#11 I Meditated for 20 Minutes Every Day: How It Changed My Life and How It Can Help You Too

Hello, my name is Karolina, and welcome to my podcast Heal Yourself, where I will be sharing my own healing journey with you—together with the experience I’ve gathered as a guide on other people’s paths of healing the body and the soul—so that you, too, can heal yourself.

What happens when you give yourself twenty minutes of silence and calm every single day—just for you?
Today I’m sharing my personal experience with regular meditation. What changed, what was difficult, and why today I wouldn’t trade a single minute. Maybe I’ll inspire you to start too—or to stay with meditation if you’ve already tried.

I found my way to regular meditation quite slowly, and through a big detour. Even though I had been practicing yoga for a long time—and I also taught it—the spiritual part of yoga didn’t interest me at all. I was only interested in the postures. I loved breathwork and the fact that I could change my state of consciousness using only my own breath. That was actually what excited me about yoga first.

That deeper, spiritual—and really the main—part of yoga felt like a complete waste of time to me. I didn’t understand what meditation was for. Of course, during my training we had short introductions to meditation and things like that, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. It felt completely unnecessary.

Which is actually pretty funny in hindsight, when we look at the meaning of yoga. The entire eight-limbed path of yoga has only one goal—to prepare us for long sitting in meditation. The final step is samadhi, deep meditation. All the steps before that, including asanas—which we now understand as “yoga”—are only preparation. Asanas are actually only a tiny part—originally there were only a few of them, and their only purpose was to prepare the body for long sitting in meditation.

Yoga means the union of our individual consciousness with the divine, and this union can be reached in different ways. Yoga therefore doesn’t necessarily have to include the asana part. What we know today as physical yoga is only one path—raja yoga, the eight-limbed path—where asanas are a very small, and actually not that important, part.

In the West, yoga evolved in a way that we perceive it mainly physically. And I myself—when I started yoga—understood it primarily as work with the body: stretching, strengthening, and linking movement with breath. The fact that it is a practice for expanding consciousness and spiritual growth completely passed me by. I actually didn’t even know what I was supposed to imagine under that.

And even though I was moving in a world where meditation was a huge part of everything, I kept avoiding it. But then it felt as if meditation started appearing everywhere. As if something kept telling me that I had to start meditating. In any podcast I listened to, the first episode was about meditation—“you have to meditate.” Actually a little like now in my podcast, where I feel like I mention it in almost every episode.

I would always be reading some book, and there would be a chapter about how meditation changed someone’s life. How it helped them, how it was transformative. I kept hearing it again and again. I would always try meditation… but I only lasted a few days. Then it stopped being interesting to me.

For many people, the first step toward meditation is connected to wanting to truly change something in their life. When they’re not satisfied, don’t feel fulfilled, deal with health issues, or don’t feel happy. Often it’s meditation that appears as the next step. For me, it wasn’t any different.

For a long time I searched for a way to get rid of eating disorders, because I had several, and they would shift and alternate. I tried everything—psychotherapy, different approaches—but nothing helped. At the same time, for years I felt very unhappy. From the outside it looked like I had everything, but inside I felt deeply unfulfilled. As if something in my life was missing. As if I didn’t know how to be happy.

Even though I had everything I could ever wish for, I didn’t know how to “use” those things to feel good in life. To feel fulfilled. I knew meditation was something that could help me with this. It was an intuitive knowing—a feeling that this is something I needed to begin.

I tried it about five times. Every time I quit. I think the longest I lasted was fourteen days, and then I gave up. Because—like most people say—“I have thoughts.” I had them too. And they were completely insane. In meditation they often get even stronger, because we sit down and try to focus—usually on the breath. And the breath is something incredibly “uninteresting” for the mind.

Only later, when we advance in meditation practice, do we discover that the breath can take us into unbelievable depths. That it isn’t boring at all. It’s a path with no end—we go deeper and deeper and it’s a beautiful journey of self-discovery. But at the beginning it doesn’t look like that at all. No progress is visible. The mind goes wild and sends us unbelievable things.

Meditation often gave me headaches, mainly because I didn’t have anyone to guide me. I didn’t have any guru or coach. At the time I was starting meditation, it wasn’t like today—there weren’t thousands of meditation apps. There were only a few and they didn’t go very deep. No one told me back then that meditation doesn’t mean not having thoughts. I only realized that later, and thought: wow… that could have saved me so much effort.

