OK, so here I am. I’m on the cushion… Nobody can be expected to sit in that position to begin with surely. I’ll just do the other cross-legged thing like I used to do at school. That should do for now. I mean I’m here, aren’t I? Showing willing. That should be enough for now so that the universe can see I’m a worthy cause.
OK, so how long do I need to stay here? They say 20 minutes of mindful meditation is enough to help me do some thingy to my brain neurons. I think it was 20. I’ll do 25 just to be sure. Oh, and now I come to think of it I’m pretty sure I can just sit in a chair. My knees are killing me. Or maybe I should try that mantra I heard about…
It’s been proven by all sorts of people who apparently know about these things, that meditation is good for us. Men in white coats have attached electrodes to the heads of Buddhist monks and compared the activity in the parts of the brain that make us feel better and, it seems like a done deal that people who meditate are less stressed, experience greater well-being and live longer. So how come we aren’t all queuing up to get our minimum twenty minutes a day? I mean it seems like a reasonable deal, doesn’t it?
Right so… Sitting comfortably…ish. No thinking. 20 minutes. How hard can it be? Set the egg timer.
Meditation. There are loads of people out there who benefit from and very much enjoy hours and hours of sitting meditation practice every day and it’s wonderful. But here seemed like the first annoying thing for me. How come they can do it, seem to love it so much and get so much benefit from it and I can barely manage five minutes before I begin experiencing the burning urge to leap up and run away screaming?
If you’re anything like me you might have decided to give meditation a go in the past, when all the other things you’d tried felt like they weren’t really working.
Meditation fomo. What was I missing?
I had stuff going on inside my head and feelings that accompanied that, which often felt like it needed ‘something doing with’ so to speak, because it all often felt less than useful to my peace and mental well-being whilst hindering my ability to do the things in life I really wanted to do.
For many years I grappled with this conundrum. I’d start a meditation practice, either at a class, or with a CD or an app or just my own made-up version but it always seemed to end the same way. Ultimately the struggle to keep it up, or eventually even sit down at all, always seemed to end up outweighing the benefit I felt. What was the point in making myself do something I didn’t enjoy? I even toughed it out for quite some time once, just because I wondered if perhaps, I could get over the hump and then I’d start enjoying it. Nope. That didn’t work either.
In the end the mere thought of meditation and my lack of ability to be able to do it began to stress me out. And I was pretty sure THAT wasn’t the point.
So what IS the point?
What I’ve found for myself is that when things annoy me it’s firstly usually because I don’t really understand them very well. Like selfish drivers, maths and my computer when it won’t do as I ask despite my frantic random key pressing. And it turns out that mediation was no exception.
I didn’t know much about meditation but I thought I knew that it was something to do with not thinking. It didn’t take me long put two and two together and come up with the idea that if my thoughts caused me problems then perhaps learning to stop them altogether could be a winner. Just clear my mind of thoughts right?
So I began in earnest. Look brain, I’ll give you twenty minutes of my undivided time and attention if you’ll just agree to give me a break. That was my negotiation, together with wondering if perhaps there might be the slightest chance that there was something divine I could connect to via these means, which might deliver me where I wanted to go if I was a good enough student. And so, with great hope and enthusiasm, an Amazon purchase of The Power of Now and a good few Youtube videos under my belt I set sail, bound for the sea of tranquillity. And then… Go to the top of the page.
So what was going on? Well I began to see that one of my annoyances was being created by the fact that my motivation for doing it was rather transactional. I was doing meditation because I wanted something in return and when I wasn’t instantly getting it in the time frame that felt reasonable to me, namely five minutes, that annoyed me.
Secondly, have you ever tried to stop thinking for even 30 seconds and succeeded? If you have then move to the advanced class. I would say that THE number one most demotivating and possibly annoying thing about meditation is our misguided imaginings that we could, or in any way will succeed in being able to ‘not think’ for 1 minute let alone 20. It’s ridiculous and completely unrealistic. Yep. You heard it here. Not doable, forget about it, don’t even bother trying. And there you are. Your first step to meditation begins right there. Who knew it was that easy. I wish I had.
The 'No thought for longer than a minute' club
There’s simply nothing like failing over and over again to get us really frustrated and annoyed, and if it’s not somebody else’s fault, the cat, the noisy children, that car backfiring outside then it must be my fault. I just can’t do it. Well no, of course I can’t. No one can experience the state of no thought at all without many many many years of practice and then a bit more, if at all frankly. But what we tell ourselves is that once we can stop the thinking we will be happy. It’s an end-goaling misery fest. If we can't be at peace with the process then we are barking up simply the wrong tree.
I once heard a quote and I can’t remember who it was by now but it went something like… How miserable are we prepared to make ourselves now in the search for happiness in the future?
