How I Learned to Meditate (the Unvarnished Truth)

by Nina

These days I meditate for 40 minutes—I’ll explain why that amount of time later—seven days a week. It feels like something important I’m doing for myself and I’ve also come to enjoy it. But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, while I had an easy time starting a home asana practice, starting a regularly meditation practice was a struggle for me. And before I succeeded, I failed several times, giving up after a week or two.

I thought I’d share my experiences with starting a meditation practice today because if you, too, are having a hard time I want you to know you’re not alone. And, also, because I finally did succeed in reaching my goal, I thought I should share some of my “secrets”—the little things I did this time around that helped me succeed when I had previously failed.

At the end of 2018, I made a resolution to start a meditation practice. I felt this was very important for me because as I was aging and my body was changing, I could see that down the road I might not be able to rely on my asana practice to reduce my stress and help me stay balanced. So I wanted to have another practice in my pocket so to speak, one that I could use any time and anywhere to help me during difficult times.

I knew this time I wanted to get serious so the first thing I did was announce my resolution to the world on my Yoga for Healthy Aging blog (see My Meditation Project).

Then I decided to keep a journal about my experiences so I could write weekly blog posts on my other blog, Delusiastic (see Meditation Project: Week 1). I thought having an audience who was expecting weekly reports from me would help motivate me to stay on track. That strategy worked, and a bonus was that some of my readers told me that my posts where inspiring them to start or re-start their own practices.

My first few weeks I practiced regularly for 15 minutes a day, six days a week (seven days a week felt too burdensome) and I did I as I had been taught: using my breath as my mental focus. The problem was that I really disliked it! Focusing on my breath was, I don’t know, both boring and too difficult at the same time—very aggravating. I felt so agitated that I couldn’t wait for my sessions to be over.

Instead of giving up, I decided to try using different mental focuses instead, including mantras, images, etc., and different types of meditation, including guided meditation mindfulness meditation, and different types of concentration meditation. (See All Good But Not Equivalent: Meditation Types) In the end, I decided I liked using a mantra (I didn’t want anything religious so I just used “shanti, shanti, shanti”) and to harness my concentration more completely I internally recited my mantra only on my exhalations. That way I was doing breath awareness PLUS a mantra, something I thought I invented but later learned was already a thing. And that’s what I continue to do until this way. In her book Meditation for the Love of It, Sally Kempton does say if the technique you’re using isn’t working for you, you should try something else.

Another problem I had was a kind of panicky feeling I would get about what I described as feeling of being “lost in time.” It really made me uneasy not knowing how much time had passed and how much I had left. I ultimately realized that feeling reminded me of having an insomnia attack in the middle of the night and feeling like the night—and the darkness—would never end. When I confessed this is a blog post, a reader suggested that I get the Insight app for my phone and use the timer function with interval bells. Thank you, Sharon! Seriously, that made all the difference and I still use the timer to this day, gradually increasing my time by 5 minutes (which is how I got to 40 minutes this year). Is that maybe cheating? If so, I don’t really care, as I can see I reach very deep states of relaxation and quietness, even with the bells going off and sometimes I don’t even notice all of them.

And you know what? I believe the realization about being “lost in time” also helped me have a better attitude toward my periodic insomnia attacks. Now when I realize I’m not falling quickly back to sleep, I start to meditate (using a different technique than I use for daytime meditation) instead of doing a pranayama practice like I used to, and do a good job of not panicking.

So that’s how I got to where I am with my meditation practice today. When I was writing my book Yoga for Times of Change, I wanted to have a solid section on meditation so I started doing more research on the topic. While there is a ton of information out there about Buddhist style meditation and mindfulness, I especially wanted to learn more about yogic style concentration meditation, which is what I was doing myself. That’s when I read Meditation for the Love of It by Sally Kempton, and even though my reasons for meditation weren’t “for the love it,” I thought that was a really wonderful book, full of all kinds of interesting techniques and compassionate advice. So I highly recommend that book to you if you want to learn more about yogic, rather than Buddhist, meditation techniques.

And if you read the section on meditation in my book Yoga for Times of Change, you’ll also find a lot of helpful information there, a lot of based on my personal experiences as well as those of several friends as well as some overview information, such as on the different types of meditation and different types of mental focuses you can use, which I synthesized based on my research.

Well, that’s it for now. I hope this inspires some of you!

Shanti, shanti, shanti

 

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