Try Meditation: CHECK!

Hey Internet, hows about a post with some actual WORDS?!

1. I'm up to my eyeballs with this new job. This is equal parts awesome and OMG.

2. I just booked my flight to Palm Springs for my silent journey. I wasn't originally planning on flying but this new job is so CHA-CHING that it's actually a better value for me to buy a plane ticket and an extra night in the hotel and then work from there on Friday than it is for me to take Friday off to drive down.

3. I also need to book my flight to Portland because my old friend Joanie has surprised us all by saying "I know I've been engaged for 75 years but we're finally getting married! On a farm in Oregon! In six weeks!"

So now I'm going to Oregon too.

Plus Tahoe for a couple of nights.

All this travel means that I will be a busy, busy bee next month.

4. But back to my silent journey:

I've been making an effort to open myself up to new things. I'm searching for a RESET button and I'm willing to look under a lot of rocks to find one. The rock I looked under on Saturday afternoon was something called singing bowl meditation.

Bear with me here:

There are seven quartz bowls and the healer "plays" them and that make loud, vibrating sounds. Each bowl is supposed to awaken or stimulate or correct one of your seven chakras. So the healer plays them while you meditate and focus on your breathing and let the bowls do their healing.

I signed up for this because A) I had a Groupon and B) the Yelp reviews were all GLOWING -- everyone felt peace afterwards and I'm looking for peace so I said SURE, WHAT THE HECK?

So I went and the lady was lovely and my co-mediatators were lovely and we meditated and I tried really hard to focus on my breathing but I kept getting lost in this dream-like spin of all sorts of random thoughts. It was like I was Jody Foster in that movie Contact and had slipped into a black hole and it was all full of light and faces of people I knew and grocery lists and 5th grade homework assignments and all sorts of weird stuff.

So of course I couldn't help wondering if this was just the way the mind works when it's about to fall asleep and do I have this same thing happen every night but I just fall asleep too quickly to notice?

I'd refocus on my breathing for a minute but then I'd be back to watching this trippy movie playing out underneath my eyelids.

The other weird thing was that the room was cool but I was hot. At one point the healer lady came over to touch one of my chakras and the moment her hands touched me I WHOOOOSHED back out of the trippy movie and I felt COLD and the light coming through my eyelids felt BRIGHT.

When the meditation was over we all opened our eyes and she asked us each how we felt. I told her I felt fine. Hot, but fine. I didn't tell her that I was wondering if the movie playing in my head was a typical twilight type thing or if it was the singing bowls doing their magic (I'm leaning toward it having been a typical twilight thing).

I didn't feel full of peace or tranquility or anything. I felt fine.

The others all had glowier things to say. I couldn't think of anything to say other than I felt fine.

All in all, it was all pretty much just a random thing I can say I tried.

Ooh, except one of the chakras is at the top of your head and it's one that's supposed to help you "just know" when something is right and I will say that I did have a "I just know it" moment when I was driving home, but then when I got home I chuckled to myself as I hairsprayed that exact spot (a girl needs volume on the crown of her head) and now the "I just know it" is gone.

5. In other news, Lauren and I are going to see Kenny Loggins on Thursday. There will be singing, but probably not meditation.

6. Things that do not involve singing OR meditation include the presentation I'm supposed to be working on right now. Yay for PowerPoint!