I had that concept of meditation that most people have—that meditation means completely emptying the mind and having no thoughts. But of course I had a million thoughts. And I felt like I had to pull them out, remove them. Often my head would hurt from it. It genuinely felt like I was much worse during meditation than before I even started. And so I gave up again.

But somewhere inside I always knew that it was something I needed in my life. That it was incredibly important for me. The topic kept jumping at me from all sides—meditation, meditation, meditation.

And then one day a Harvard study “jumped” at me, where they talked about how meditation can literally change the structure of our brain. They measured the brain before starting meditation, then people meditated for several weeks, and then they measured again. They found that meditation isn’t just some abstract concept. Until then it had felt very esoteric to me—I was very rational then, very science, science, science. And this was exactly the moment I needed.

I needed scientific proof that it makes sense. That if I stick with it, the structure of my brain will truly change. That some parts grow, others shrink—and that’s exactly what the study described. At the same time, they said that these changes didn’t appear in anyone earlier than roughly three weeks of regular meditation. And that’s when I realized I had never reached that point. I had never lasted longer than fourteen days. So I couldn’t have felt those changes.

So I set myself a challenge. I will meditate every day for twenty minutes for one month. And if nothing changes even then—if it’s still just as terrible—I decided I won’t try anymore. That meditation simply isn’t for me.

The first three weeks were basically the same tragedy as everything before. Meditation often works like this: the first few days, the brain is excited because it’s something new. The mind can “play” with it and the curve goes up. But then meditation starts repeating, becomes monotonous, and for the mind it’s terrible boredom. At the same time, we’re not far enough in the practice to feel any strong changes.

Maybe there are already small changes—maybe we sleep a little better, feel slightly less stressed, respond more calmly to things that used to throw us off. But they aren’t big enough yet to excite us and motivate us to keep going. And at the same time, in the meditation itself, there is a huge drop. Often we feel like it’s even worse than at the beginning.

The first few meditations can paradoxically feel easier than the ones after two weeks. And that’s exactly why it’s so important to keep going. I only realized this in hindsight. If someone had told me back then, “I know it’s starting to feel monotonous and you want to quit, but this is exactly the moment. Don’t worry—soon it will break through again. Right now your brain is beginning to change,” it would have helped me so much.

Having a mentor then would have been amazing. Someone to guide me through it. I didn’t have anyone like that. It was my own way of finding meditation. But I’m so grateful that today I can be that person for others. That I can make it easier for people to move through the phase where meditation begins to become beautiful, fulfilling—and where it starts to genuinely be something you enjoy.

So I meditated every day for twenty minutes. For the first three weeks, nothing major changed. Not in my life around me either. Maybe I slept a little better, but like I said—those changes aren’t huge enough in the beginning to blow you away. But I like challenges. And when I set one, I’m determined to keep it. So even after three weeks, when I was thinking it still wasn’t working and nothing was happening, I told myself: “You gave yourself a month. So you’ll do the month.”

And then it happened. At the beginning of the fourth week, I sat down to meditate again. That day I felt I was sitting with much more ease. It was more pleasant right away. I focused on the breath, and after some time I opened my eyes, looked at the clock—and forty-five minutes had passed since I sat down. I hadn’t noticed at all.

It was the first time I entered flow in meditation. That state where what you’re doing is still a challenge, but no longer so much that the mind fights it. The brain can fully focus. I was only in the breath. I didn’t perceive time, I didn’t perceive the body. I honestly have no idea what happened in those forty-five minutes. I was just the meditation.

And from that day, it was as if something switched. Suddenly I was sitting down to meditate with the feeling that I knew. As if in that flow state I understood what I had been doing wrong all along. I stopped fighting thoughts. I let them come and go.

It took me much longer than it would have taken someone who was meditating “correctly” from the start. I had been meditating wrong for a long time and I had to figure it out myself.

In that moment it clicked. Suddenly I could let thoughts flow, and for much longer I could stay focused on the breath. And when I drifted away into thoughts, I simply came back—exactly how I would guide it today. I understood what it actually means to meditate. How to do it. And from that moment, it started to feel incredibly easy.

