I am not a perfect meditator

I went to my first yoga class in my twenties.  As soon as class started, we focused on breathwork.  We were asked to close our eyes and focus on our breathing  Immediately,  my mind started racing, I felt uncomfortable and anxious just sitting there and not doing anything.  I nervously opened my eyes to sneak a glance around to see who else was feeling this same anxious jittery ”forced into stillness emotion” with me.  To my surprise, almost everyone else was sitting peacefully and breathing with their eyes closed. This only made me feel worse, and if something was wrong with me that I could not sit peacefully like everyone else in this class.  I found myself becoming antsy, irritable, crawling out of my skin, and  arguing with myself…. all within the first full minute of class.

After I exhausted those thoughts and arguments,  I  tried again to just focus on my breath.  This time my thoughts drifted to all my discomfort and annoyances. My back was hurting even though I was sure I was sitting tall in my spine the way the teacher suggested. The floor was ridiculously hard under my mat and the person next to me was breathing way too loud.  Why on earth did I take off my socks in a room that was freezing cold?  I refused to give into these thoughts and instead I found more complaints.  When I finally finished my internal rant, I found myself silently screaming at the teacher to hurry it up already, get on with the actual yoga poses, the main reason I thought I was there.

Sound familiar?  This is what the start of meditation looks like for a lot of us.  It took me YEARS to be on my mat and be able to just sit in stillness.  It took me YEARS to feel the sensations in the room, in my body, and be able to lean into that discomfort.  It took me YEARS to be able to drop into my body.

And some days it is still hard, I might drop into stillness, only to come right back out and wrestle with a problem in my mind.  This is all part of the practice of meditation though. Over the years, I have learned to give myself grace, to lean into all those discomforts and annoyances, to accept that I am not a perfect meditator.  

Meditation is not about emptying our mind, it is about coming back to our breath again and again. It is when we recognize the awareness that we are suddenly no longer present, it is then that we can drop back into the  stillness, into the breath, and into the body.

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