm so sorry if my arm was flailing. She's like, I couldn't control my left arm. It just was moving. And I was like, no, no, I had my own thing going on over here. I'm like, no. It was fine. She apologized and we talked a little bit more before we left the room and she said, I'd never experienced anything like that. I shared what happened for me. It was like, I've— this is my 8th week-long retreat and this is the first time anything like that has happened. She said there was definitely something going on. We also pass a clipboard around this group because the individual who was getting healed in our group, if they wish to, they can reach out and thank us via email or contacting us otherwise. I noticed the woman next to me on my right was also a Debra, different spelling, but I thought, what are the chances of that? How interesting. So as we left, you know, I had never seen her all week. It's a big room, a lot of people, everybody kind of going their own way, and you know, just all I knew was her first name. That was it. The next morning, that was our last day actually of this retreat. The next morning I was returning from my very last walk on the beach before I needed to jump in the shower and leave for the airport. I was waiting, had pushed the button at the elevator, and she came right to me and she's I said, looked at her and I'm like, what are the chances? Like we sat together last night, never seen each other. And she goes, well, I was thinking of you. And I'm like, oh. And she said, I wanted to tell you something. She said, you know, last night, you know, we talked about that and I haven't heard out of my right ear for years since I was young. This morning I can hear out of my right ear. And this is something that, you know, Dr. Joe and others also talk about, is that healing that happens when you help someone, when you give to somebody, you also get back. So this isn't all that unusual if you know the way meditation and the way giving comes back to you. So 45 minutes later, I go upstairs, I'm going to my to the elevator, go to my room to shower, quickly pack up, and I'm calling an Uber. And it is about 11:00 AM the morning after we concluded this retreat. I need to be at the airport really at about 12:00. Have not given myself a lot of padding. And I am looking and demand for Uber drivers was apparently big because everybody had the same idea. So my wait was longer than I was comfortable to make my flight. So the first Uber they matched me with, I can't cancelled because it was like a 23— exactly a 23-minute wait. I was like, ooh, that's more than I think I have. So I cancelled that. I booked again, same problem. They booked me with the same driver, same 23 minutes away. And so I'm worrying about, okay, now I'm wasting time and some ride is better than no ride. So I book it. Immediately after, I mean immediately, seconds later, I get a text from the airline. United says my flight is delayed from 1:54 takeoff to 2:17. That is exactly 23 minutes later, the same as my Uber wait. Hmm, coincidence, right? So one of the things that people will say is if you're on the right path, start looking for doors to open that wouldn't open for anybody else. Start looking for serendipity, those kinds of things that just seem like, huh, is that an accident or is it just things you're attracting? They open up for you. So my flight being late, finally takeoff, You know, we even take off later than suggested delay, made my connection worse. Like I had thought I had, okay, I'm fine. Well, now I'm not feeling fine, right? And there were many passengers on that flight in the same situation. So I have to climb over, 'cause of course I have the window seat. I climb over passengers to deplane, I dash to the gate, But looking at the app, having done all this, once I'm at the gate, it becomes apparent that it wasn't another gate. It was the same exact gate. They were just deplaning and changing the flight number. That was my plane. So there was no nervousness about getting to my flight on time, no nervousness about would my bag make it to the flight. It was right there with me. It all worked out. So again, it was like coincidence or not so much? Which would you choose to believe? And then there's this. Before I left for the retreat, for about a month or so, I'd been feeling my right knee just bothering me a little bit. Now I've had 42 years of good exercise, like lots of it, teaching aerobics on cement floors, running on concrete, and I do high-impact exercise now for my bones, right? But I've never had an issue ever with these. So it seemed like something on the medial side— that's the inside of my right knee— was bruised or swollen. Wasn't acute injury and wasn't really due to any major training change. If anything, I reasoned it was chronic, but it seemed odd to me that, you know, it just came out of the blue and then it was suddenly there. I'd opted recently to do a Prenuvo total body scan, not for any reason or that reason alone, but I thought, well, maybe this will tell me what's going on. I've wanted to do it for a few years just to look at soft tissue, bony structure, space between vertebrae bones, and, and know anything I could to improve my— I hate the word hacking, but really change the way I take care of myself with the knowing of what's going on. So I found that it was offered locally. I did that, signed up, and for those wondering, it's literally a total body scan, looks at muscle, skeleton, organs, assessing space between spine and joints, what might be problematic lesions. And to give you an idea, I learned a lot. I have a little degeneration at cervical spine, flattening of that curb, something I knew or suspected, but I was able to confirm. You know, I also learned about Baker's cysts behind each knee, which surprised me but completely