Thoughts on meditation

My experience with meditation is a long history of wanting to commit to it, getting serious for a day or two, then going off the map again for a while. When I started trying twenty-five years ago, I was not able to look up a guided meditation on Youtube, so I could either put on some music, or sit in silence, which sounds kind of nice, but for some reason I procrastinated as if it was a form of self-torture. I also imagined I was way too busy to make the time for it, even though my priorities were not reasonable and left me feeling completely crazy, disappointed in myself, and ragged all the time. Looking back, a little meditation could have helped me see how many unnecessary things I was doing.

In the beginning, when I tried to sit in meditation, something would force me back up and I would suddenly notice myself already across the room, trying to accomplish some menial task, like an itch that needed to be scratched. I had developed the habit of staying in motion, filling my life with distractions, because when I wasn't, my mind would generate some very negative thoughts. I didn't want to think those things... they just came into my head as the default setting. I felt like I was in a race to keep my mind from catching up to me. This only worked temporarily at best because the thoughts that I ran from seemed to only gain in strength, while my strategy was wearing me out.

I kept trying meditation throughout this time in my life because when I did there were occasional successes, brief moments that I felt I had access to something beyond my normal existence. I couldn't help but notice those moments started adding up, both during my meditations and throughout my day. Even though I wasn't practicing every day, I was still making progress. Nothing about my life was changing on the outside, and for the first time ever I didn't need it to in order for me to feel good. It was getting easier to sit in silence, I was enjoying it more, and it was creating a notable change in the volume, intensity, and nature of the thoughts coming into my head. What I think happened is that the discipline of sitting still when I didn't want to was actually taming my nervous system so that it wasn't in charge anymore. Instead I could feel what my body was really telling me. It was actually trying to guide me towards the things that were most right for me, and let me know when I had strayed from that course, so that I didn't have to have a mental battle every time I didn't know, which was often. I had never learned to listen to myself.

I had imagined there would be an easier solution than that to control my anxiety. I had hoped that I could take a pill that would put me back into balance, but I feel very lucky to have tried meditation before I could follow through with that. All things considered this was the easier solution. What takes way more time is finding the correct medication, dosage, appts with the overseeing doctor, time taken up getting prescriptions filled and picked up, dealing with side-effects (the hidden costs). Instead what turned out to be effective for me is the most natural source of calming, that I just didn't feel like submitting myself to at first, but made me better each time I did it. It was medicine that was actually healing my insides through the discipline of learning to sit in silence.

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