Why you won't learn to meditate
How do we cultivate calm, focus, and productivity in these uncertain times. For me, meditation is the key daily habit that brings these benefits
Even though I've been "doing" meditation for 30 years now, it still feels a little uncomfortable telling people about it. It's much more acceptable in these times we live in, but it's still full of mystery and brings a feeling scepticism by the majority.
I would say that there are three key blockers to you discovering the benefits of meditation, stopping you getting over the line to reveal its strength.
Blocker 1
The word "meditation" just puts you off. You see it as too spiritual, too wacko, a waste of time, of little benefit, another thing to fit into an already bursting schedule.
Blocker 2
When you finally decide to explore it, the amount of information on it is so overwhelming. You therefore don’t know where to start, and you give up before you've even begun. There is the Headspace app, the Calm app, books, websites, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and classes, all telling us about it and how to do it.
There are different types of meditation too, mindful meditation, mantra meditation, guided meditation. You have to also go through that stressful exercise of picking one within all these types too. Ironically it’s at that moment of overwhelm that you need meditation the most. But you don’t, you give up.
Blocker 3
If you do find a meditation practice to have a go at, you don’t know if they are doing it "right". You can't see someone else doing it, you cant see what is going on in their head. So you cant emulate others performance.
Russell Brand on his podcast recently interviewed Joe Wicks (the UKs new PE teacher). Russell is big into his meditation and was asking Joe if he had tried it. Joe said he and his wife had recently been trying it, but Joe didn’t think he was getting any benefit so he gave up.
Joe's mind, and the Youtube viewers of his exercise regime, are used to seeing visual instruction, copying it, instantly gaining feedback to make adjustments on, thus leading to quick results. That doesn’t happen with meditation, it needs a lot of goes at it, trial and error, and tweaking, to start discovering the benefits. In this world of instant gratification you don’t have the stamina and patience for all of that, so you quit.
So how are you best starting?
Firstly, change the language. Called it mindfulness if you don’t like the word meditation. Meditation is a practice to create that wonderful life-affirming quality of mindfulness. So just call it mindfulness, it's fine. It's just a label.
I recommended starting with an app like Headspace or calm. You can test them out for free, then for a small monthly subscription fee you gain access to their full library of guided meditations. If you are completely new to meditation, check out the Headspace short cartoon videos on YouTube. If the apps don’t work for you, or even if they do, go exploring other types of meditation.
For me I'm less of a fan of guided meditation, as found on the apps, as I prefer mantra meditation. I'm less keen on having continual instruction as I'm doing it. I prefer to go at my pace and in silence, but that's me.
Once you’ve started, keep doing just a little bit every day. If you are insure if you are doing something right, put the question onto Google, where there's a good chance someone has posted the same question. The more questions you ask and the more you find answers to, the more you will relax during your meditation. This raises the experience further, therefore encouraging you to cement a rewarding daily habit .
Happy exploring.