I used to be surprised when I’d mention meditation to someone and they’d say, “yeah I don’t know, I tried it and it didn’t work. It doesn’t work for me, my brain won’t stop.” The comment would always take me by surprise.
When I came to meditation, I tried it like my head was on fire and it was the only water around. I tried and tried, practiced and “failed”, over and over. I had severe anxiety, an aversion to therapy, and I was determined not to remain on medication for the rest of my life. So, when I felt “not good at it,” it seemed all the more reason to do it. I didn’t feel like I had any other option.
If you are like most people, you have a job to juggle with other responsibilities, and there just doesn’t seem to be time or luxury to sit and see what your body wants you to do. Humans, for some reason, have collectively decided to abide by a system in which the more your income exceeds your expenses, the more you feel compelled to spend it, so that we end up with an unsatisfying amount at the end of the month, further tying us to the job we have, keeping us in relationships for stability’s sake, or depending upon those who are unhealthy for us to be around. It is an insane system (literally), and it explains a lot of our inner turmoil. And so, as we suffer more than ever before, we need to address our lack of inner stillness with an honesty we’ve never attempted, and the old excuses need to be questioned.
Our minds have been programmed to survive an insane system since birth. Trial and error has shown us our very mannerisms, simply a combination of what we’ve seen, and we call this “me.” Included in that is the mental chatter which has enabled you to survive in this world, staying inside the lines of society. It’s no wonder it feels necessary to this day, and it’s no wonder your mind is so quick to determine meditation isn’t for you. Your mind wants the status quo, because it is the status quo. Sitting with your thoughts and feelings for five minutes with this new information in mind might even lead you to resonate with this – “you” don’t want to stop thinking.
I like to think of this scenario, then, like a math problem of sorts. You’re the conductor of a train that’s been circling outward in a spiral for as long as you’ve been alive. You can’t even see where you started anymore. You’re tired of the ride and want to get off, but the train didn’t have brakes built in. So you set to work constructing brakes with what you have on hand, but you only work on this ten minutes a day for a few days. Meanwhile, you and your crew continue to shovel fuel into the engine for the rest of the day. When will the train stop?
Well, if it has an infinite supply of fuel (media, expectations of friends and family, etc) and you quit at four attempts, you’re on the ride of your life. If you can stop fueling the engine and finish those brakes with patient, ardent, consistent practice, you’ll stop that train. At that point, you will have a say over when your mind thinks, and you can safely engage with the world without losing access to an inner peace that already exists within you, just waiting to be noticed.
So – are you bad at meditating because you have attempted a few ten minute sessions to quell conditioning which has only been worsening for generations as we internalize more and more trauma and increasingly complex expectations of ourselves? I’ll let you answer that.
For a long time, it felt like life was just hard. That’s all it was, hard for everyone. And I’ll admit, depending where you find yourself, the evidence may be quite compelling. This is why we must do the bravest thing we’ve ever done – to really look at ourselves, all day every day, until we begin to see the mechanisms of our minds. And seeing this is the start to seeing beyond it, to liberation. As in The Matrix, you see that it’s all a program, a limited perception, and beyond it is truth.
It all sounds like a lot, I know. The wonderful thing is, you don’t have to figure out how to see the matrix. 2600 years ago, humans figured out how to get past their mental chatter to find inner stillness, and they called it yoga. True yoga, which is not fitness-geared and incorporates meditation, allows us to hear what we’ve been tuning out. We work through the excess energy in our bodies, allow the energy to move freely by addressing areas where we hold tension, and then we sit – our bodies better prepared to sit still and make space for quiet. Trying to meditate for the first time without having prepared the body is going to be turbulent. In fact, it could remain turbulent for years, and it’s no reflection on your “skill”.
The beauty of the time we find ourselves in is that yoga is now more accessible and affordable than ever. For $10, you can take a group class in your home and not experience the feeling of being out of place, not having the right clothes, not being skilled enough. Anonymity, community, and accessibility are taking the elitism right out of yoga, and I’m here for it. And the best part: you don’t have to get up and go after savasana. You can move right into meditation in whatever form your practice takes, as it was intended. We have with this an opportunity to restore yoga to its original form, to collectively realize that meditation (and yoga for that matter) is not to excel or fail at but to practice for the sake of practice. I love being part of that journey.
Heather Ralston 