I started looking forward to meditation. Suddenly I would leave meditation feeling amazing. My head didn’t hurt, I felt light. It became something that truly started improving my life. And it wasn’t only the meditation itself—I started seeing huge changes everywhere around me.

Those changes came almost like a jump. Like someone took my life and turned it to the other side. Everything was different. Everything was better. Everything I was doing felt more fulfilling, calmer, happier.

I remember being so surprised that suddenly I was laughing all the time. That I automatically smiled at people around me. Before, I had that “bitch face”—I always looked slightly angry, exactly how I felt inside. Unhappy, unfulfilled. And suddenly I started smiling at everyone around me, naturally.

Things that used to drive me crazy stopped bothering me. I remember how enraged I would get when someone chewed loudly—it would trigger this deep anger in me. Suddenly I didn’t care at all. Street noise, honking cars… before, it would always either irritate me or scare me. When someone honked at me, I felt like reacting. Now? Nothing. Nothing at all.

I stopped getting startled. And that’s something I noticed fairly soon. Before, I had a strong startle reflex—any loud sound, movement, anything unexpected would throw me off. And suddenly it vanished. As if I no longer had the capacity for it.

To this day, I honestly don’t remember the last time I truly got startled. When I’m with other people, it feels normal, but then I notice it—like a bird suddenly flies up next to me and three people around me flinch. And I do nothing. I keep walking. If it flew right into my face, of course I would move, but it wouldn’t scare me. I know nothing is going to happen to me.

Loud sounds, honking, animals moving—none of it scares me anymore. When someone tries to scare me on purpose, they usually give up. Even my partner eventually gave up. He would always try to jump out and then just say, “Yeah, I always forget you basically never get startled.”

And this is what I started realizing shortly after I began meditating. Before, I was constantly clenched. In continuous anxiety. As if anything could be a threat. And that completely disappeared. Suddenly I could breathe. That inner tightness, that feeling that I needed to protect myself all the time, dropped away. And suddenly it just wasn’t there.

And those positive changes in my life—together with the fact that meditation itself became a beautiful experience—led to the point where twenty minutes was no longer enough. I loved sitting in meditation for forty-five minutes, even an hour. Extending meditation wasn’t a problem. I was happy when I had enough time to meditate longer. I truly started enjoying it.

Meditating every day suddenly wasn’t a problem at all. It was something I looked forward to. Often it was the best part of my entire day.

And like I said—it changed my life on so many levels. One of them was sleep. That was a change I started noticing fairly soon, but the huge difference came especially after the first year. Suddenly I began falling asleep completely peacefully. Before, falling asleep was a huge problem for me. I often took sleeping pills just to be able to drift off.

I would lie in bed and my head would run at full speed—a million thoughts, past, future, everything I did wrong, everything I had to do the next day. Classic bedtime mind. And meditation was able to quiet all of that.

And I didn’t even have to meditate right before bed. My brain was trained enough that it could “switch off” on command. When it was time to sleep, I simply slept. And if I happened to have a bigger stressor—something I had to handle the next day and it popped into my head right before bed—I already knew what to do. I would focus on the breath, just observe it, and soothe myself into sleep.

The difference in falling asleep was enormous. And so was the difference in sleep quality. I started feeling like I needed much less sleep than before. Even after seven hours, I would wake up full of energy, far more rested than I used to be. And that affects everything in our life. When we sleep well, everything else becomes easier.

I believe that feeling subjectively so much happier was because of meditation—but also because for the first time in my life, for the first time in my adult life, I was able to truly sleep well. Without alcohol. Without sleeping pills. And today we know that those things might help you fall asleep, but especially alcohol significantly worsens the quality of sleep. The body can’t regenerate the way it does during truly deep, natural sleep.

Sleep was one of the biggest changes I could objectively evaluate after the first year of meditation. And it has lasted to this day. In fact, it keeps getting better. Of course I still have periods when there’s more stress in life and it isn’t as harmonious as at other times. But like I said—today I already know what to do even in those moments when sleep is affected by what’s happening around me.

Another huge change came in the area of focus. Things that would have taken me several days, I was suddenly able to finish in just a few hours—simply because I could focus one hundred percent on one thing. I’m genuinely sad I didn’t start meditating before university. I’m certain it would have made exam periods and studying for final state exams so much easier. If I had had the ability back then to calm the mind and aim the brain at one specific thing.

