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I ran back up the stairs after my morning walk, flung open the door to my studio apartment, and saw my boyfriend sitting at the table, already tapping away at his computer. In a second, my plans to meditate that morning disintegrated. He’s already working. Shouldn’t I be doing something productive, too? I pulled out my laptop, skipping my meditation practice for the day.
It had been years since I’d begun reading about the wide-ranging benefits of meditation. As someone who has struggled with a lifelong penchant for getting lost in anxious ruminations and rigid self-expectations, my intermittent meditation habit was a way to practice momentarily releasing the desperate grip of control I usually maintained.
After enough profound moments of tuning into the present moment, I knew on an intellectual level that a regular meditation practice would help me. But when it came time to execute it, I struggled to consistently take a seat.
I had all the logistics down pat—the time of day, the location in my apartment, and all the details common to meditation advice. They were all squared away. The final and most important step was where I faltered. The perfectly planned time of the day would come and I would feel a powerful resistance. The temptation to instead continue doing rather than being would oftentimes get the better of me, and I struggled to hold myself accountable to my commitment.
I never gave up, though. And I repeatedly vowed to continue at least trying to adhere to a practice.
One day, as I sat in problem-solving mode, I considered why I was having such a hard time taking the action of inaction. What emotions did I feel when it was time to meditate? What was different about those periods in my life in which I could sit in meditation?
What came to mind were the times I attended group meditations at a yoga studio near where I used to live. That’s when it struck me—maybe community is what I needed to overcome my blockage and cultivate a regular meditation habit.
The Modern-Day Minimization of Community
Many of us, especially in the U.S., are conditioned to value rugged individualism since before we can even understand what that means. We are tasked from an impressionable age with enacting our will on the world around us to crush our hyper-individualized goals and come out on top of whatever we set out to do, all on our own.
Although the optimistic go-getter in me loves the ambitious element of this make-it-happen manifesto, it’s no secret that it’s also contributed to an ongoing loneliness epidemic and societal void of deeper meaning, especially as we find ourselves isolated and staring at screens in our own individual worlds.
But the simultaneous magic of this individualized and now digitized world is that we have more agency than ever before to seek out meaningful connections with like-minded people, no matter where in the world they are.
Trying an Online Meditation Group
As I began brainstorming how I could seek a community as interested in making meditation part of daily life as I was, I wasn’t sure that any of my many supportive relationships would want to join me in this commitment. Then I realized that I could tap the power of the internet.
First, I posted in the meditation subreddit, sharing my objectives and asking if there were others interested in linking up to create a meditation group in which we were also accountability partners.
By the next day, I had received about 15 responses. One recommended I make a group on Discord, a social platform that enables user communication through voice and video. Although I’d never used the website before, I learned how and sent the invite link to everyone from the Reddit thread who had expressed interest. Everyone joined, and within days, I had begun a consistent meditation practice with two women from the Discord group who wanted to start immediately, Sofia and Neha.
Against the odds of daunting time zone differences, we were able to find a time of day that worked for all of us: morning for Sofia in Florida, midday for me in Buenos Aires, and evening for Neha in Bangalore. In our first video call, we introduced ourselves, shared how we ended up wanting to be part of a group like this, and expressed our intentions.
We also shared any external or internal life circumstances that we were either working toward or trying to shift. The commonalities we found prevented any awkwardness that otherwise could’ve arisen from three strangers convening online.
We’ve now been meditating together for three months, Monday to Friday, on a Discord voice call. We usually check in with each other for a few minutes at the start of our call about how the past day has gone for us since we last met. When we hit roughly the 15-minute mark, we turn off our mics and begin our meditation. Most of the time, we do a guided meditation. For the entire first month, we worked through a meditation program from Joe Dispenza, a researcher and author of Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. Through pre-practice journaling exercises and visualizations during meditation, the program helps you shed awareness on destructive unconscious thought and behavior patterns and work to replace them with new mental and physical habits.
When we finish meditating, we reconvene, turning our mics back on and briefly sharing how the meditation went before signing off for the day.
Community Can Support Us as We Reach for our Highest Selves
I’ve witnessed countless positive changes in myself since we formed this group and began not only sitting in virtual silence with like-minded people thousands of miles away but sharing our highs and lows, struggles, and journeys.
Many of the guided meditations we do center around the power of the mind to create your reality. The more you believe is possible, the freer you’ll feel to take action in the direction of your dreams. Honing my mind every day to live in this state of consciousness has allowed me to see everything in my life in a more positive, optimistic way. My self-confidence and perception of what is possible have greatly improved.
Being part of a meditation group again, even though it’s virtual, has given me the push I needed to stay accountable for showing up for myself every day of this ongoing journey towards greater awareness.
This image by Brazilian artist Genildo Ronchi came to mind when picturing the transformation that meditating consistently has encouraged in me.
It’s also unexpectedly become the social outlet I didn’t know I needed. The experience has reminded me how deeply we all need each other, not only not to be alone but to share profound truths and discoveries about our shared experience of existing on this planet. I believe that communion—whether through meditation, organized religion, or any other practice—has the capacity to lift us and encourage us to reach for our truest potential as humans.
Where to Seek Out Meditation Groups
If you’d like to see what joining a meditation community can do for your practice, here are a few places you can go to find one:
- Meditation groups on Discord
- The meditation subreddit
- Yoga studios sometimes offer group meditation sessions
- Meetup has both local and virtual meditation groups
- Local community centers and libraries
- Online meditation courses
- Meditation retreats
- The Mindfulness Network
- Apps for meditation, such as Insight Timer and Ten Percent Happier, offer live events and community groups centered around different types of meditation
