Tag: cleaning

In October 2021, yoga instructor Meka Taylor was in the throes of an identity crisis. 

The 30-year-old had been shaken by the discovery that she was adopted — which was revealed after a paternal cousin reached out to her on Facebook. The startling truth of her biology came just days before she was diagnosed with ADHD. 

On the verge of a mental breakdown, Taylor, a Los Angeles transplant originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, found a life-saving mental health hack. And she found it in the shower. 

“Meditating in the shower has changed my life,” Taylor, now 31, told The Post. “It’s helped me heal in ways that I did not know were even possible before.”

She had practiced mat meditation and yoga since she was a teen, but after experiencing a massive sense of stress-induced tension last November, owing to the revelation of her adoption and disorder, she tried a new way. Taylor hopped in the shower and aimed the running, detachable spout directly at her chest, allowing the water to hit where it hurt. Almost immediately she felt a sense of comforting relief.

“It’s an intentional cleansing, not just of my body, but of my soul, too,” said Taylor, who now meditates in the shower with hot water on a nightly basis. 

“I visualize that the water as different colors,” she continued, “and when I feel that anxiety in my chest I imagine the hot water is green and that it’s cleansing the anxiety [of] my heart.”

And while the purification ritual offers her 10 minutes of mindful solitude, Taylor isn’t alone in her commitment to the bathroom-based coping mechanism.  

Actress Lindsay Lohan, 36, recently lauded the practice and called it a “nonnegotiable” staple of her daily self-care routine as the cover girl of this month’s Cosmopolitan.

And under the TikTok hashtag #ShowerMeditation, more than 1.4 million inner-peace seekers have hailed the calming ablution as a transformative cure to burnout and an expulsion of negative energy. 

“Every time you take a shower, visualizing washing away your stress and anxiety,” wholesome wellness trendsetter Hannah Jarrah shared in a viral video, featuring a breakdown of her shower meditation technique. The clip, captioned “scared showers,” earned a staggering 536,000 views. 

“Envision the power of the water washing away your negative thoughts,” her on-screen text continued. “Feel sadness, regret, anger and depression washing right off of you. Let it all go down the drain.”

Holistic wellness influencer Bianca Koyabe agrees, telling The Post that meditating in the shower is one of her preferred forms of achieving Zen stillness, owing to its baptismal-like qualities as well as it’s time-saving benefits. 

“Showering is something I do every day, and I’ve found that [meditating in the shower] is great pocket of time to incorporate mindfulness into my day,” said Koyabe, 29, from Johannesburg, South Africa. 

Koyabe, who works as a model, began meditating in the shower in January after randomly stumbling across an Instagram post on the practice. At the time, she had a nagging desire to become more intentional with her words and thoughts about herself. 

She now meditates twice a day, once in the morning and again at night, for 5 to 10 minutes. During the session, she dims the lights, burns cinnamon and vanilla incense sticks and softly recites inspiring mantras —  affirmations like “I did my best today,” “Everything I need is within me” and ”This time is for you” — to herself as pressure from the warm water massages away any tension. 

The custom has since transformed her life.

“I’ve been able to completely regulate my nervous system,” said Koyabe. 

“Before, I felt like I was in survival mode — in a constant state of fight or flight,” she confessed. “Now, my nervous system is in a state of rest and digest.”