What I have Learned from 15 Years of Daily Meditation
Image by Dorota Dylka/Unsplash
What is your relationship with meditation? You may have a regular, rock-solid daily practice, which is wonderful. Perhaps you have dabbled in mindfulness, loving-kindness, self-compassion or other practices, dipping in and out over the years. Or you may want to build a practice into your life, but can’t seem to make it consistent. Having spent many years struggling to create a regular practice, I understand only too well how frustrating that can be. But the turning point for me was taking an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) course. Apart from the evening spent meditating with a group once a week, homework involved a ton of daily practice – both formal and informal.
And it was this regular, daily mindfulness programme that finally kickstarted my meditation practice. I have now been meditating, almost every day, for over 15 years. Here are some of the key lessons I have learned, which you may find helpful, especially if meditation doesn’t come easy for you:
Don’t expect too much. My morning practice varies, depending on the busyness of the day. I try to sit for 20 minutes, practising mindfulness of breath, the core practice in both Buddhist and secular traditions. Today was a bit busy, so I only managed 10 minutes. I was also more distracted than normal, so there was a lot of thinking throughout those 10 minutes. Sometimes I come to my senses after a few minutes and think, Wow, I’m just thinking non-stop! This isn’t meditation. It’s easy to get frustrated on days like this, or see it as a failed attempt at practising. But after all these years I understand that sometimes this is how it is. Hopefully, tomorrow I will manage 20 minutes and my monkey mind will be calmer.
How much benefit did I feel this morning? Not much. But that’s fine too, because I trust in mindfulness meditation and know the research behind it, which shows that around 10 minutes a day is the ‘minimum effective dose’. Meaning, sit for at least 10 minutes and do your best at the practice and good things are happening, in your brain and nervous system, even if you’re not aware of them. It’s a bit like getting your five a day – do you feel amazing every time you eat a tomato or banana? No. But you know, from all the nutritional research, that it’s optimal for your health to eat them. So it is with meditation, whether you feel calm, grounded and blissed out or not.
Don’t aim to clear your mind of thoughts. When you sit for the first time and try to focus on something – your breath, sounds, sensations in your body – one of the first things you realise is how busy your mind is. My mind is so hectic sometimes, it’s like one of those mindblowing pedestrian crossings in Tokyo, with hundreds of people scurrying in every direction. Busy, busy, busy. Viewed through the lens of neuroscience, this is your default mode network in action – the neural network that switches on when you’re not focusing on a particular task. And a big part of practising meditation is just becoming aware of this network and your regular patterns of thinking in general. Because, especially if you struggle with your mental health, those patterns are likely to be negative and upsetting in some way.
The metaphor meditation teachers often use is that, every time you notice you are distracted and make a light mental note, like Thinking, thinking or Worrying, worrying, it’s like a push-up for your brain. You are building the muscles of focus and concentration, so you have more choice over where you place your attention at any given time. If worrying makes you stressed and exhausted, while rumination makes you depressed, it may be better to focus on your breath, say, or a pretty cloud in the sky. Regular practice builds up your ability to choose, so you’re not at the mercy of your monkey mind, jumping all over the place throughout your day.
The benefits of meditation are slow, steady and cumulative. Just because you don’t feel a big difference after any one meditation, it doesn’t mean nothing is happening. It’s just that the changes happen slowly, steadily and in a slow-building way. After all these years of meditation, here are two of the biggest changes I have noticed. The first is my changed relationship with craving, linked to ‘addictive processes’ as they are known in internal family systems. I am convinced that learning to meditate, as well as studying Buddhist and Western psychology, helped free me from a range of addictive behaviours. I had struggled with these problems my whole adult life, so it’s a huge, night-and-day change to be free of them.
This cessation of craving is at the heart of the Buddha’s path to enlightenment, which means waking up from the bad dream we mostly inhabit, thinking we desperately need a particular object, person or substance to be happy and content. As a mostly sober person, I now understand that is not so – contentment comes from living mindfully, as much of the time as possible, not needing to escape mundane/painful reality by any means necessary.
Another big change is my essential state of existence, which is mostly calm, steady and grounded. This is especially helpful given my job, working with complex trauma and having a steady stream of crises, conflicts and emotional demands coming at me. Remaining calm in the face of these buffeting waves is largely down to my years of meditation, which helps me be the steady, patient therapist my clients need. That’s not to say I am always calm, because I definitely have my moments! But I am so much calmer than I was before discovering meditation, for which I am deeply grateful.
I hope that hearing about some of these hard-earned insights is helpful for you. I also hope you are able to weave meditation into the strands of your daily life. It is such a deceptively simple activity – one that looks easy but is in fact challenging, complex, and multifaceted. But it is a skill you can master, with enough time, patience and determination. Take it from a long-term meditator: all that patience definitely pays off because regular practice could be life-changing, like it has been for me.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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