Starting over, thoughts on meditation

I’ve been going through some painful self discovery in 2019. A lot of contradictory thoughts and feelings in my head. Anything from simple things at work and home to big things like where I want to live has been unreal this year. For instance, at the start of this year, I felt like I wanted to move away from the city to Southern California. That has changed and I don’t really know where I’d like to live in the coming few years, fortunately, the place I’m in right now I don’t have any complaints about.

This post is about meditation, I recently started getting serious about doing meditation. My earlier attempts at meditation were always driven by incorrect or ill-informed ideas such as “you need an empty mind to meditate” or “be away from everything and in a quiet place”. The latter is pretty bad because at my house, the pets are always around me so I wouldn’t be able to be myself and it’s not often quiet. I got a tip from my therapist that I should just try to meditate in places that are far from quiet, like the bus or at work. So far from what I understand, emptying your mind is not the goal of meditation. Seeing your thoughts and letting the float by is one goal and it has been pretty tough. I’ve been reading Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris which has some good ideas on getting started and it also has convinced me of getting rid of some of my doubts. I highly recommend checking it out.

One of the big things I’ve started learning from meditation is that you are going to be always restarting and there isn’t anything wrong with this. The conventional sense of “failure” is actual a success case in the world of meditation. It will get easier to focus on my breathing as time passes by every time a thought takes over me, it’s not a “failure” but instead a challenge that came up and I need to overcome.

My awareness and mindfulness has become something now but I can’t say it’s much yet. I’m trying to be mindful and mindfulness can be cultivated by meditating but I’m still very early in the process.