10 Lessons from 200 Days of Meditation
Having never meditated before, since the start of January I have done it every single day. I downloaded the Calm App and never looked back. That’s not to say my practice is always effective, or that a Zen Warrior now lurks where once there was a grump. But after six or seven months, I’ve learnt a few things about what works for me.
A few minutes ‘sitting quietly with yourself’ is always worthwhile
Learning to meditate is a funny one in that there’s not a lot to it in essence, but that doesn’t make it easy to carry out effectively. The good news is that even on days where I never fully settle, it’s still time well spent. Escaping the noise of the world as part of your daily routine has life-affirming value, even if you’re terrible at the art of mindfulness. By the way, nobody will ever tell you (or know) that you’re a ‘bad meditator’, which is a positive in itself.
I’m a sucker for a good voice
I quickly got hooked in by the voices of Calm who would lead me through this new adventure. Lebron James has a motivational series which suggests his next career could be as an orator, while it didn’t take me long to discover Matthew McConnaghey’s sleep story. With that mellifluous southern drawl, it’s hard to care what he’s actually saying.
But the real star of the show is Tamara Levitt — the voice of ‘The Daily Calm.’ She can tell me to reframe my addictive thought patterns with the best of them.
Routine is key
Everybody has different lifestyles but for most people finding a spare 10 minutes every day is hopefully possible, once it’s part of a routine. For me, it’s something I do every day around 9.30–10pm as part of starting to wind down for bed. It’s a good slot because by this point I’ve eaten my dinner, hopefully finished work and life admin for the day, and probably watched enough TV.
Rather than missing days, I’ve actually gone the other way and started to do double sessions by adding a morning meditation to the mix. Having traditionally used it as a way to settle down for sleep, I’m now seeing it as a way to find a healthy mindset at the start of the day as well. If I could only apply this same discipline to flossing then my oral hygiene might receive a welcome boost as well.
But there are bad times to meditate. If you’re too tired, too distracted or had a few drinks, surprise, surprise - you may not feel the full benefit.
Thoughts can be observed without engaging with them
As somebody who has struggled for years with switching off and consequently with insomnia, learning techniques to combat this has been a revelation. It’s not realistic to think you’ll stop thoughts coming into your mind while meditating, or subsequently, but you can learn to observe them, and let them pass.
Of course, this practice is easier said than done, but finding a mantra or metaphor which resonates can help. Calm offers plenty of those. A classic of the genre is imagining your thoughts as clouds, which you observe passing, without interacting with them. Or you might prefer the image of watching a storm from a window, as opposed to being caught in it.
One tip to stop yourself leaping back into thought spirals is to try ‘noting’ them as they arise. By labelling that work worry as an intruding thought as soon as you become aware that it’s crept into your head, you lessen the likelihood of engaging fully with it.
Being ‘Present’ is the holy grail - but it’s easier said than done
The goal of becoming, and staying present in the moment is intoxicating. Your digital guru will tell you that all that matters right now is this breath, because that is all you are doing — and who you are — right now. This is potentially a big thought at a time when you’re trying not to engage with any of those pesky tormentors.
But the pursuit of being present has revealed how much time I unwittingly spend in the past or future. It’s easy to dwell on what’s been and gone. Equally, I am prone to ‘what if’ thinking about things that haven’t happened, and may never happen. This is classic fretting! It’s enlightening to consider that anxiety about hypotheticals is so often worse than the reality that emerges.
The Breath is my Constant
On the Calm app drawing your focus to the breath is the standard practice to establish mindfulness — your ‘centre point.’ The sense of your breath as the great constant can initially be a hard concept to grasp for an asthmatic, but I’m on board.
You are encouraged to follow the breath with curiosity and persistence. It’s actually really tricky to do this without leading the flow. I have also learnt that my ‘mindful minute’ involves four really drawn out breaths in, and out. That’s how many times I can inhale and exhale fully, if I really concentrate, in 60 seconds.
One technique is to focus all your attention on the area just below your nostrils. This doesn’t work for me. I can barely detect anything going on here, which doesn’t mean I’m one of those hapless mouth breathers. I just find it much easier to follow the breath in the chest or abdomen.
It’s Easy to Focus on the Wrong Thing
The nasal focus isn’t the only technical prompt I struggle with. The specific suggestion to fully relax my tongue in the lower part of my mouth always brings to mind a sleepy, drooling dog. I don’t know how to do this justice, and that thought pattern probably isn’t helping me much.
But a worse habit I’ve developed is to care too much about streaks. I mentioned I’ve meditated every day since early January and it would be fair to say I got a little obsessed with keeping the run going. This came to a head when the app failed to record 1 or 2 of my sessions properly, thus breaking the streak in the eyes of Calm. To be annoyed by this was, of course, daft. I knew my streak was ongoing and, crucially, nobody else cared anyway.
Life events will affect moods - and that’s ok
Over the course of six months everybody has good days, bad days and all manner of monotony in between. I was lucky enough to go on Honeymoon in February and meditation helped me to stay present in some moments which I wanted to last forever. This was something I’m very grateful for, and would love to reproduce more often.
On the flip side there have been upsetting and stressful moments to contend with. When practicing on tough days my concentration might struggle, but on other occasions deep focus was still possible. Either way I would never regret taking those 10 minutes.
Effectively keeping an ‘emotions diary’ through the app highlighted some gross lack of perspective when I reviewed it recently. On the same day I first mentioned the impact of Coronavirus, I still found time to mention the frustrations of bad Wifi. Giving a global crisis equal billing with a minor irritant shows why it’s important to reflect, and catch yourself being outrageous.
Don’t ruin practice by leaping back onto social media
You take 10 minutes to bring yourself into a serene headspace and then what do you do? If you’re crazy, you creep back onto Twitter to witness the world raging at itself again. Most of us know the potentially detrimental impact of social media on our mental health, yet still we slip into bad habits. I soon learnt that the very least I could do was avoid these pitfalls in the latter part of the evening when trying to settle down.
There’s still plenty of room for improvement
I definitely feel intuitively that meditation is a good thing for me. At times I become more mellow, or I gain perspective, reflecting on the bigger picture. But that doesn’t mean I have it cracked, by any stretch of the imagination.
For one thing I can still struggle with sleep due to over-thinking. Conquering this sustainably remains a big ambition.
And then there’s the bell. Calm loves to use a gong to bring a wandering mind back to its home base. The only problem is that the threat of a bell makes me uneasy - the exact opposite of its purpose. You know it’s coming, but you don’t know exactly when. For some reason this really puts me on edge.
Work to do yet.
