Finding Your Form of Meditation and Gratitude

Meadow founder Stacy Valner began meditating in 2019. Now, it is a daily morning ritual that she makes sure to maintain in her personal life. There is a common misconception that meditation must look a certain way for it to be effective. That you must follow specific rules and meditate in exactly the right way. Stacy disagrees.

The first, most important thing about meditating, she believes, is knowing that meditation should follow no rules. At Meadow, we are endlessly encouraging our customers to savor the Power of the Pause and reflect on all of the things they’re grateful for in life. We firmly believe that the positive impact of meditating and the powerful feeling that gratitude brings are interconnected. The best part of cultivating your own meditation practice is that it can look different from person to person. 

For Stacy, her meditation routine often takes place when she is moving in nature. Her daily walks, when she has very little cell service, are when she is most calm and she can truly reflect on how she is feeling internally. This process has allowed Stacy to spend extra time acknowledging the gratitude she feels in her everyday life and manifesting her goals for the future. This is also the time when she allows herself to address her fears and respond to them in constructive ways. 

When starting Meadow, Stacy’s biggest fear was introducing her brand in an age of social media. As a happy mom who typically only posts on social media for birthday wishes for her husband and children, there was an underlying fear of not knowing how to approach the social media aspect of the business. After reflecting on this during her meditation sessions, Stacy came up with a course of action to address and overcome this fear. 

If you’re looking to get into meditation for the first time, we strongly encourage you to find a routine that feels natural and comfortable for you. Whether it’s going on walks, following a guided meditation from an app, or just sitting quietly in silence, we want you to embrace that routine and make it a sacred ritual in your daily schedule. Not sure where to begin with meditating? Here are a few prompts that we use for our self-reflection that may help lead you down the right path:

• What are you grateful for right now? Either write out a list or recite it silently in your head.
• What is scaring you right now? Why does this thing hold the power of fear over you? What is one thing that’s currently in your control that may help you move past this fear?
• What is one goal you are working toward right now? What are the steps you’ve already taken to get there? What steps do you still need to take to accomplish this goal? 

“Meditating comes in all shapes and sizes,” Stacy says. “As long as you are finding the one that works for you, that is okay. In my Meadow, there are really no rules.”