Calm
My first several years of meditating were a failure. Meditating was an activity I wanted to include in my life, but it just wasn’t for me. I was that girl who fidgeted — touched her hair, had an itch on her face and arm and shifted her legs — and whose thoughts wandered for the entire duration of every session. Five minutes felt like an agonizing hour. I wasn’t like the other students who could sit still and focus solely on their breath.
In June 2020, three months into the quarantine because of COVID-19, I joined a four-week meditation workshop online. As usual, I was fidgety, not calm at all. Apart from the actual meditation, we had weekly discussions where we could, but were not required to, share our own experiences. And what I learned was this: I wasn’t unique. The nerve of me to think I was the only one who fidgeted and couldn’t stay still, who had trouble focusing on the breath, whose mind wandered and contained only negative thoughts, who’d fallen off the wagon so many times and couldn’t get back up, who wasn’t calm. Imagine that — I had the audacity to think I was special.
Aside from the group discussions, we were each paired with a fellow student — an accountability buddy — to check in with every day or whenever we wanted to. And I’m so grateful for my partner, who came up with the idea of using a shared online journal to write our feelings and experiences on our individual meditation every day. I freely wrote about how I had trouble with attention, how meditating took a lot of time out of my day, how much hatred I felt for myself sometimes, how much I longed for the past — generally how messed up my day was — and she did the same. We read each other’s entries (and talked over Zoom sometimes) without really aiming to fix anything or give advice, just acknowledging our emotions without judgment, which is the best form of support ever.
Out of all the techniques I learned, my favorite (and the one with the most surprising results) was naming my emotions as I meditated. When I tried it, I was shocked by the emotions that came out, for instance, envy. Believe it or not, prior to that, I had never felt (or at least thought I had never felt) envious of anyone; I never was competitive. I loved supporting everybody’s business ideas, passion projects, blogs, what have you. But for the first time, the name envy came up. So did sad, scared, lost, longing for something, missing someone. It made me wonder if I had, all my life, been suppressing my real feelings, covering them up with false contentment, showing the world I was okay, optimistic about life . . . and calm. This form of meditation helped me be conscious of emotions buried deep and, most important of all, face them. And then accept them.
Although I’ve learned many more things over the course of four weeks (and even after that), my main takeaway is to practice being kind and patient toward ourselves whenever our mind wanders during meditation — just gently, calmly bring our awareness back to the breath. There’s no such thing as a failed meditation, even when we lose focus and go back to the breath a thousand times. Meditation is more accepting and forgiving than I thought. Then we can allow this kindness and patience toward ourselves to extend to all other areas of our lives, like in our careers, relationships, health, recreational activities and faith — get back on the wagon as many times as we need to.
One-word prompt: Calm
