Kelly Ripa has been promoting her memoir, Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories. We last talked about how uncomfortable she was with her ex co-host Regis Philbin, and how she tried in vain for years to get him to like her. That admission seemed more like a reflection of Kelly’s issues than Regis’s, but Kelly has always been a polarizing person. Kelly was recently a guest on the Dear Gabby podcast [via People]. She talked about her husband of 26 years, Mark Consuelos, trying to convince both her and her mom to meditate. Mark uses an app to meditate, I’m assuming it’s Headspace. Kelly tried it and had an experience that’s familiar to many people – she thought meditation didn’t work for her because her thoughts were racing and she couldn’t settle down.
During an appearance on Dear Media’s Dear Gabby podcast, the Live with Kelly and Ryan co-host, 52, said it was “fascinating to watch” her husband’s recent attempt to get her 81-year-old mother Esther to try meditation.
“He was trying to teach my mom to meditate,” she told host Gabby Bernstein. “And he has this app on his phone that is good for him when he travels or when he is on the road and he just wants to…ground himself.”
“He was really trying to teach my mom to meditate with this app and my mom started arguing with the voice of the app and it was funny to watch,” she added.
However, the television personality knew it might be an uphill battle to teach her mother the self-help practice, saying, “There’s certain things you’re not gonna penetrate. Not in their eighties.”
Ripa admitted that she also struggled to learn mindfulness technique when her husband introduced it to her.
“When Mark was first trying to get me to learn how to meditate, I said to him, ‘My brain is too noisy, I just can’t do it.’ And I had a really hard time with it, I was really fidgety [and] squirmy,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘It’s not working. It’s just not working.’ And he said, ‘Every time your mind drifts away, you are meditating. Every time you pull yourself back in, every time you keep telling yourself that it’s not working, you’re meditating.'”
“And he goes, every time you go for a run, you are meditating. Every time you take a dance class, you are meditating,” she continued. “He’s like these things that you give yourself this time, that you allow yourself to do what you wanna do, and you’re not so inside your own head. You are meditating.”
Ripa said her husband allowed her to see that she does meditate “a lot” but “it may not be conventional, but it is a form of meditation.”
I tried the apps like Headspace and Balance and found that I liked the flexibility of guided meditations on YouTube instead. I wrote a post early in lockdown with links to my favorite guided meditations if you’re interested. I’ve since done the basic transcendental meditation course and while it was expensive (it’s income dependent but starts at over $400) it was absolutely worth it. Maybe I drank the TM Kool-Aid but it helped me so much and was better than the guided meditations I was doing. It’s like hiring a personal trainer for meditation and most of all I paid for the accountability. Mark is right that it doesn’t matter if your mind wanders, you’re still meditating when you sit down with the intention to meditate. TM teaches you that thoughts are part of meditating and that meditation should be simple and easy. So many of us are hard on ourselves and don’t start meditating because we think our minds should be blank immediately. It’s like any other form of exercise, you just have to do it regularly and you will see progress.
I disagree that physical exercise is meditation every time though. Working out can be meditative and help clear your mind, but meditation is different. You can actively try to meditate while you’re focusing on a task but that’s also different than the task itself being meditation no matter what you do. Maybe the TM course made me a meditation snob though.
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