Why Meditation Sucks

I don’t like meditating. Thinking a lot about everything is possibly my favourite pastime and so when someone says I should meditate it’s kind of like saying to someone who loves to crochet “Don’t crochet. Find time in your day to specifically not crochet.”

When I was a young kid, I remember my dad meditating. I remember thinking it was weird. Fancy being a grown-up and getting to do whatever you want, like buy every single tube of Pringles at the supermarket or drink Creaming Soda every day or ride all the cool rollercoasters – but instead, you choose to just sit down and close your eyes and do nothing.

I learnt meditation when I was around 8, when I started yoga. I was a super anxious kid – my head would often swarm with vivid and horrible imaginings of awful things happening to me and my family – and it used to give me chronic stomach aches. So to calm me down, my mum (who was way ahead of the yoga game) enrolled me in a kid’s yoga class. At the end of each class we were led through a very basic meditation. It involved feeling love radiate from within you like warm sunshine and fill your body, and then flow out your feet and fill the Earth. I liked how it made me feel and often let it play out in my head before going to sleep. But then I remember bringing it up around some primary school friends once and they laughed at me and said it weird. So I stopped doing it after that.

Fast forward to grown-up me, I’ve found myself consistently shocked at how frequently and adamantly most great thinkers in the psychology field insist upon a regular meditation practice. I mean, don’t they have anything better to do? And yet, time and time again, there it is. Just clap meditate clap So I tried picking it up a few times. I didn’t like it. I thought it was boring. It felt difficult most times, confusing other times, and all in all, not particularly useful. So I gave up. I had better things to think about.

Then late last year, I felt myself in a slump. That feeling where you’re being pulled in every direction (mostly from yourself and your own expectations) and I felt swamped and overwhelmed, like my face was wrapped with a wet towel and it was difficult just to breathe. I was mainly concerned with the fact that I felt chronically uninspired. My days seemed to fill up so quickly with meaningless fodder and at the same time I never had time to do things that really mattered to me. I went to my therapist and explained all this to her, and she said to me…

“Have you tried meditating?”

Pls, not this again.

Couldn’t she suggest something else? Like, anything else? When you go to chat to someone about how busy you are and they come at you with the old “Have you tried sitting down and doing nothing”, it’s like “Seriously? No.”

But she explained to me this notion of “creating space”. How the heaving pull of life can feel so stifling and suffocating when we neglect to give ourselves space from it.

I recalled the feeling of the wet towel. I wanted to breathe. So I tried meditating again.

I don’t like meditating. I don’t like cleaning my bathroom either, but when my bathroom is clean I feel good. That’s how I feel after meditating. It clears space in my head and as a result, helps me clear space in my life. It’s helped me become unwound from my wet towel and breathe through soft linen. I am not free of the weight of the world, but it’s no longer suffocating me.

STRONG IS THE NEW BRAIN-THING

We like the idea of being strong. It’s nice to not collapse while carrying your grocery bags, or put your back out moving a couch, or sob defeated in the corner of the kitchen thanks to the lid of a peanut butter jar.

We admire the physique of men and woman who are strong as we understand they didn’t get there by accident. Physical strength takes discipline. It takes commitment. It takes continuous and repeated attempts, many failures, some injuries (perhaps) and lots of bloody hard work. No one just “is strong”, strength is earned over time, and garners respect.

So why is it that we don’t treat psychological strength the same way?

Psychological strength or resilience is possibly one of the most useful assets we can develop. It’s what gives us the ability to bounce back from hardship and mentally deal with lots of life’s bullshit. And while it’s often just assumed that we’re built equipped by default, for many of us, this is just not the case. If you’ve ever struggled with depression or anxiety, self esteem issues or feelings of unworthiness, you’ll probably appreciate how much work it takes to simply try and take control of these nasty mental gremlins.
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So how do you build your brain muscles? It’s certainly possible, but like washboard abs or a sick set of Sarah Connor arms, it can take lots of training and commitment. Not made easier by the fact that the brain’s a lazy piece of shit that always prefers to do what it’s always done. So if you’ve come to think of yourself as a limp noodle who deserves to cop all of life’s misery, it’s gonna take a helluva lot more effort to shift that pattern of thinking than simply buying a Poo Emoji mug that says “Good Vibes Only”.
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Currently I’m trying out Mindfulness practices to help develop my own psychological resilience. Here’s a few that are currently in the werks…
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  • EXERCISE:
    This was the first thing that worked for me, and I was shocked to say the least (I had a “sick” day pretty much every PD/H/PE day in high school and thought people who did sport were boring.) Working out drags you kicking and screaming into the present moment, which means you cant sulk about the past, or fret about the future. You just suffer, sweaty and exhausted, in the present. And hopefully get a nice butt.
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  • DAILY MEDITATION:
    Have tried and failed at this many times. What can I say, Im shithouse at meditation. I get bored. I think about breakfast. I think about memes. I design stylish macrame hangings. Basically everything but meditate. Have started up again, committed to 15min each morning with a guided track. This is a work in progress.
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  • GIVING MYSELF SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO:
    I love this one because it makes me justify random holidays as a self-care thing.
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  • CUTTING DOWN ON MULTI-TASKING:
    This one is pretty much the hardest atm, but am taking baby steps. Like most of us, I try to do lots of stuff all at once (read: I try do do lots of stuff while also doing the internet). It’s not particularly efficient, it’s a poor use of resources and guarantees that my mind isn’t ever completely in the task at hand. In an effort to cultivate mindfulness, I’ve given myself the challenge to complete certain tasks (such as cooking dinner or cleaning the apartment) without scrolling through Instagram or refreshing Facebook. This sounds boring, and it is, but it’s supposed to be good for you so I’m trying it.