For many, Meditation just doesn’t seem to be an immediate priority. They figure they’ll get to it at some point in their lives. More commonly, many think they should probably wait and explore meditation at a point when they’re less “active.” For some reason, meditation is wrongly associated with being physically inactive, or viewed as an activity you do when you have nothing else important to do. Meditation is sometimes viewed as a classic “postpone for retirement” candidate.

Others view meditation as a practice that must be borne out of necessity — to solve a particular problem or health concern. If they’re already successful, generally content and have what they want, or at least most of it — money, success, fame, peace of mind — meditation seems “unnecessary.”

And finally, for those of us who are already meditators, we pass through periods in life where many other things become priority and meditation takes a back seat, sometimes too frequently. Sure we’re meditators, but not all that regular.

Should meditation be a priority in our lives, if so, why and how?

This morning I logged in online to pay my electricity bill online and got a shock. Sure, it’s winter but the charges were way too high even for the seasonal change. And then I realized that I’d signed up for a green energy company as my energy supplier who had lured me in with a great introductory rate but over the last many months, had nearly doubled their rates compared with the other suppliers in my area. While I was proud of making that change to green energy when I signed up, I realized that living green isn’t just economically viable for most people.

A while ago, I wrote about the typical meditation cliches and stereotypes. These are times when meditation is exploding in the market. Virtually anyone with a bit of knowledge of meditation wants to make a quick buck. Capitalize on the trend as they say. While there definitely are effective forms of meditation that we appreciate a lot, an exceedingly high number of meditation offerings in the market like to dumb meditation down to something very simplistic and often frivolous, either deliberately because they think the audiences cannot take something that isn’t too simple or likely because that’s all they know.