And that’s exactly what we train in meditation—attention. Attention on one thing. In meditation it’s most often the breath or sensations in the body. But what we train in meditation transfers into every area of life. Focus is huge, and most people notice it very quickly. The mind stops jumping from problem to problem, from phone to TV, and we can fully immerse ourselves in whatever we are doing.

Meditation is also great for people with ADHD. For them, classic seated meditation can be more challenging at first than it is for people without ADHD. But there are other paths—deep breathing, focusing only on the inhale and exhale, or meditation in motion. Walking, where we focus on what’s happening in the body with every step. For ADHD—and really for any difficulty with focus—meditation is an incredible tool.

Another big change was related to health. Before I started meditating, I had a rash on my hands for several years—eczema. It would appear on my body too, sometimes even on my face, like under my nose. I didn’t know what to do with it. I tried so many creams and approaches, but nothing helped. Until meditation.

For the first time in my life, my eczema completely disappeared exactly when I started meditating regularly. And it never came back.

For me, those skin problems were caused by chronic stress. Regular meditation can reduce chronic stress to a level that the body can handle. It brings us into a state where we’re no longer living in constant tension, but rather we experience waves of stress—and then calm again.

Because of that, for many people things begin to happen that they wouldn’t have considered possible. Eczema disappears, acne improves, digestion regulates, for example with IBS. These issues are very often connected to stress. And when we reduce chronic stress, the body begins to heal itself.

In my case, the rash never returned. Not even in later periods when I experienced more stress. The body was no longer in constant overload. It could handle acute stress—and then return to calm.

And another area where I saw a huge change—literally a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn—was relationships. Relationships with other people, but especially my relationship with myself. And I think that this relationship is what everything else is built on. Meditation healed my relationship with myself. And that relationship then influenced every other relationship around me.

When we hate ourselves, it’s very easy to hate the people around us too. It’s incredibly easy to look for flaws outside, to project onto others what we aren’t happy with in ourselves, and then get triggered by it in relationships.

My relationship with myself—some self-love for my body, for my flaws, for myself—was actually one of the main reasons I started meditating at all.

For several years I battled different eating disorders. I talk more about this in my online program Meditation, where I go deeper into it if you’re interested. Meditation was what finally helped me.

When we harm ourselves like this, when we harm ourselves and our own bodies, we can’t see ourselves in the mirror the way we truly look. We look at ourselves and think we’re disgusting, that we’ve never seen anything so horrible in our life. That is not a body problem. That is a self-love problem. A problem of the relationship we have with ourselves. And that is exactly what regular meditation can completely turn around.

The process wasn’t fast for me. When the problem is rooted this deeply, it takes time. But after one year I was able to heal from binge eating. I no longer had body dysmorphia. I could look at myself in the mirror—not as if I saw a goddess like I do today. That came much later. This process took several more years. To truly “meditate” myself into the state where looking at myself in the mirror becomes something beautiful and pleasant.

Today it’s similar to looking at someone you love unconditionally. They seem like the most beautiful person in the world. And that’s exactly how I look at myself today. It might sound narcissistic, but it is immensely important.

I remember once hearing the Dalai Lama talk about how incomprehensible it is to him that people hate themselves. For him, it was a concept he couldn’t understand. He believed that people always love themselves—that the problem is more often that they love themselves too much and the ego needs to be softened. But that someone would hate themselves? He couldn’t imagine it.

In his culture and religion, self-love and self-acceptance are so deeply rooted that the idea that someone could have it differently was unimaginable.

Here in the West, unfortunately, it’s completely common. And for women I feel it’s taken to an extreme. We are constantly evaluated based on appearance. Looking good is seen as incredibly important. And then it’s very easy to twist that in the mind and start seeing ourselves completely differently than we truly look.

That love for ourselves, that acceptance—not only accepting ourselves, but being able to see ourselves as something beautiful—often disappears.

From my experience: after one year, all the issues I had disappeared. And it still wasn’t that I loved my body one hundred percent. When I look at my body from that time today, I think: what was wrong with me back then? If I had a body like that today, I would look at myself like a goddess. But back then, I saw something completely different.

