7 Times When I Almost Quit Meditation
It’s so easy to fall into the hype of meditation. When you google ‘Meditation benefits’ you get articles from Forbes, Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review all writing the same thing:
- Mindfulness sharpens skills like attention and memory
- Meditation can increase creativity, focus, and better relationships
- Meditation helps quiet the constant mental chatter
- Mindfulness training can help motivate you to live a healthier lifestyle (i.e. eating healthy, exercising daily, and getting 8 hours of sleep a night)
As a young professional, the ability to focus on tasks, create meaningful relationships, and stopping the stream of pointless thoughts is fundamental for success and cultivating a powerful personal brand.
I can spend the next 20 minutes giving you all the studies and articles that show the benefits of meditation, but reality is that people already know this.
So the bigger question is, Why hasn’t everyone jumped onto the meditation bandwagon?
Through my personal experience and asking others this question, I’ve concluded that most people have false expectations of meditation that causes them to quit.
So here are my seven moments where I almost gave up on meditation. Hopefully through reading my personal experience you gain a greater understanding of what to expect when you sit down to meditate.
Expecting Too Much
I’m not sure if this comes from the years of watching movies and reading articles on the internet, but before sitting down for my first meditation, I just assumed I was going to meditate like the monks and yogis and master my mind.
But the complete opposite was true. I fell asleep during my first attempt of meditation (So much for becoming a yogi). But the takeaway here is that when you first start to sit down to meditate, you should only have one expectation and that is, be ready for anything. More importantly, don’t let your first experience stop you from trying again.
Like the saying goes, practice makes perfect.
Not Having a Consistent Schedule
That brings me to my second point. I first attempted meditation when I was nine years old. Then I took an 8-year break and got back on it sporadically my senior year of high school. Then took another two years off and finally established a consistent schedule my second year in college.
From that date, the longest I’ve gone without meditating has been four days. It wasn’t until I started to meditate on a consistent schedule where I began to see the benefits. So the takeaway here is you have to do it every single day.
Because the truth is that you aren’t going to have life-altering benefits just meditating once in a blue moon. Still don’t believe me, here’s a great article by Fast Company that explains how to make any routine stick.
The most notable blurb from this article:
A goal we looked at in depth recently was meditation. We researched the people that were failing at meditation and the people succeeding at meditation. The people that were succeeding were like, “Well, I just started with two or three minutes a day and my mind was a complete mess but that’s okay.” People that were telling us that they were failing were telling us, “I just sat down for only 30 minutes, but I couldn’t keep my mind clear, so maybe meditation’s not cut out for me."
I thought Meditation was ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail’
From a young age, we are taught to see everything as ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail.’ Our parents gave us the nod of approval or disapproval. Our teachers gave us a passing or failing grade. When we enter the workplace, our boss gives us a review whether we met company’s standards or not.
So for a new person into meditation, it’s easy to fall into the traps of seeing meditation as a ‘pass’ or ‘fail.’
And for the longest time, I was hard on myself when I would sit down to meditate because I couldn’t stop the mental chatter. From my inability to stop my thoughts, I would tell myself, ‘This isn’t working…I’m not good enough to meditate…’
So the takeaway here is fall in love with the imperfection of meditation and your wandering mind. My favorite article on this topic by TinyBudda, says it best:
Practice doesn’t mean perfection or performance. It’s about making friends with our wandering, imperfect minds.
I Didn’t Like Being Around My Thoughts
When I first started to take meditation seriously four years ago, I was in the midst of my depressive mood swings and a diagnosis with Crohn’s disease.
I wanted to run away from everything. My family, my friends, and especially my thoughts. So when I first started to meditate and thoughts would pop up, I would cringe and feel sick to the gut because I’ve never stopped to notice my thoughts.
The takeaway here is, for those who are starting out with meditation, understand it’s our personal duty to make sure our thoughts are healthy and enabling us to become the person we desire. The only way we can do this is by accepting our thoughts. Only then we can start shifting our focus on thoughts that help serve us.
I Expected My Mind To Quiet Down
Most people who get into meditation in the first place are doing it to silence their minds. That was the reason why I decided to meditate. But again, I set high expectations on how my experience would be.
I thought that sitting down and meditating for 10 minutes would help silence my mind. But the complete opposite happened.
The inability to quiet our minds is enough of a reason for anyone to quit. But take it from someone who decided to push through and accept this reality, it’s okay to have your mind race with thoughts when you first set out to meditate.
The takeaway here is knowing that our minds have always been racing with these thoughts. We just haven’t sat down and notice them before. Which in essence is the point of meditation, noticing.
I Kept Forcing My Mind To Shut Up
When I started to meditate for the first time, I fell victim to this cycle that looked something like this. I sat down to meditate, I immediately start to notice my thoughts, I became restless, so I start to force my mind not to think.
The problem is that you can’t force your mind to NOT think. That’s impossible. You’re actually making your mind wander faster by forcing yourself to not think.
We can avoid all this trouble if we have a clearer understanding of what meditation really is. In Fast Company’s article, ‘What you really need to quiet your mind?’ describes mindfulness meditation as,
Davich describes meditation as a state of mindfulness. “Being mindful doesn’t mean quieting your mind in the way most people expect,” he says. “The mind isn’t going to stop thinking. A zen master once told me the goal of mindfulness isn’t to suppress thinking, but to surpass it.”
So the takeaway here is do less because sometimes we’re our worst enemy.
Giving Up
Like Albert Einstein said,
It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
Even though meditation isn’t a math problem, this idea still applies.
Those who you consider as monks or yogis aren’t any more special than you, they just have stuck with meditation longer than anyone else. So give yourself the challenge to meditate for seven days and see what happens.
Give yourself permission and surrender to just accepting and noticing your mind. You’ll be happy you did.
Closing Remarks
Being a young professional, we have a million and one things we need to get done every day. So I understand when people say, ‘I don’t have time to meditate.’
But remember what I mentioned earlier in this post, meditation has the power to strengthen our personal relationships, build creativity, and focus. So give yourself the next seven days and try it out. And see what happens.
