8 Weeks of Mindfulness

I've wanted to like meditation for decades. When I returned to school to become a therapist, I tried really, really hard to do so. I joined Headspace and spent months and months trying all the different mediations offered in that app. Unfortunately, I wound up disliking meditation even more and eventually gave up.

I decided that my daily walk outside and yoga stretches were enough and to let go of trying so hard to learn to meditate. I focused more on practicing mindfulness, instead. Mindfulness is the conscious effort of using your sense to become aware of the present moment. This was relatively effortless. 

The benefits of mindfulness became so great that I sought out deeper study and stumbled upon the the Palouse Mindfulness, a free online course. 

I signed up and was excited to begin...until I saw that my daily homework would involve meditating.

The first words I wrote in my meditation practice log were: “I didn’t like it.” I went on to add, “I felt anxious, bored, uncomfortable, at times disconnected. My body, itself, felt fine. Yet, my mind was all over the place and not present.”

The final words in my meditation practice log, scribbled in roughly 2 months later, were: “Busy mind—aware and accepting.” Those two entries capture the essence of my entire journey into the practice of mindful meditation.  

The basic commitment for the duration of the course was to meditate daily as well as practice mindfulness exercises and complete assignments in the form of readings and videos. The daily meditation was a chore I never looked forward to until the last two weeks. However,  by the end, I no longer resented daily meditation time, and how I felt about meditating didn't matter. The point was that I was aware and accepting of all the sensations and feelings that happened in the moments of my meditations—the good and the bad. The awareness and acceptance of the present moment became the goal, not whether or not I liked meditating. 

There were subtle shifts that occurred that brought me to this place of eventual acceptance. The first one was to say to myself, it’s okay if you aren’t perfect. This was reinforced when I watched psychologist Shauana Shapiro’s video about her own struggle when she went to a meditation retreat and was very much caught up in her head about not meditating correctly. She met with one of the teachers at the retreat and he finally helped her to see that in her quest for perfection, she was missing the point of meditating, which is to accept ourselves where we are in that moment, imperfections and all. That story replayed in my head as I went through the early weeks of the course, and it helped to strengthen my resolve to not give up; it told me I didn’t have to be perfect at this, I just had to be. Without that burden of perfection, I really was free to "be".

The next shift occurred as yoga was brought into the course, which really stressed me out. Although I love yoga, I no longer attend classes because of the pressure I would feel to perform each posture perfectly. Yet, with the introduction of the 10 mindful movements, that evaporated, and another shift occurred, bringing me closer to myself in the present moment. The movements were not perfect or about being perfect, and I would close my eyes and really feel them. This was a precious gift.

The final and most important shift was when meditation went from being a struggle to get myself to do it, to it feeling as natural as my daily morning walk. I don’t always want to do it, but I accept that reality and do it anyway because it brings me such physical and mental peace. 

I now have solid and simply daily meditation and yoga practice now that feels grounding and healing, even though it is not perfect.

I went into the course hoping to, at least, learn how to meditate, and I told myself no goal and no expectation that this will change much, but it actually did. Moment by moment.

Can Facebook Make You Depressed?

Before I landed on being a counselor, at one point I thought I was going to become a full-time writer or, at the very least, make writing—whatever the form might be—a career. So, I went to back to school in my early thirties to pursue a MFA in creative writing. While there, the director of my MFA program preached about the dangers of comparing yourself to other writers—you can render yourself not only artistically paralyzed, but also emotionally frozen by focusing on how much better you think everyone else is compared to you. I can honestly say, I never experienced more than small flickers of envy and comparing during those two and a half years I was at that program. Then, I graduated, thrust into the Real World where I encountered a serious problem with comparing, encounters that got increasingly more emotionally upsetting over time.

Now, years later, as a mental health counselor AND as a client of therapy myself, I know that comparing yourself to others is a normal and even healthy way to measure your own successes and failures. However, there is an insidious cognitive experience that occurs when we start comparing ourselves to others, and it’s called Social Comparison Bias, which stems from Leon Festinger’s Social comparison theory that states humans have an internal drive for “accurate self-evaluations” (basically we want to know how well or poorly we are doing), and the way that we humans get those self-evaluations is by comparing ourselves to others, across the many domains of our lives (looks, economic status, education, etc). Festinger’s theory was expanded upon by a guy named Willis, who talked about upward and downward comparisons. Willis’ idea is that in order to measure our own success, we look up (for motivation to be better) and we look down (to feel better). This is all well and good if you can, in fact, compare yourself to an Olympian and become inspired. Or, if you can compare yourself to a couch potato and feel good about the three miles you jogged. And, in my case, if you can compare yourself to someone who isn’t as far along in the world of publishing as I am—someone who hasn’t had anything published yet—and feel like you are progressing towards the goal of published author.

On the surface, I was a model post-MFA student; within a year of graduation I was launching a literary anthology, landed in Publisher’s Weekly, and was receiving an offer from an agent. However, these successes were trumped by the failures that came along with them. The anthology, while widely recognized and submitted to, didn’t “take off” as I hoped. My agent and I parted ways and never landed a deal. Within a few short years post MFA, I was sobbing in a therapist’s office, declaring myself a complete and utter failure— a sham of a writer. I took my failure to launch as an author to be a failure as a mother, wife, friend, daughter, teacher, etc.

How did this happen?

Like many writers—and people in general—I spent a lot of time on social media, and all of us are continually bombarded with Facebook posts and Tweets that espouse successes, triumphs, and achievements. This is such a problem that in recent psychology studies, researchers have been able to link Facebook with depression, making this social comparison bias phenomenon a possible cause to mental illness! When we continually see statuses about job promotions, new relationships, and expensive purchases or, in my case, new book deals, we start to compare ourselves to those statuses in unrealistic ways. The bias is the part where now we actually start seeking out information that supports this cognitive distortion that I’m a loser and everyone else is having success!  Thus, when I see the status that so-and-so got a “fantastic” three-book deal, I start to seek out more information about the book deal to either confirm that, in fact, I’m a loser or, the opposite, that they are.

There were times, for a few of those post-MFA years, so-and-so’s new book deal simply drove me to work harder on my craft and on my research of publishers to send my work out to. Unfortunately, more times than not, it made me feel like total crap.

However, I discovered in therapy, this constant comparing, over time, changed the way I thought about myself not just as a writer but also as a mother, wife, friend, teacher. What rendered me so depressed was my thinking and my perception of myself. The comparing myself to others I perceived as more successful, reinforced the thought, I am a failure…at everything and that thought became the lens through which I looked at myself and my world.

Eventually, the healing came in the form a serious commitment to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. By both challenging these thoughts about failure and gathering up concrete factual evidence to both support and refute that statement, I was able to start seeing myself more clearly. I started to examine failure and discovered that I was equating my failures as crimes rather than what they were, simply failures and that failure doesn’t make me a bad a person. A bad person is many things but not someone who simply fails to get a book deal. I also discovered that I was putting my worth into something that is kind of equivalent to winning the lottery: saying “I suck because I don’t have a book deal” is like playing the lottery and saying “I suck each time I don’t win.” You can’t control winning the lottery any more than you can control if someone wants to publish your book. All you can do is play the game.

More importantly, measuring self-worth against anything you cannot control is nothing but playing a losing game.