Am I now a Zen Master or did I just have 30 short naps? The highly anticipated DecZENber conclusion.

Snow covered mountain-tops were a little hard to come by in QLD. So mostly I just meditated in t-shirt and shorts in my loungeroom. Not as impressive but far more practical. Photo by Dvine Yoga from Pexels

So I posted a little while back that I was tapping into the trend of monthly challenges with a pun in the name and had started a meditation challenge aptly coined DecZENber. Anyway, I promised I’d report back to you at the completion of the challenge and here we are, nearly half-way through January. Given how exciting the topic is – the practice of sitting and doing pretty much nothing – I’m sure you are all dying to hear about the outcome! Did I finish the course? Did I stay awake through the meditation, or drift off, fall over and hit crack my head open? Did I get so relaxed that, as in pretty much any movie featuring meditation or yoga, I was interrupted by flatulence? Or did I achieve true enlightenment, learn how to meditate, grow a long white beard and move to a cave in the desert?

You may also be wondering if the name “DecZENber” sparked a multi-million dollar bidding war between key players in the health industry to try and acquire the name? Strangely it did not, but I’m holding out hope. Surely Google or Facebook will come to the table soon; they love spending bucket loads of cash on stuff.

Turns out fine whiskey does not improve meditative discipline. Photo by Eva Elijas from Pexels

But enough preamble; how did I actually go with the challenge? Full disclosure; I didn’t quite complete the 30-day challenge in December, with a stumble at the end leaving me painfully short of the finish lane! I got through 29 days without missing a meditation in what was a 30-day challenge. But on the 29th day (after meditating in the morning) I had a rather large evening with a couple of my oldest friends. Just to clarify, not literally my “oldest” friends. I mean, that kind of conjures images of me trading shots with my Grandma. Which would be kind of cool; I think this is a feat a couple of my cousins have managed with her! But in this case, I just meant friends who I have known for the longest. Thanks to lockdowns and living in different states, we had not caught up for a little while. I headed over to their place for dinner, after which we settled in to chat whilst sipping some fine whiskey and then sudden it was 4:15am and I was seeing double!

The next day I had scheduled in a catch up with my brothers. The 11am start had seemed safe enough, but turned out that left me operating off about four hours sleep and still feeling somewhat seedy. It was a great day, but come early evening I was pretty certain I would fall asleep during the meditation if I tried it and, on top of that, I was driving back to QLD the next morning, so was in need of some catch-up sleep. So in short, I didn’t meditate in the final two days of December and so didn’t complete the 30 day program on the app until January 1st. There; I’ve said it and now the name of DecZENber has been besmirched and I will never get a decent offer for selling its rights! Luckily, having (belatedly) finished the challenge, I am so Zen and calm that this doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

This guy must have found a better meditation app than me. I mean, he doesn’t even look that Zen, but look at that elevation! Photo by Nextofederjco from Pexels

Despite the tardy finish, I really enjoyed the practice of meditating daily. I didn’t fall asleep or suffer from a relaxation of my bowls (well, not anymore than usual in any case). But neither did a grey bearded guy in a brown cloak offer me a cool sword powered by the force of light, or did I learn to levitate. This was the most disappointing part of the challenge; I mean, I didn’t expect to be able to levitate to the roof tops or anything, but is 2-3cm off the ground too much to ask?

The course was enlightening, but in a really subtle way. The guy who led the How to Meditate course on the Calm App was called Jeff. When I found this out at the start, my fears of falling asleep increased ten-fold, worried that it might be Jeff from the Wiggles. But it turned out there is more than one Jeff in the world, and this one happened to be Canadian (I knew because he said “about” regularly during the meditations, much to my amusement). His guided meditations were very cool; completely relaxed without being too serious. He threw in amusing lines throughout his guided meditations, delivered with zero like pretentiousness, like “let life meditate you” and “no pressure; we’re pretty much sitting here doing nothing”. The app added quotes at the end of each meditation, kind of like this gem by Leonard Cohen; First of all, nothing will happen and a little while later nothing will happen again. So the whole course really took any pressure off and was very relaxed.

Thankfully it was not Jeff from the Wiggles leading the meditation. Image from Wiggles Fandom

And that’s really what it was about. It was about sitting and doing nothing for roughly 10 minutes a day. It was about practicing awareness of my own thoughts, and getting a little curious on what my mind drifted to, and what might be behind those thoughts. It was about practicing concentration and focus; noticing as my mind began to drift and then gently pulling it back to whatever I was meant to be focusing on for that particular meditation. It was about practicing equanimity; easy-goingness, stability, composure. It was about stepping back from the craziness of life and taking out a little quiet time to pretty much do nothing but be alone with my thoughts.

It seems to me to be like a fairly worthwhile practice. Let’s face it; we are bombarded every day with things we can do, whether chores, entertainment, commitments, work. There are heaps of reasons why we should be doing them, some good, others less so. Among all this we can forget to take a proper, conscious break from it, beyond what sleep offers. It feels refreshing and re-vitalising to spend a small amount of time doing nothing; sitting in stillness.

As beautiful as it is, I’m not sure that meditating here is conducive to relaxation and calm. Good equanimity practice I guess. Photo by Life Of Pix from Pexels

Of course, I should preface that this is not how it happened each time! While I was in Sydney I tried to meditate in the backyard of my parents house where I was staying. They have notoriously bad reception in and around their house, and it was not uncommon for the app to freeze mid-meditation. The challenging part was, because much of the meditation involves silence anyway, it was pretty hard to know when this was happening. So I would find myself meditating patiently, but thinking in the back of my mind that Jeff may have indeed fallen asleep this time and the meditation could go on forever, only to eventually crack an eyelid and see the app had frozen. I’d then have to spend the next 3-4 minutes holding the phone up in the air (like that would help) searching for a spot that reception would kick back in. There were the mosquito bites, phone beeps, arguments between the boys from down the hall, or conversations that cut across my concentration. There was the time I opened my eyes at the end of a meditation only to find Thomas, my six-year-old, sitting cross-legged opposite me, just staring. Not in a creepy, Chucky type way, but in a super-cute way because he was bursting to tell me something but was waiting patiently for me to finish before doing so.

All these things were part of it, accepting that life can be chaotic, accepting that, and practicing on just pulling my mind back to what it is focusing on despite all those distractions. And among the more jarring distractions there were also the beautiful sounds of bird song, the banter of mates kicking around a soccer ball in the back oval, of my boys laughing, joking and playing beautifully together, the gentle drumming sound of the rain on the roof, the rustle of the wind in the trees. Beautiful sounds that happen every day but sometimes we’re too busy to really stop and notice them.

Even though the challenge has formally finished, I’ve continued to carve out ten minutes a day to fit in a meditation, sticking with Canadian Jeff for now. So, if you’ve been thinking about it, I’d recommend giving it a go. Don’t wait for next December just for the sake of the pun; get started as soon as you are ready. And if you do work out how to levitate, please show me how!