But after that year, I could look in the mirror without saying horrible things in my head. My confidence returned. On the outside I always had it, but inside it was absolutely zero. I was deeply insecure. I constantly worried whether my thighs were too big, whether I looked fat somewhere. Those thoughts completely disappeared.

And that’s what’s beautiful about meditation—that those thoughts stop terrorizing you. Suddenly you no longer have that disgusting dictator in your head telling you you’re not enough, that you look terrible, that something is wrong with you. That voice slowly becomes quieter.

You can look at yourself objectively and say: “Yeah, I look good today.” And gradually it becomes: “Wow. I look beautiful.” You can look at yourself with real love.

And when you’re at that point, life begins to be lived completely differently. We look at ourselves in the mirror every day. And if the first thought is: You look terrible today, you can imagine what the rest of the day will feel like.

But when you look at yourself and say: Beautiful. You’re ready. You look great—everything that follows is lived in a completely different way.

That relationship with myself then changed how I experienced relationships with other people. I started being much kinder and more pleasant. I wasn’t like that at all before. I was always slightly angry, often unpleasant, harsh. I didn’t smile much.

I remember the time when I had my first company, The Glitters. We traveled with the girls to festivals—we applied gems, did glitter, braided hair. I had a team of girls—hairdressers, makeup artists. The first summer, about twenty other girls worked under me. And I know they didn’t like me. I was exactly that toxic boss—unpleasant, hard, mean to people.

We often traveled to two festivals at the same time. We were split into two groups—I traveled with one group and the other traveled with Sára, with whom I ran The Glitters. And then it happened that the girls who had been traveling with Sára were supposed to travel with me. And they said they wouldn’t go. That they didn’t want to travel with me. That they were afraid of me. That I was unpleasant to them.

Now try to imagine that—what kind of person I was back then. How unpleasant I must have been if people didn’t want to travel to work with me.

And today, people often tell me: “You have such beautiful energy. You’re so pleasant. You smile so much. Just being in your presence calms me.” But I wasn’t born like that. That isn’t my natural state. It’s all thanks to meditation.

I wasn’t any “nice energy.” I was the opposite. I breathed fire. The dissatisfaction and unhappiness I carried inside, I spread around me. When I was unhappy, I wanted everyone around me to be unhappy too. And unfortunately, I often succeeded.

In that year when I started meditating, we went into another festival season with The Glitters. And the whole team changed. From that first year, almost no one stayed. Everyone left. Because I didn’t build any beautiful relationship with those girls. I was just unpleasant. I believed I had to create authority.

And that is exactly the idea many bosses have—that they need to be hard and strict so that people are afraid of them and then behave the way the boss wants. But it doesn’t work like that.

During that year I realized it. And as I started treating people kindly, smiling, it changed my relationship with the girls who worked for me—completely. One hundred and eighty degrees. If you had seen me a year before and then after, you wouldn’t have recognized me.

Suddenly I was kind to them. Which sounds like the most basic thing—when someone works for you, you treat them well. But for me back then it wasn’t normal. Suddenly I saw they liked me. I didn’t have to look for new people every year. The girls stayed. They felt good working with me.

I remember a moment when I told them that this time it wouldn’t be me going with them, but Sára. And they asked: “Will she be as kind to us as you are?” In that moment, it hit me. Suddenly it was a joy to work with people.

I started asking them: “Did you eat? Take a break. Are you tired? That’s totally fine even if there’s a line. I want you to be okay. Rest for ten minutes. Don’t push yourself. Girls, did you drink water? Did you eat?” I simply started taking care of them in the way that should be normal. But at the beginning it didn’t feel normal to me at all.

If all bosses in the world started meditating, the world would be so much better. If everyone had someone above them who meditated regularly, I guarantee they would treat people completely differently. Suddenly different things would matter.

After a year of meditation, other things started happening too. Out of nowhere I felt the need to help others. I went to volunteer in a refugee camp, later in an orphanage in Africa. Things that would never have crossed my mind before. Suddenly it mattered to me to be useful. To be kind. To care about how people around me feel.

But that doesn’t mean my life became perfectly harmonious. It doesn’t mean difficult things stopped happening or that things never went wrong. On that level, almost nothing changed. Life was still up and down—just like life is.

