What Marie Antoinette Did Right: A Youthful Headspace Moment

I have recently committed myself to the 40 Day Challenge at BIG Power Yoga.  If you aren’t familiar with what this is here is a good link to check it out!  But part of the journey in this challenging period is to embrace and form a meditation habit, among other mind-body habits – like daily!  So … it’s Sunday, the eve of my 40 Day Challenge to begin and I spent a good sum of two hours with my daughter, scoping out the prime location for my meditation space in the house.  We found one, by the way, and you can check it out here!

As she and I spent a few hours together in our new meditation space … perusing Pinterest for fresh new ideas … staring at each other in the mirror, just learning about every line and embellishment on our faces … her braiding my hair (I LOVE this) … listening to some meditation music on Spotify … and, of course, meditating … I sat a while, just letting my mind wonder.  I think that is the concept of meditation – right?   But, in this moment of head-space, I was reminded of the Mario Antoinette movie (the one with Kirsten Dunst) and her garden, the one she’d roaming thru at Versailles.  There are a few scenes where you see her just frolicking the large landscape without a care in the world, just picking flowers and sitting.  And, then I was reminded of my own childhood, when there were times I lay on fields of grass at my grandparent’s homes (they both had a farm and ranch lands) and just spending time staring up at the skies, watching clouds pass by.  Sometimes, I’d wonder why clouds sometimes appear to move so fast, and sometimes I’d imagine the characters the clouds made and let my imagination run wild with stories never told.

What happened to this?  I am thinking hard of my life, in trying to remember that milestone when turning the dial on the space occupation of my days was metered to “must stay full.”  I think it was my teenage years when the view of my time’s preciousness changed, and I don’t say this precociously.  A fire was rumbling in me at the time.  I believed I had the world to conquer for myself … a name to make for me … unchartered opportunities and carpe–diemism to live by, … I had a path to build for myself.  I signed up for almost every club imaginable at school – I spent a lot of time with friends – I studied.  And, I went off into the world and had zest and gusto in my heels.  I wasn’t taught to reflect or be mindful.  I wasn’t mentored on balance or the delicate scales of being many things at once.  Soon enough, in my early twenties I fell madly, deeply in love with technology … so much so I would get angry at the concept of sleep because it imposed interruption, putting distance from what I enjoyed.  Technology gave me a playground for my mind.  I often time got lost in it, and the concept of time ceased to exist.  It swooped me from the hardness of my realities and my world when I was with it, I was able to explore and learn and achieve from the fruits of my own labor.  And, soon enough, as I applied my learnings I found myself fortunate in it becoming a career.  WOW – I forever hit a jackpot by getting paid to do something I love.  In fact, I have felt that way ever since.

But, what happened to look at skies and white clouds?  There is a phrase that I often hear in yoga: Keep looking up.  With this new challenge and goal, clearly, the hope is that I will grow from it … come out a different person, ideally a better person from adopting new habits that influence a more mind-body balanced self.  And, if I excel, with integrating meditation as a practice, I hope I’ll find a way to bring the blue skies and white clouds as an opportunity to let my mind wander because I should have never left that simple pleasure only to the Bridgette before she flew the nest.