explained the right knee issue that I was experiencing. And I learned a lot about both ankles that confirmed something I learned 16 years ago. And I did see a little benign lesion on my liver that might be something to watch, and really minor things, but I'll elaborate on that in another episode in in case you're interested about the Total Body Scan. Let me know if you're hearing this, if you'd like to know more. But physically now, there was a visible reason for what I'd experienced as just a little aching, not when I walked, but when my leg was straight. So now it made sense because that is one of signs and symptoms of Baker cysts. And, you know, since returning home the week after the meditation, I'd done high-intensity interval training, returned to regular 30 or 60-minute walks. Been strength training heavy, and I did so twice while on site at the retreat as well. So it wasn't as if I had rested it. I've had no discomfort. I'm only just realizing it because we only focus on what's bothering us, right? That no longer is. Strange but true. So I'm not saying that meditation could heal your weight loss resistance problem, your gut issues, or your bone-on-bone situation, but there is research to suggest that. There are testimonials of individuals who have grown back a thyroid by meditation only. They've healed cancer or they've restored their hearing, as we heard a little earlier. Could meditation open doors for you? That's— I'm gonna rhetorically ask you that question. I don't know it, but I do know I feel better and I operate at a higher level of energy, a higher vibration, and everything on this earth is energy and vibration. You're at some frequency. Low emotions— hate, dislike, fear— those are very, very low vibrations. Joy and love are very high vibrations. You've experienced that before in your life, I'm sure of it. When you're in love, you might still have had stressors, but you're in love, and so it it works so much better. So I leave you with that to think, you know, I do know I feel better and I operate at a higher frequency. I do walking meditations, I do seated, I do lying meditations. It's one of the greatest gifts I've given myself. And I don't mean the week-long retreat so much. So don't think about the retreat itself, the cost, the hotel, the cost, the being away, the cost. There's a cost of all of it. But the daily practice of it and coming back to it even when it's hard to focus. My entire week this time I thought would be so different. I thought my second week would just be, I'm gonna go to the next level because I was at one, so now I'm at two. Well, it's not how it worked. There were a lot of things on my mind, on my emotional mind before I went in, on my work-minded mind when I went and it was really hard for me to stay focused and not drift to things I'm worried about or concerned about or need to do. And I had to constantly pull myself back in. I mean, at times it was like me talking to me was, are you kidding me? Like you've flown all the way here, you've taken 9 days away, you're boarding your dog, you're at paradise in a ballroom with Joe Dispenza. And you're not in your head, like, cut it out. Let's get back in here, you know? So I had a little come-to-Jesus talk with myself several times, but I felt like staying with it, continuing to show up. Really, my reward was that Sunday when the chair shook, my arms were, you know, something happening. You know, I fought the entire week. You know, with myself and focus and concentration. And I was also sick, which can be— behavior change can bring up resistance. Changing takes a lot of courage, and changing anything can bring up resistance, and it can show up in the sign of illness or injury. It can show up in like tissue damage, like you can be extremely sore in some places. And I had all of it. So I had the stomach flu and what really felt like food poisoning the night before I left. Then I got a cold, a cough, a sore throat the first day. I even missed one day because I didn't want to be that person in the room next to someone coughing endlessly. So I stayed in my room, went and got some vitamin C and soup. And Ricola and made sure that I wasn't coughing the rest of the week. But getting sick is a way that the body puts up resistance against you making changes. And sometimes it is your body's way of purging. So there was a lot of fluid coming out of me in many ways. TMI, I know. But that is also a way to kind of purge excess or negative energy that the body will do. So it took until the last day of the event for me to be rewarded, or so I think of that situation as that. So there's a risk that if you do something like this, that you will grow in ways that might mean you outgrow some people around you who aren't coming with you, who aren't ready to come with you, and that they served a certain time in your life, they served a certain purpose, but maybe are no longer going to serve it depending on where you're going. And even that can be scary or bring up resistance for you. Whatever you want, if you've been doing things you think will get you there and you've confirmed that is really true, right? We have to admit that exercise at your 50s or your 60s can't be what you tried at your 20s or 30s. If you really want to be in the best shape of your life now and for the rest of your life, you have to change the strategy. So I want this really clear that if you really know that you're doing what you should be doing now, it could be that you're thinking so much more about what you don't want or the problem you have as opposed to where it will be and what it will feel like when that problem is gone, thinking about what you do want and focusing all your energy there. So dramatic difference. Back in when I first started looking at exercise science and sports and