Reshaping your mind with meditation
We cannot sugar-coat this: being a freelancer is not easy. For all the upsides this way of working offers, it does take a toll on a person’s mind and body. After all, all the responsibilities of the business are on the freelancer’s shoulders, who’s acting at the same time as the professional, the accountant, the PR and the secretary. Stress levels can easily go through the roof for various reasons: a busy workflow, concomitant life events, and the constant pressure of knowing that everything depends on you. All of this adds up to the stress that naturally stems from our profession – we have all heard about interpretastress, which is a topic that academia has been studying in depth.
All the above reasons, and the increased difficulty of drawing the the boundary between private and professional life, might make it difficult to “switch off” when it comes to shutting down our PCs and our minds, which is precisely what happened to me a few months back. “Have I sent that email? Yes, I have. How does my day look like tomorrow? I still have to nudge that client regarding the quote I sent ages ago, I will have to make a note of that,” I find myself thinking whilst I am chopping the vegetables and my partner is telling me about his day - but I am not really listening, as my mind keeps drifting back to my mental to-do list. “Right, I want to schedule more practice time, I will have to check when I can fit it in – I have got that appointment in two days haven’t I? I still need to look for that term, I can’t really remember how you can translate it and I’ll need it for tomorrow’s interpreting assignment. What time do I need to leave to be on time?” I think whilst I keep tossing and turning in bed, unable to steer clear of work-related thoughts. I eventually drift to sleep but I wake up possibly more tired than I was when I went to bed: my sleep is uneasy and fragmented. I know what is happening, and I know what I have to do: I usually hit the gym a couple of times more a week and that rids me of the tension – but this time it does not work. It still takes me ages to fall asleep, and even during the day it’s hard for me to switch off: my mind is on and buzzing virtually 24/7. I then decided to resort to something I only ever used purely for interpreting-related purposes: meditation.
My trainers always suggested meditation, but up until that moment I had never realised how beneficial this technique could be in my daily life. I had participated in a couple of workshops entailing breathing exercises and meditation and I felt that it could work for me. That’s why I decided to start, and as I was quite unsure how to do it, I decided to go with guided meditation to start with, even if I was not sold on the idea of having someone talking to me whilst I was trying to concentrate. It turns out that I cannot meditate without someone guiding me through it, at least not at first: my mind was so used to drifting and wandering to work-related thoughts that at the beginning I was not able to focus on my breath or the awareness of the space around me without a voice constantly telling me to do so. It was no easy feat, either: I felt as if my mind was forcing me to go somewhere else, almost resisting relaxing and letting go. It was very easy to lose focus, and most of all, it was extremely difficult to be aware of myself and my surroundings, and feel what was around me: getting in touch with what my body was feeling on the outside and on the inside was almost impossible, as if I were wearing a shield. It took me a solid week of repeated daily practice to start scratching the surface of these more “complicated” sensations, but right from session 1 I could feel my body slightly less tense and my mind less clouded. In the space of just a couple of weeks I was going to bed without dreading the endless tossing around and the buzzing in my head.
What I love most about meditation is that there is no one way of doing it: guided, unguided, focused on breathing or thoughts, completely silent, lying down or standing up – meditation suits everyone’s needs, and this is precisely one of its strongest features. Your body might only need some breathing exercises to calm down and regain focus, and when this is not enough, you can easily go “deeper” and dedicate more time to meditation with exercises such as “visualisation": even if at first this might sound a bit abstract and possibly farfetched, I find this technique quite refreshing and empowering, imagining a “calming golden wave passing through my body” filling my body from head to toe, relaxing the muscles and invigorating them.
An added bonus is that you can do it literally do it anywhere, anytime. It takes only 2 to 3 minutes for regular breathing exercises that you can do whilst you’re walking to work or sitting on the bus, and then you can schedule a longer session during your lunch break, or at night before going to bed, as I do. Forget gongs, incense and candles: all you need is your mind, and the willingness to spend a few minutes concentrating on what’s going on inside you rather than what’s happening outside. I did not understand this until a few weeks in, as well as the fact that meditation is not just confined to those 5 or 10 minutes: to meditate does not mean to reach a higher level of spiritual depth or a romanticised inner peace – to meditate means analysing how your mind and body react to external inputs and reshaping your response so that it is not self-harming.
In light of all this, I have integrated meditation into my daily routine along with my physical training regime, and every day I am astonished by the change I am experiencing. The only thing I can add is my hearty advice that you give it a go: meditation is more down to earth than it seems, but if you’d like to meditate with a couple of candles lit you’re more than welcome to!
Have you experienced the same feelings? Have you tried meditating too or have you found other solutions? If you meditate, how do you prefer to do it? We welcome any suggestions!