What changed was that it stopped shaking me so much. I wasn’t in euphoria when something went well, and in total depression when something went wrong. I was more in the middle. Things didn’t throw me off the way they used to.

And even when life didn’t go the way I wanted, I could feel calm underneath it all. It doesn’t mean I was never sad. On the contrary—paradoxically, I sometimes allowed myself to feel sadness even more. I could cry, experience emotions fully. But it wasn’t the end of the world. It didn’t throw me into dark depression and the feeling that everything was terrible.

Even when I was sad, somewhere deep under it there was still a sense of peace. A basic feeling of wellbeing and harmony. As if on the surface there were storms, waves, tsunamis… but at the bottom of that imaginary ocean of life, there was still calm. A feeling that everything will be okay. That everything is as it should be. That nothing is so terrible that a person must completely collapse from it.

And recently I found an Instagram post I wrote five years ago. It was exactly one year since I started meditating regularly. And I summarized how I felt then and how meditation changed my life. I’d like to read it to you now.

It's been about one year since I started my regular practice of meditation…
And literally everything in my life has become better.
I smile more. I need less sleep. My focus is sharper. My endurance stronger.
Disappointments no longer hurt me as much.
I have so much more love for the people around me — and for myself.
Things that used to drive me crazy just don’t bother me anymore.
I am finally able to truly enjoy the beauty of all the places I travel to.
And even in moments when my life turns into complete chaos,
I can still strangely maintain this warm feeling of contentment and happiness.
I could go on for hours talking about all the ways meditation has improved my life.
And if you’ve ever thought about making it a regular part of your life — please do.
It is incredibly difficult at the beginning,
but if you don’t give up, it will pay off big time.
And you won’t be able to stop.

From that moment on, I’ve meditated roughly 1,500 hours. Meditation is now a fundamental part of my life—every single day. And the way it was able to completely turn my life upside down, how it helped me with so many different things that don’t seem connected at first glance, but all improved thanks to this one practice… it absolutely amazed me.

So much so that I decided to devote the rest of my life to passing on this teaching and this enormous gift of meditation. And so I hope that this episode was that final nudge for you—just like the Harvard study was for me—and that you truly include meditation in your daily routine.

As I described at the beginning, it isn’t easy. For some people it’s harder, for some less so. There are people for whom meditation is more difficult. I was definitely one of them. And today I teach meditation. It’s my work, but above all it’s my greatest passion and hobby.

So please don’t think that if you have a lot of thoughts, meditation isn’t for you. It’s the opposite. Meditation is exactly for you. For those whose mind is restless, loud, and sometimes exhausting. Those are exactly the people it can help the most.

Meditation itself isn’t complicated. But for it to be truly effective—and so the process isn’t unnecessarily painful—it’s incredibly helpful to have a guide and a clear structure. I would have wanted that so badly back then. Someone to tell me what to do. Someone to tell me not to quit the moment it starts to feel boring.

And that’s exactly why I created my own 21-day online program. It’s designed specifically for people who want to start meditating. So even if you have absolutely no experience—that’s okay. It’s exactly for you. And it’s also for those of you who have tried before but quit every time.

The course is created so that it guides you step by step and helps you last until the moment it starts to shift. I put a lot of care into making sure it isn’t monotonous, that you enjoy it, and that it includes bonus meditations that help you bring what we learn into everyday life.

The program lasts 21 days, and you’ll also find plenty of bonus material you can use to meditate for practically unlimited time. You’ll find the link to join the program in the description of this episode. The first three days are completely free to try.

If you want to start meditating regularly, if chronic stress is something you often face, or if you’d like to experience at least a part of the changes I experienced, I would love for you to join me. Even if it’s just as a trial.

The change that can happen in your life is truly incredible. And from the bottom of my heart, I wish that as many people as possible can experience a life that isn’t lived on autopilot. To truly live it. With ease. With calm. With a sense of wellbeing and happiness that can be there continuously—no matter what is happening in life.

If you’ve already started the program, or you’ve even completed it, I would love it if you let me know how it helped you and what your experience was. Your feedback means a lot to me.

Thank you for being here with me today. For listening to this episode all the way to the end.
I wish you a beautiful rest of your day, and I look forward to seeing you next time—until we meet again in the next episode of the Heal Yourself podcast.

With love,
Karolina