exercise psychology, we knew that athletes could create a vision of how they would play and they could literally close their eyes, be walking through pre-game, or if you were an athlete who was going to do a race, going to do a triathlon, you would think your way through setting it up in the transition and practicing it. And that would help some of the very successful athletes actually win even when they hadn't gotten there early and spent time in that climate. It made a difference, but they were thinking about not mistakes they didn't want to do. They were thinking about the perfect score, the perfect game they were going to hit, how it felt to connect with their racket with the ball, for instance. So it's important that you are doing something similar, but think about right now, how much time do you spend just thinking about what you don't want? Meaning you're expressing, I want weight loss. That actually may backfire on you because the weight loss is what your brain hears. The weight is still with you. You're thinking what you don't want. You want to be at your optimal weight where you feel free, where you feel light, where your pants feel good when you slip them on, they go on easily, they're roomy. So you're thinking about those things as opposed to the others. And it's so easy, I know, to get pulled down by the crabs of what you don't want. You don't have to be somebody who's constantly complaining of ailments or a hypochondriac, but any default thinking that could have been based on something or someone you said to years ago that stuck with you, that you keep replaying the argument over and over, the conversation, wishing I would have said this. You're still in the past, so you can't be in that positive future that you want to be in. So food for thought. So there's more on this, and this is coming from 2 or 3 weeks now after the retreat. Just yesterday I was shopping. I don't do that very much other than online anymore, does anybody? But I had an opportunity to shop because my time was— what I thought was going to be in a dentist chair for much longer wasn't, so I had some free time. It's Christmas holiday season. I'm walking around, I was shopping. I decided to get a set of tights and jackets and I was like, I don't know these, the, every store has different, like they're 6 in versus the small or the medium is like, I don't know which I need. So I knew I needed to go try 'em on, but I was pretty sure I wasn't the 4 and I wasn't the 8. I needed the 6, but I was like, I wonder if they'd be willing to check that mannequin. I wonder if that mannequin is a 6 cuz it's not here. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna take the 4 and the 8, and then if one's too small and one's too big, I'll know it is the 6, and we can see what goes on. And as I was waiting in line, there were more people waiting in line. I was like, I have the afternoon free, I'm not in a hurry. So I let them go, and then I let the second person go, and I think I was there before her, but I was just like feeling generous, it didn't matter. And he's like, okay, now you, what's your name? So I'm like, Debra Atkinson. So I marched up there and he's like, let me just get these outta here. And he comes out and he has a pair of brown tights. And I'm like, could you look at those? Are those a 6 by any chance? He's like, they are. I'm like, that was meant to be. And I don't know, was that coincidence or was it karma? There's that. But the tights actually right now are on my butt. So there's that. All right, everyone, that is why I meditate. It is not because, you know, there is a sudden fix about it, but it is a way to start. Ordinarily, I try to do my meditation first thing in the morning. So now that I have a slightly older puppy, that's doable. We do go outside first and shift, but it's also good for me to get up and not be doing this in bed where I'm lying down and there's a risk of falling asleep. So I'm sitting upright and doing it, and I will do it for 20 minutes if I feel like I'm short on time. And if I can, I'll do it for 45 or for 50, if I have a little longer time. Usually those are on the weekends, but sometimes during the week, but it makes a difference. And I know a lot of people will say, well, I don't have time to do that and do the exercise. And I get it. But the way I have felt since this retreat is that there's like this expanse of time. It's like, I do have time for everything. Because I'm just firing on all cylinders. And I don't mean like moving at an accelerated pace the rest of the day. I just mean I'm getting things done. I'm not doing things over again. And there just seems to be time. There's all the time I need to do the things I want and need to do. So that is my wish for you in this coming year and always. I hope this was valuable to you, whether you do or you don't meditate, but I would love to hear from you. Number one, if you've considered meditation, if you are meditating, or like me, have started, have stopped, and it's time to get back to it 'cause you miss it, I highly encourage you to do so. But I'd love to hear your story. And, you know, I know I've been asked sometimes, would you do a meditation? Would You know, I'm not a meditation teacher, and I, I can't think of a reason why I would try to take over or do something that Dr. Joe Dispenza does this every day. And his recordings, his meditations are very reasonable. So go to the site, you can download a couple of things if you'd like. I would be happy to give you a recommendation. Of where to begin. All right. Thank you so much for being here with me. I know you have choices, and one thing you could repay me with is sharing this or another podcast episode you think would benefit a friend. Thank you so much.

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