How Meditation Is Helping My Insanity
It was September 1 and I had just turned 44. I had lived half (or more?) of my life with one leg in tomorrow and the other firmly planted in yesterday. “That’s why you’re pissing all over today,” a wise teacher had wryly quipped. I chuckled but deep down I knew it was no laughing matter. No wonder I’m not getting anywhere, I thought.
I intellectually understood that Now is all I had, all any of us have, yet, I was living for a later that would never come. “Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.” I had read Tolle a decade earlier and already knew this. Yet. Here I was. Or wasn’t, I guess. To be human is to not be here right now. Hence the insanity.
I knew meditation to be a reliable practice in helping one learn how to be here right now and I had dabbled in it. As it turns out, meditation isn’t something you can dabble in. Like exercise, you must be all in if you want good results. As a person who needs structure in order to thrive, I decided to subscribe to Headspace. I tend to over-commit to things which is likely why I paid the $79 USD and bought a year’s subscription. I downloaded the app and as a newly minted 44-year old, I began my journey to Now.
I started with a course called Basics and quickly discovered there’s nothing basic about 10min of meditation. As much as I loved Andy’s calm and Britishy sounding voice, after a few min, I was like.. “there’s still 8 min left??” As a Type A person I felt like I wasn’t doing anything, which, as it turns out, is precisely the point. The not doing is the doing. My job was to not do. I felt like a city worker.
10 days in, Headspace informed me that I had completed the course. I decided to move onto Basics 2 but after 3 sessions I discovered that as much as I loved Andy, the guided meditation was distracting me from meditating, which I suppose I should have welcomed. Nevertheless, I decided to move onto the semi-guided option and found it to be a better balance. Andy was still there but he prompted me much less allowing me to learn how to focus on my own. After a few months, I started to get cocky and tried a 10 min unguided session. The eerie silence absent of any prompts proved to be too much and I spent most of the time thinking about hockey and whether we should order pizza or Thai for supper tonight? I also remembered that I forgot to text back that client shit!!!, how is there still 6 min left??…
Yesterday, Headspace informed me that I had officially meditated for 150 days straight. 5 months and over 35 hrs spent doing nothing. Although meditation is about learning how to see and then quiet the ego’s voice, it’s also about seeing your whole self clearly. If I’m honest, I see my ego has enjoyed the stats! The stats are likely the X factor in how I’ve managed to stay so consistent. The thought of starting over on Day 1 after missing a session is often enough motivation on its own for me to never miss. Lately though, my motivation has started to change.
Although I’m still aware of the stats, they pop up on the screen at the end of every session, I have now found myself looking forward to the first 20 min of my day. That’s right, I’m up to 20min now. My alarm goes off around 530am and after throwing on my pj’s and comfy socks I walk into my space, put on my headphones, and push play. I do this before anything -especially coffee (my hyper mind has enough trouble focusing without caffeine waking it up). I start every session watching one of the clever one minute animated mindfulness videos. I have found they help ready my mind for its daily exercise. After several months of this routine, 20 min no longer feels very long so next month I’ll move up to 30min. If you had told me a year ago that 20 min of doing nothing would go by quickly, I would have never believed you. As it turns out, doing nothing can really be something.
I mentioned exercise. As much as meditation is an exercise for the mind, I have also learned the importance of exercising my mind while working out my body. I began Shaun T’s famous or perhaps infamous Insanity program on January 1st and officially finished the grueling first month, today. I have one week of “recovery workouts,” before I begin the much more grueling month 2, next week. I put recovery workouts in quotes because most people would struggle to complete them. How is this relevant?
If you know anything about Insanity, you know it to be among the hardest and most intense exercise programs on the market. It is high-intensity interval training to the max. Every session takes you to your limit and as much as you hate Shaun T for what he is making you do, you also lovingly, “grab a Shaun T,” and let him do it.
During the first few weeks, my focus in the workouts was trying not to permanently lose my breath while obsessively checking how much time was left on the clock. Sometimes while doing speed pushups or even suicides, I would actually catch myself thinking about the next day’s workout and how much I was dreading doing the power jumps. No wonder I was losing my breath and struggling to keep up. I was pushing my body to the limit while my mind was somewhere else. How pointless and dangerous and human is that?
As it turns out, projecting negativity into the future is one of our favourite past or future? times even though we are notoriously shit at predicting the future. In fact, we are the only animals who have bothered to try. Daniel Gilbert explains the problem in his excellent book, Stumbling on Happiness. “When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.” In other words, when I imagine tomorrow’s power jumps while doing today’s speed pushups, I do so while exhausted and project that exhaustion into tomorrow creating a dread that doesn’t need to be there. We make this mistake all the time in a variety of ways even though it guarantees our unhappiness. Unless we learn to live in this moment, we’ll spend our lives chasing the wind.
Recently it dawned on me that unless my 20 min meditation session was flowing into the rest of my day’s activities, I was likely engaged in an exercise called -missing the point. It’s one thing to be able to focus and be in the NOW when the house is quiet and you are in your cozy jams and slippies, it’s another thing to do it when you are being pushed to your physical limit.
Or your boss is yelling at you.
Or the test came back positive.
Or your kids are driving you crazy.
Or your loan wasn’t approved.
Or you failed.
Again.
Yesterday, I was nearing my limit. As the sweat sprayed off of me and I felt the exhaustion set in, I didn’t check the clock. It was power jump time. As I bounced up and down, I felt a strength and a rhythm that can only come when you’re completed dialed into the present moment. All of a sudden Shaun T shouted, “come on yalllll, where you at, where you at?” I understood what he was asking and it made me smile.
I’m right here.
