For me personally, meditation has had a place in my life for years. That started long before I experienced severe restless legs. Meditation is another word for attention as far as I am concerned. If you pay attention to how you are doing, you will get a more accurate picture. This helps me to deal better with things that are not that easy.
Meditation can be done in different ways. You can join a group or sit on a cushion by yourself. For me, meditation is in all daily events, but it took a while before I could see it that way.
I mentioned earlier that I am involved in yoga. In 2005 I started a yoga training. This was an intensive, personal process that led me to start teaching yoga. I learned that meditation and yoga are closely related.
After several years of teaching yoga courses and private lessons, I started a yoga website online. On this website are a few hundred filmed yoga classes that you can do at home at your own time.
There are also tailored filmed yoga classes for a number of different target groups. This applies, for example, to people with fibromyalgia, post-polio, sarcoidosis and rheumatism. The latest addition in this regard is a package of yoga classes for people with RLS.
Restless legs
At the beginning of the blog I mentioned that meditation helps me to deal better with things that are not so easy. Obviously, RLS is one of those things. Physically, having to deal with restless legs every night is quite uncomfortable. However, it is not easy mentally either. Troubled legs cause stress and for some even depression.
I also mentioned the word attention. When things are painful or uncomfortable, you may initially be tempted to take your attention away from them. In meditation, however, you go right there with your attention. You specifically feel what is there at that moment. You sit in the middle of it, as it were. My experience is that this already takes off some of the tension. You relax a bit more in the situation.
I think the value of this should not be underestimated.
However, not everyone likes the word meditation that much. It is often associated with smelly hippy socks and navel gazing. As far as I am concerned, it has little to do with that. You focus on what is really going on. You could also also call it relaxation exercises or mindfulness.
Your problems or complaints do not disappear by meditating. That is also not the purpose. A certain space is created though. In that space you take a little extra care of yourself. Meditation is essentially an act of caring, of compassion towards yourself.
Online meditation
Personally, I came in contact with meditation for the first time through yoga. After my yoga training I also went to Buddhist centers, sometimes for meditation retreats. Those intensive experiences helped me to give meditation a more and more daily place in my life. That came to me gradually.
Nowadays, it is becoming more common to do things like meditation and yoga at home, using an online website or an app. At the time, I was a pioneer with my yoga website. Now more and more online platforms are emerging where you can go for lessons on a daily basis, also for meditation.
A good friend of mine has set up such an online meditation platform. Live meditations are given there every day, provided by various professional trainers. The great thing about such a platform is that you meet like-minded people online. You meditate together, from home. After such a session there is room for questions. If you want you can even go to a kind of chat room to have a chat afterwards.
Meditating in a group can be supportive if you are just starting meditation, but also if you have been doing it for a while and lack the motivation to do it alone.
