One of our recent interns, Ben Watts, was inspired by our love and promotion of all things meditation and he decided to try out a regular practice for himself. Ben wrote the below article about his experience setting up a mediation practice, read below to see what he discovered.
A Meditation Practice by Ben Watts
I am very new to meditating. Having started in January, the hurdles are not only fresh in mind but I’m still tripping over them. Over the course of the last couple of months I have fallen asleep whilst meditating, suffered back pain, yelled in frustration at my inability to concentrate, suffered neck pain, procrastinated starting for a full hour, and suffered leg pain.
However, there are lots of articles warning people that meditation is not easy. Instead, I want to say what’s helped me (besides an osteopath).
I have a theory (I’m not sure I’m allowed a theory, given how little time I’ve been meditating for, but until someone takes it away, I’ll repeat said theory). The theory is that newcomers to meditation are not discouraged solely by the practice’s difficulty, but by arriving at it harbouring the stereotype that meditation is easy, and then finding it anything but.
Imagine starting the practice with the image of a monk sat peacefully underneath a cloudless sky, besides pebbles balanced atop one another, and then sitting for the first time and feeling pain at holding your attention to your breathing. You haven’t been prepared for this.
You didn’t sign up for discomfort.
So, you stop.
Luckily, online articles on meditation often point out that the practice is far from easy. I’d had a snoop around, so I half-knew what to expect, yet still I found this stereotype impacting my practice. When I struggled, I figured it must have been because I was doing something wrong, rather than difficulty being a natural and important part of the process.
As a result, I sought to correct my practice, and the only way I saw how was to adhere closer to the prescribed “ideal”: cross-legged, twice a day, twenty minutes per session. In a shock twist, this didn’t help squat! Following these guides made my practice worse. I dreaded sitting, I struggled to settle into meditating because I didn’t want to be doing it, I’d get bored and cut off my practice early.
And what ended up helping? In a second shock twist, it was putting aside the strict rules. I swapped the floor for a chair, twenty minutes for ten, and instead of meditating twice a day, I sat when I felt I needed it. That last one was crucial.
Even if I’ve struggled immensely during a meditation, knowing that I wanted to do it when I started helped maintain the willpower to finish that session. I’ve found it helpful to view meditation the same way I do eating and sleeping. Some people recommend eating and sleeping at regular times daily, but that doesn’t work for me. Instead, I eat when I’m hungry and sleep when I’m tired.
Locking myself into a recommended pattern wouldn’t help me one iota, and it’s the same for meditating.
My last piece of advice would be that nothing has been as beneficial as the change from no meditation to some meditation. What sleep is to tiredness, meditation is to a cluttered mind. Imagine if you were tired but didn’t know sleep was the cure. You’d sit tired all day and have no idea how to fix it. It would be infuriating.
Even if my mind is cluttered and for whatever reason I’m not meditating, knowing that I can do something to relieve it when I choose is its own kind of comfort. I would recommend starting to anyone, however you choose to do it.
