For a number of months now, my meditations have been “sub-par”.
I know I’m not supposed to judge, but objectively I’m aware that I’ve veered off course somewhere. In the past, I’d have good days and bad days, transcendent meditation sessions and really distracted, “no-way-I’m-gonna-focus” ones. But that was okay, because a large part of mindfulness meditation is coming back to the breath AFTER losing focus.
This has been a little different.
It started with a few weeks of distractibility as I was navigating stressors in the early months of this year. But gradually, things went downhill until I seemed to make it my job to use meditation time to go down rabbit holes.
Maybe I was too tired, meditating in the evening before bed or when I woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep, so I didn’t check my wandering mind because I was dozing off.
If I had music in the background, my mind would dance off in a tangent and I wasn’t meditating anymore, forgetting that this was a time for calm and presence.
So I’d start a guided meditation — listening to someone’s voice would keep me on track, right? Nope. My ability to allow that voice to fade into the background was nothing short of impressive.
Day after day, I had dutifully taken on the task of wandering way off my meditation path until I realized that I was going nowhere and it was time to quit the restlessness and stay still for a while.
Even after years of daily meditations, I had to re-learn the habit of staying… because over the past few months, I’ve established a new habit of not coming back to my center regularly enough. And this new habit of spending my session mindlessly had managed to supplant my previous meditation flow.
So here we go again: setting aside some quiet time when I’m not particularly sleepy, finding an anchor like the breath to focus on in a patient, non-gripping manner, maintaining a gentle awareness of where my mind is, and when it inevitably wanders away from my point of focus (which it always will), calmly guiding it back.
When the breath seems like a boring place to drop my anchor, I turn to the sensations in my hands and feet (particulary useful when I’m stressed) or the sounds of automobile traffic outside ebbing and flowing or opening my awareness to all my senses and accepting whatever shows up. My focus is on the present and that’s where I aim to keep it.
So it’s true, that old “muscle memory” is bringing back my meditation practice and strengthening it as it does so. This serves as a good reminder to not get complacent, calling myself a “meditator” and throwing around stats like how many days in a row I’ve been meditating. In the end, the important thing is not my meditation streak, it’s the fact that today I will choose to meditate again.
Frantic Shanti 