RiverBender Blog: I Tried Meditation
The search for calm continues with meditation, mindfulness and maybe manifestation, as one writer keeps chasing the mental and physical health benefits these practices promise.
I am not a meditation person. I want to be. I want to be someone who is so effortlessly calm and mature about all my emotions. Meditation promised me that this could be the way in.
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I was committed. After reading the latest in a line of articles about how meditation benefits us, I decided to give it a shot.
My journey with meditation has not been linear. A few years ago, circa 2019, I downloaded one of those free meditation apps and popped in my earbuds, ready to start.
And it was…fine. I listened to the slow, calming voice telling me to breathe in and out, and I followed directions.
I pictured my thoughts floating by like leaves on a stream, and then I pictured the stream, and then I remembered this creek in my grandparents’ backyard, and then I thought I should really call my grandma, and then I realized I was no longer meditating, I was just sitting quietly and thinking.
This is, allegedly, a very common experience. The meditation articles and podcasts and apps will tell you that you should approach your straying mind without judgment, but instead just try to gently redirect your thoughts to the leaves on the stream or your breath or whatever your focus is supposed to be.
And so I took a deep breath, reminded myself to focus on the rise and fall of my chest, and leaned into it.
Except I couldn’t. Stop. Thinking.
Like, I don’t know about you all, but my mind is just…always running. Not in a bad way, but in a human way where I’m pretty much constantly noticing stimuli or remembering my to-do list or thinking about what to eat for lunch. I’m distracted easily.
Meanwhile, it turns out you can’t talk about meditation without hearing about mindfulness. The two seem to go hand-in-hand, according to the experts.
Mindfulness is (basically) this idea that you try to fully live in the moment, without distractions. So while you’re washing the dishes, maybe you really pay attention to the heat of the water and the grime of the food on the plate. Or in the shower, you smell the shampoo and keep your music turned off and focus on the rush of the water beating down.
Or so I’ve heard. Meditation was proving to be much harder than I thought — and I had used up all the free meditations available on my app — so I decided to take a beginner’s step and prioritize mindfulness first.
Feel the rain on your skin, I told myself. No one else can feel it for you. Only you can let it in…The rest is still unwritten.
(These are lyrics to a song, if you didn’t catch that. So once again, my mind wandered. I forced myself to come back to center.)
It turns out mindfulness, while easier than meditation (in my experience), wasn’t quite for me, either. I think I just am not a meditation/mindfulness/yoga guru kind of gal, as much as I might want to be.
That’s not to say these skills aren’t valuable, and I plan to continue flexing that meditation muscle. There are real mental and physical health benefits to these practices, which I’m determined to reap. In fact, I’m manifesting it — another “m” practice I’m ready to try out.
If you have any meditation or mindfulness tips, I’m all ears. In the meantime, I’ll be redownloading a meditation app to see if I can sneak in another free trial. Wish me luck.
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