(If anyone knows who said this I’d love to be reminded please because it wasn’t me.)
Something else I was interested in was the fact that some of the most well-adjusted happy people I knew had never meditated a '20 minutes' in their life. Just saying…
But let's go back to the evidence for it and its connection with our well-being, I still wanted to investigate it further. And I did this by way of learning more about it and what it was I was really getting myself involved with.
It soon became apparent that the third annoying thing about meditation seemed to be connected to the fact that I had been viewing it as a 'thing' I had to ‘do’ that I wasn’t achieving, when in fact it is no such thing.
At this stage, I’d like to point out that It would be impossible to talk about all that meditation is and isn’t here, and not only that, I still have little clue in the deepest sense. There are however a great deal of far more qualified people who can talk about it at those levels and I encourage you to seek them out. All I can do here is share what I have discovered so far that’s been really useful to me.
The truth is that we enter in and out of states of what can be called meditation every day as we are going about our business, we just don’t notice them because our attention is more often than not oriented towards the noise rather than the silence. Silence and quiet isn’t something we have to ‘do’ but rather something we can ‘notice’ and that changes the game altogether because it’s not possible to fail at that really. We already are it whether we like it or notice it or not. So that job is being done for us already.
An example might look a bit like this. When we look at this paragraph what do we see? Words and letters, and then there are spaces between, but these spaces tend to get overlooked even though they were always there. The words and sentences would be pretty meaningless without them too but we much prefer the ‘something’ to the ‘nothing’ and find it far more interesting. Because let’s face it, ‘nothing’ is pretty boring right?
Or so you might think, but if there was no blank page, how would we be able to write something there? What if we saw the blank, or the nothing, or the silence as a possibility for infinite potential rather than something that's just not very interesting.
So the truth is that the ‘something’ and the ‘nothing’ or 'silence' and 'sound' are both always there and both equally as important. Because out of the ‘nothing’ ‘something’ always comes. So really ‘no thought’ is always there and therefore not something you have to DO but rather just notice. Have a go… There… You just meditated. Or you noticed what meditation is. It is actually always there, just waiting to be noticed.
Once again there is no blog of mine that could do this subject the justice it deserves but if I can go some way to pointing towards the kind of truth about meditation at its most basic level and in that way encourage us to engage with it at all then that’s cool as far as I see it.
In its most basic sense, the reason mediation is so good for us is because it reminds us of the quietness, stillness and peace that we already are, whilst connecting us with the inner wisdom and sanity we already possess, even if just for a moment. And this is why it’s so important that we don’t use the word or the idea of it to in fact start achieving the exact opposite.
Over time, I have come to notice that I am in touch with moments of meditation all throughout my day if I care to be aware of them, and if I want to go and sit on a cushion for 20 minutes or an hour this now feels more like a treat a rest, a retreat time for me where I can enjoy the process of just relaxing my body and slowing my thoughts in terms of revs per minute.
Just reminding myself that this is possible and available to me at whatever level feels possible for me that day is in and of itself restorative. I never expect to stop my thoughts altogether and instead allow them to come and go as I accept whatever is there or not. What a relief. I have found over time that my mind begins to quieten down more and more of its own accord and any ideas of annoyance are just that. Passing ideas all arising in and out of the space of quiet that I didn’t have to manufacture or DO anything to get.
I can’t meditate like anyone else. There is no specific way to meditate that I can somehow fail at. Mediation is always going on in the background. It’s exclusively my experience and it’s always there waiting for me to notice it. I don’t have to go anywhere or sit like anything or do anything or stop doing anything, (unless I want to of course then yes, I do that too) I just have to notice for a moment, or longer, or less.
Meditation is there before I even get involved, whether I like it or believe it or not, or whether I’m thinking or not thinking and it will still be there when I think I’ve finished. The quiet realisation of this is a form of meditation in itself.
So it’s not that we can’t add ‘doings’ to meditation, and we do. There are so many different wonderful types of meditation, which focus on connecting us with the difference aspects of ourselves but when I began to experience the kind of resistance frustration and annoyance, which turned me away from the idea of meditation altogether, it seemed to be because I was somehow beginning from this place of transaction and ‘doing’ as my starting point.
I then often felt like it was just another thing I couldn’t ‘do’
Once we realise that there really isn’t anything to do and start again from there, the following relief and relaxation into this realisation alone, then begins to feel like it might have something to do with mediation… and it’s definitely nowhere near as annoying.
Maxine Kemp is a transformative life coach based in East Suffolk UK who is dedicated to simplifying and demystifying the journey to greater peace well-being and empowerment.
"It’s not supposed to be that difficult."
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