I am bad at meditation
Meditation is one of the tools I often recommend to clients and one that sometimes gets a lot of resistance. The thing I hear most often that keeps people from trying (or trying again) to meditate is that they don’t think they can do it right or that they will be bad at it. Well, the title of this post gave away my secret, but I am also “bad” at meditation. And yet, I still find it to be an important and valuable part of my mental health and self-care strategy. Today I’m sharing all the ways I and others are bad at meditation and ways to overcome these problems or decide they aren’t even problems at all.
It Doesn’t Work
I work with a ton of anxious folks, and a common rebuttal I hear from them when I suggest they try meditation is that they have tried it and it didn’t “work” to help them calm their anxiety. And what I often find when I dig deeper is that they tried to sit and meditate when they felt highly anxious or panicky. It does not work this way, y’all! To use a sports metaphor for a moment, a panic attack or stressful situation is like The Big Game and meditation is all the practice sessions, time at the gym, and lower stakes games you’ve played to make it to The Big Game. You have to start meditating regularly at times when you aren’t overly anxious in order to build the skills to “win” when the stakes are high. So, what are those skills meditation can help us build? There is often confusion about this as well.
I Can’t Clear My Mind
One of the biggest misconceptions my clients have about meditation is that the goal is to be able to clear your mind and “not think” for whatever amount of time you are meditating. This is just not true or even possible for most of us regular people! For myself, and most of my clients, the muscle we are trying to build with meditation is the ability to come back to ourselves when we find that we’ve wandered off down a rabbit trail of overthinking. I’ve been meditating pretty consistently for several years, and I still think a lot sometimes during meditation. And that’s completely fine because each time I notice I’ve started thinking about my to-do list, something I said to my kid, or whether I have something to make for dinner tomorrow, I get to work on that “coming back to myself” muscle. When you do this over and over (and over and over and over) during meditation you start to get what it feels like physically, mentally, and emotionally to notice your spiraling thoughts and come back to the present moment. And then you’re more likely to be able to pull off that play during The Big Game.
I Don’t Have Time
I also often hear people saying that they don’t have time. And listen, I get it. We all have a ton of things on our plates. Whether it’s work or school or kids or pets or cleaning the house or caring for elderly parents, we are BUSY! I think there is a belief that there is a right amount of time to meditate and that it is ideally a long time. Or that there is a correct time of day to practice meditation, which is in the morning before everyone else gets up. Not so! I used to meditate in the mornings, which served me well at that time, but these days I am loving to meditate right before bed. Any time you can be quiet and alone works even if you’ve got to hide in the bathroom! And as far as the time goes, any amount of time is great. Seriously, even 5 minutes will give you time to get a couple of “coming back to myself” reps in. My evening meditation time lasts between 10 and 15 minutes most nights and never more than 20.
I Hate Sitting in Silence
There are some meditation snobs out there who don’t think guided meditation is “real” meditation or that it’s like training wheels until you can “really meditate”. Well, I think that’s crap. Guided meditations are excellent doorways into a meditation practice and can be really helpful for lots of different goals. You can find a guided meditation for just about anything you want to focus on. Managing chronic pain? Yep! Healing negative body image? Yes, indeed! Sleep and relaxation? Of course! Being a better parent? Oh yes, there’s one for that too! You can also listen to music while you meditate. That’s my preferred method right now, and there are literally thousands of little pieces of music in my favorite meditation app that I can use. So you do not have to sit silently. You actually don’t even have to sit. Did you know that? There is a long tradition of walking meditation that you could explore. I also encourage folks to bring mindfulness practices into other parts of their lives. You can meditate while doing dishes, mowing the lawn, standing in line, folding laundry, etc. This works a related but slightly different muscle, the “be here now” muscle. The goal is to work on singular focus on your task, notice when your mind wanders off, and bring it back.
It Makes Me Feel Bad About Myself
You’ll notice that there is a common thread running through these things that make us bad meditators, and that is the belief that there is a right way to do it and that we can’t be perfect at it. As a recovering perfectionist myself, I completely get this. And this is another way that having a meditation practice can help our mental health and personal development. Through meditating, we can slowly build the “I’m not perfect and that’s ok” muscle. I used to get really frustrated with myself when my mind would wander a million times or I couldn’t sit still during meditation. After literally hours of practice, I can now smile or lovingly chuckle at myself and all the silly things my brain wants to think about when I give it some space. I am not my thoughts and not all of my thoughts need to be taken seriously. The effect in my daily life has been that when I make mistakes, I feel less shame or embarrassment than I would have before. And that’s pretty great.
So, there you have it. I’m sure there are other ways to be a bad meditator but those are the main ones that I see others struggling with or asking me about. The link to my favorite meditation app is below. Unlike a lot of the apps out there, it is completely free and has TONS of content. It can be kind of overwhelming, actually, but it has some great meditations “for beginners” if that’s you, as well as music tracks, a simple timer, and since COVID they have started offering live streaming classes including meditation, yoga, talks on various topics. I highly recommend it!
Until next time, take care of yourself
Meghan
My favorite meditation app