Meditation, or the lack thereof

Anna Blackmon
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

I read “Love Warrior” recently and in it the author, Glennon Doyle Melton, quotes Pema Chödrön --

“So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t sit for even one, that’s the journey of the warrior.”

I’m trying to learn to meditate so that quote was less inspirational and more depressing. I swear I’m getting worse instead of better. Like, the more days I try the less I’m able to focus. Does that quote work in reverse? Can I be on the warrior’s journey if I’ve moved from 1.8 seconds to 1 second to .5 seconds?

I suppose it could be that I’m simply noticing my distraction more. Yet I’m pretty sure that a month ago I could go 20–30 seconds before my brain spun off and the last couple of days I’m not even making it to 5 seconds. My thoughts are a frantic buzzing in my skull that makes me want to chunk a glass at the wall.

Why is it so hard to focus for two minutes? Just two freaking minutes. I’m not looking for an hour or something.

I have played around with meditation off and on through the years but not with any real consistency. This is the longest I’ve gone where I’ve meditated more days than not and it’s not what I expected. I started for a number of reasons but mainly because I realized that my brain wants instant rewards and when it doesn’t get them it simply wanders off. It reached the point that I noticed a decrease in my productivity. And happiness.

I have increased the amount of reading I do, and the level of that reading, and I discovered that my ability to follow a complex thought has all but vanished. I remember a time when I regularly read long college-level books and now I find myself distracted after only a few pages.

My writing has also suffered from a lack of attention. There was a time where I thought nothing of sitting down and writing a few thousand words before work. Now my brain will flip to a new and more interesting thought and I don’t even finish the sentence I’m in the middle of writing, sometimes after only a few paragraphs. Obviously this has not been helpful.

So I’m making myself read hard books anyway, even if I have to reread pages to remember what’s on them. And to write something, even if I don’t feel like it’s any good. And I’m meditating, terribly, to build focus.

Currently my practice makes just makes me want to smash things.

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