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.