This blog post is gonna be about how I found meditation and my March 2021 challenge, where I set myself the goal of doing one meditation session each day.
The Beginning
I first started being interested in meditation during my semester abroad in Japan. Before that I didnât really understand the concept of it. I guess like everyone else my notion of meditation was sitting motionless in a room until my hair falls out, I get fat and my skin turns gold. However, during my semester abroad I attended a course about Japanese Buddhism, whose teacher also offered weekly meditation sessions. I really enjoyed doing the meditation in the small group we had with our teacher as the guide. The sessions consisted of 20 minutes of calming meditation (called âShamathaâ) where we also did a body scan, followed by an additional 20 minutes of insight meditation (called âVipassanaâ) where we concentrated on one body part and focused our entire awareness on it. While 40 minutes in total sounds pretty long, doing it in the group with someone to guide us through the it made it relatively easy.
After a few sessions I got accustomed to the duration of the meditation and also the inevitable numbness in my legs and I could really focus on the meditation itself. Week after week I got better at doing nothing and just sitting there. One thing I realized is that my thoughts never really stopped to wander around. Instead they started to get slower and slower. I was thinking about the usual things, but every sentence was pulled apart as if my mind was occupied with the nothingness of meditation and didnât have enough time to process the sentences. I thought about what I was going to eat after the meditation, but that thought alone dragged itself out to five minutes or so. I soon realized the effects of meditation on my mind and how calm and quiet my mind was during the sessions. I really enjoyed the weekly sessions and so I went to every single one that was offered that semester. My teacher jokingly said that Iâm his best student yet and that I will soon become a monk. Well, that could have been an interesting career pathâŠ
Another thing I realized later, while not really feeling well and having a lot of anxiety, was that my breathing was very short and fast and I was huddled. This is in complete contrast to breathing during meditation, where you want to take deep breaths and for that you have to sit with a straight back. So when I realized that during one of my anxiety attacks, I tried to straighten out my back and take some deep breaths. I donât know why, but the thought of coming out of that hole during those moments was terrifying me. The thought of taking a deep breaths was just scary to me and I just donât know why. But as I tried to calm down and breath in deep, I felt the anxiety slowly fading. Although I didnât feel great afterwards, I at least wasnât feeling like complete shit anymore.
The Drought
There is a huge difference in doing guided meditation versus meditating on your own. While 40 minutes of guided meditation were hard but manageable, even 10 minutes of meditating on my own were unbelievable difficult. It felt like time wasnât moving at all and after looking at the clock after what felt like an eternity not even half of my meditation time was over. I really felt like I needed guidance in one way or another.
Luckily, my meditation teacher offered us to send us a recording of one of his meditation sessions a few years back. It was intended for exactly these situations, where youâre alone but want to do guided meditation. In the beginning this worked fine. It felt like a normal session in my meditation group at the temple in Tokyo. However, after doing the meditation with the audio a few times, you know every sentence and every word by heart. You know what the teacher will say next, when the random laugh of one of the students will come and you know every sound of the audio by heart. And so I meditated less and less frequently, until I eventually stopped meditating. This went on for a few months, where I always felt like I should to do it, but never knew how I could actually keep at it.
The Resurgence
I knew there were a lot of different meditation apps available that filled the need for guidance that I felt I had. However, my problem was that I didnât feel like it. I wasnât motivated to do it, as so often in my life. And, I have to say, that is okay. Itâs hard for me to just accept that sometimes I just canât do anything, that I feel exhausted for seemingly no reason. Adding to that the feeling of anger and disappointment for not doing anything and not being enough doesnât help me. So after a few months, I felt like I wanted to try meditation again. I tried a few different meditation apps and finally stuck with Medito (Play Store, App Store). The app is free and the app is managed by a nonprofit organization and some dedicated volunteers.
I started to meditate again, not daily, but often, but always sitting in my room with an open window. It didnât matter what the weather was outside. Sometimes a -10°C cold breeze softly grazed my skin, other times snowflakes falling on my legs and sometimes it was a pleasant warmth that filled the room. If you canât be outside to meditate, you just bring the outside inside.
And so I meditated sometimes in the night for a few months. In the end, I wanted to try to stick to daily meditation again and see how that goes. And so, after nearly 1000 words of how I ended up with the meditation challenge, here we actually goâŠ
March Challenge: Daily Meditation
My goal for the month was to do at least one 10 minute session of meditation every day. I also tried to shift my meditation time from nights to the afternoon. This way I could split my day up a bit. If I felt like I needed another session at the end of the day I did another one at my usual time in the night before going to sleep. This way I could be a bit more collected throughout the day, instead of just unwinding at night, while building up stress the entire day.
Meditating in the afternoon proved to be especially advantageous when I did home office. Usually, when Iâm at work I get tired and unfocused in the afternoon/evening. I donât have this everyday, but when I do, concentrating just seems impossible. When I realized that I just canât get any work done anymore, I normally go for a short walk outside to collect myself. However, at home I realized that meditation does pretty much the same thing. I can switch off for a second, clear my mind and afterwards I can work more productively until the end of my workday. This also helped me through studying for exams and working on projects for university.
Then, after about the halfway point of the challenge, meditating got harder and harder. Pushing through the initial resistance of not feeling like doing something was easy for me to do in the beginning, but after a while, the wall of resistance got bigger and bigger and my motivation smaller and smaller.
At the end of the month I slipped a few times and didnât meditate some days. However, I donât see this as a negative. I realized that pushing to do something regularly for the sake of it isnât the way to go for me personally. I found benefits in meditating regularly and I know how to use it in times when I feel bad, however, meditation is just a tool. Knowing how and when to use a tool is important to know, otherwise youâll try to use it in the wrong situation and potentially make matters worse. And exactly that happened at the end of the month. I didnât feel like meditating and instead I needed to just go out for a walk, take a hot shower or do something else to calm and collect myself. But I was stubborn and wanted to push meditation as the solution to all problems I had. On these days the meditation went as terrible as it can go: my mind was constantly wandering, I wasnât able to concentrate on my breathing even for a few seconds and afterwards I didnât feel any better than before. So while meditation is great in some situations, it isnât doing anything good in others.
This challenge taught me that I have still a lot to learn about myself and how to best handle stress, anxiety and depressive moments. Going forward, I want to keep at meditating, however, I donât want to force myself to do it. One important thing to mention here is that I donât mean ânot wanting toâ as being lazy. There is a clear distinction for me between just being lazy and not feeling like it, which is sometimes hard to differentiate. This differentiation is also something that I have to get better at, because pushing through the resistance of âjust being lazyâ is, in my eyes, a good thing that will lead to a more fulfilled life, whereas pushing through the resistance of ânot feeling like itâ will likely lead to being burned out.
Next Up: Big Brain Acquisition
My challenge for April will be reading every day. I was an avid anti-reader in the past, but I recently gathered some books to read from recommendation of some people I follow on social media. And so I will try to give reading another shot and see how goes this time around.
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See you again soon :)
Ash