Think you’re bad at meditation?
I’d like to change your mind and shift your perspective on mind.
Whenever I ask people about their experience with meditation, most start off by mentioning that it’s nearly impossible for them to quiet their minds. As if thinking thoughts is a brain defect!
Yet the essence of mind is thought.
Our minds are great at producing thoughts. What if we could just appreciate their first-rate productivity and applaud them for being so incredibly good at doing exactly what they were designed to do?
We necessarily rely on our minds to discern, judge, plan, worry, daydream, ideate, contemplate, assimilate information and remember. These activities are the specific and detailed terrain of mind. As humans, we wouldn’t have evolved as far as we have without getting so darn good at mind-ing.
All of this fawning aside, in my opinion, to disdain the pronounced homo-sapien mind-muscle is misguided. Especially so if we expect to achieve a meditative state by damming up the mind’s natural flowing thought streams.
What if quieting the mind as an approach to meditation has always been a waste of our energy?
It’s been my experience, and I offer this experience in hopes that it clears up what for many is a common barrier towards developing a positive relationship with meditation, that the part of us that meditates is not the part of us that thinks. The part of us that can tune into an expanded state of consciousness like meditation, is not mind at all.
Meditation occurs when we align with our seat of awareness. When we rest into the experience of our own inner stillness; the place from which we witness ourselves, our actions and our mind’s activity. Mind never turns off. It’s always ticking. We simply have the possibility of orienting elsewhere.
In this light, meditation can be viewed as a practice of decisive re-orientation. We identify and choose to line up with a different aspect of ourselves. And most have already had this experience for example, losing oneself in a moment of awe over a sunset or becoming completely engrossed in a favorite activity and losing track of time. These moments sans thought are not an indication that our thought stream has been dammed. Rather, they are moments when we’re not paying attention to our thoughts, when we’re operating from a different place of orientation and doing so changes our experience of consciousness.
There are myriad tools and practices to help engage this kind of meditative experience from spiritual traditions the world over, but listing or detailing them is not the point of this brief commentary. So I’ll now move on to my second point.
That is, when setting out to meditate, one ought to start with clear goals.
I say this because I wonder whether another part of what keeps so many people from feeling accomplished as meditators is that they’re simply setting the bar for their goals too high.
If you are someone who has been been feeling like a meditation dunce, or whose anxiety gets provoked by attempting to sit and meditate, I’d encourage you to check in with your goals.
Chances are you’re not trying to be a monk. So why are you holding yourself to such high standards? Most people think while they meditate. They just don’t stay focused on their thoughts or consider them a hindrance.
The majority of folks who want to incorporate meditation into their self-care routines are just trying to enhance their wellness by adding a practice that decreases stress, balances mood and improves mental and physical health and performance. One doesn’t have to become a masterful meditator or an enlightened being in order to achieve these simple benefits. Ten imperfect, but well-intended minutes in the morning and ten again at night a few times a week will do a body and a mind very, very well.
And that bit about ten minutes? I made it up. Your meditation practice can look how you want it to look and happen for as little or as much time as works for you. You and only you get the privelege of directing how you’d like to establish a spiritual connection with yourself. And by all means seek guidance, find a teacher, but then, you are the one in the practice. You learn from your experience, from trying it on yourself. And it’s called meditation practice for a reason. It’s the ritual of it; the returning to yourself over and over again, to your intentions, to your care, to your tending the soil of your internal landscape that produces results over time. And to keep going back to it you have to be able to tolerate your imperfections. Sitting with those is part of the package; remembering that you’re not trying to be perfect leaves more wiggle room to enjoy the journey.
My final note is that once you start to become more familiar with the part of you that witnesses, once you can access that seat of inner awareness more easily because of the consistency of your practice, then life can become part of your meditation practice. You can begin to witness yourself, from your seat of awareness, with humor and compassion, letting all of it arise and letting all of it go, reorienting to each fresh moment as it unfolds.
If you’d like some advice on a personalized approach to meditation that works for you please visit www.caraliguoriwellbeing.com and contact me for a virtual consult. You can also follow me on instagram @caraliguori.wellbeing for more thoughts on the wellbeing of bodymind, emotion, spirit and soul.
