Rachna says

If someone had told me a year ago that I would willingly sit in silence every single day for five months, I would have laughed in their faces. I have been meditating off and on for years now, but never this consistently.

One of my greatest strengths has always been consistency. I don’t give up after a few days or weeks. That single trait has served me well throughout life. I worked from home productively long before Covid made it fashionable. I have strength trained for nearly three decades, much before women lifted weights. Healthy eating has been second nature for years. But meditation? That was the one habit I could never stick with, until now.

But there was one phase of life that tested even my legendary consistency: perimenopause.

Perimenopause lasted almost a decade, and I struggled to find doctors who truly understood what I was going through. I was eating right, working out consistently, but the symptoms were driving me nuts. My mood swings, aches and pains, poor sleep and furnace-like body temperature were wrecking my life and straining my relationships.

Last year, when I reached menopause, I thought the troubles were behind me. But post-menopause comes with its own set of challenges. Being an empty nester, surprisingly, takes a toll too, especially on mothers. This is when I realised I needed to nurture my mind.

On March 1, I decided I was going to meditate every single day.

For the past five months, I haven’t missed a single session. Not one. I’ve travelled, gone on holidays and still kept my dates with meditation. At 51, post-menopausal and officially an empty nester, I have discovered that the biggest adventure of this stage of life isn’t travelling to exotic places; it’s convincing your brain to calm down before your first cup of coffee.

We have very little control over what happens around us or how other people behave. The only thing we truly control is how we respond. Meditation has helped me create that tiny pause between feeling something and reacting to it. Sometimes that pause is the difference between saying something hurtful and choosing silence.

When my children were younger, silence was something that happened only if they were up to mischief. As every parent knows, a quiet house with toddlers is usually a sign that someone has found permanent markers or scissors.

Now the house is genuinely quiet. The irony isn’t lost on me. For years, I longed for a few peaceful minutes to myself. Now I have them. I relish the quiet mornings and the unrushed routine, but I miss having the house full as well. Both emotions can exist at the same time.

Meditation wasn’t something I started because I wanted to become deeply spiritual or achieve enlightenment. Honestly, I was simply looking for a way to feel calmer while navigating post-menopause, changing hormones and the curious experience of being a couple again.

Menopause is an interesting season of life. One minute you are perfectly comfortable; the next you are wondering why you have become your own central heating system. You walk into a room and forget why. You open the fridge and somehow remember everything except what you came to take out. You look at someone and struggle to remember their name. And don’t even ask me why I walked upstairs.

Meditation, thankfully, does not expect perfection.

In the beginning, my mind wandered everywhere. Grocery lists. Recipe ideas. Whether an invoice had been paid. Why someone said something ten years ago. Why my husband insists on hoarding packing boxes.

Apparently, my brain had been waiting years for an uninterrupted audience.

At first, I thought I was failing. Then I realised the practice is not about stopping your thoughts. It is about noticing you have wandered off to mentally plan your next workout or tomorrow’s dinner before you have even finished your third breath, and gently bringing yourself back to your breath.

Over and over again.

It is surprisingly similar to raising children, except this time the toddler is my own mind.

The biggest lesson has not been learning to sit still. It has been learning to show up.

Some mornings I feel wonderfully peaceful. Other mornings I am mentally planning dinner before I have even taken my second breath. Some days I emerge feeling like a wise sage. Other days I finish wondering whether I achieved anything at all.

But something has quietly changed.

I am slightly more patient. I don’t react to every little irritation as though it is a national emergency. I recover more quickly from stressful days. Even when life throws its usual surprises at me, I feel more anchored.

And perhaps most importantly, I am more comfortable with my own company.

I have spent decades looking after everyone else: packing lunches, solving problems, remembering birthdays, finding missing socks and generally keeping family life running. Meditation has become the one appointment in my day that is just for me. No one needs anything. No one is asking where their charger is. No one is shouting, “What’s for breakfast?”

I think the secret wasn’t finding the perfect meditation app or technique. It was simply refusing to negotiate with myself. Some days the meditation was deep and peaceful. Some days my brain behaved like an overexcited Labrador. It didn’t matter. I showed up anyway. That is how every worthwhile habit in my life has been built; not through motivation, but through consistency.

Five months ago, I thought meditation would simply help me sit quietly for twenty minutes. Instead, it has quietly changed the other twenty-three hours and forty minutes of my day.

Who knew that doing absolutely nothing for twenty minutes each day could end up doing so much?

This stage of life has brought something unexpected, a deeper appreciation for slowing down.

Sometimes the best way to move forward is simply to sit still.