“I’m Terrible at Meditating!”
Thoughts on a common sentiment
My paperback copy of Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee caught the eye of the woman next to me on a morning flight from Chicago to NYC last Thursday morning.
“How is that?” she asked. June, a Korean woman about my age, wore the sharp, finely textured attire of the finance professional I would soon learn she was.
Despite the early hour, her question sparked a rich conversation that lasted most of the final hour of our flight. From the challenge of allowing our teenagers to fail to how our calculus for risk-taking evolves from youth through middle age, this perfect stranger graciously shared her life experience with me.
Eventually, we touched on how our minds work during the most challenging situations in work, parenting, and life. I pointed to the page I was reading, which featured the subheading: “Meditation as a Tool.”
“Oh, I’ve tried before and I’m terrible at meditation!” she laughed. “I can never get my mind to stop thinking!”
I’ve heard this sentiment countless times since I started a meditation practice 15 years ago. Occasionally, I’ll finish the sentence for someone. It’s that predictable.
Since these misconceptions about meditation are practically universal, it seemed worth unpacking some of what I’ve learned.
The Myth of Effort
Meditation isn’t something you do. It is, paradoxically, effortless. You cannot stop your thoughts; that isn’t the goal. In fact, forget the idea of a “goal” entirely - it implies the effort of accomplishing something.
Bruce Lee spoke of this cognitive dissonance, “‘I must relax.’ But then I just thought something that contradicted my will at the precise moment I thought ‘I must relax.’ The demand for effort was already inconsistent with the effortlessness of relaxation.”
Right out of the gate, you see the struggle.
Meditation is simply a practice. It is the practice of becoming present, observing your thoughts, and noticing how quickly they pull you away from that presence.
Mindfulness is often defined as paying attention to what you’re paying attention to. It uses the breath as an anchor. When we bring our awareness to the inhale through our nose and the exhale through our mouth, we become present.
Simple enough.
Then, often before that exhale even finishes, a thought arrives—seemingly from nowhere—followed by a cascading waterfall of thoughts.
Observing that thought (“What will I make for dinner tonight?”), letting it go, and returning your awareness to your breath constitutes the entire practice. That is one “rep.” Think of it as a one-pound mental dumbbell curl.
Anyone can lift a one-pound weight, and anyone can practice meditation. And like anything, the longer you practice, the more skilled you become.
This is a skill worth learning.
The Power of the Pause
Maybe there’s too much baggage in the word “meditation.” You don’t need to sit on a pillow in a lotus position for 30 minutes a day.
Call it a breathing practice. You can do this anywhere, at any point. For ten seconds or five minutes, whatever you have.
Our senses give us access to the present. Wherever you are right now, listen for the sound furthest away from you for ten seconds. Whether you’re in a busy cafe or a quiet room, for those ten seconds, you suddenly become aware of the subtle sounds you weren’t hearing while your mind was chattering away.
That was the present moment. Doesn’t it feel nice? Isn’t it restorative to have even a three-second break from your inner monologue?
Your breath is especially useful because it plays a powerful role in calming the nervous system. It is a reset button, or parking brake, for when our thoughts activate our emotions. Which is happening nearly all day, every day.
While I’ve learned to never advise my wife to “just take a breath,” it is always good advice to offer ourselves.
You are not your thoughts and you don’t control your thoughts; they arise as a function of how the brain operates. Comedian Pete Holmes puts it like this:
“You don’t choose your thoughts. They show up, they are occurring... We’re just reporting on a jazz concert that’s happening inside of us. Feeling is like the saxophone, the drums—it’s your anxiety. And you’re just reporting on it.”
Name It to Tame It
The jazz metaphor evokes the swirling energy and blurring notes that capture our inner world. That energy often compels us to react without understanding what’s happening in our minds and bodies. All those instruments playing at once.
The breath gives us a chance to pause. What is happening right now? What emotion is surging in me? Anger? Sadness? Fear? What am I feeling physically? Checking into these somatic signals is a way to anchor yourself in the now.
Saying it out loud is a useful hack. “Naming it to tame it” helps redirect energy from the limbic system to the executive control center in the prefrontal cortex. This is where we have the superpower of reasoned thought—the ability to decide how to respond in a way that is consistent with who we want to be, rather than relying on “autopilot” programming (again, where 99% of people reside most of the time).
June shared how often her teenage son “overreacts” to losing at sports. It’s frustrating as a parent who knows how insignificant a game is in the grand scheme of life. We have all this wisdom we desperately want to impart to our kids. We want them to see what we see, to know what we know. More than anything, not suffer needlessly.
But we are often compelled by our own emotions—feeling sad or anxious at our child’s hurt—and we react by telling them not to worry or that their point of view is incomplete. Of course it’s incomplete. We only see the big picture because we have decades of experience. Our well-intended advice often leaves our kids feeling unseen and unheard, their experience diminished.
We unintentionally put more distance between us when all we want is to bring them closer.
Nirvana
June said something to the effect of, “It must be so nice to reach that blissful, Nirvana-like state where you don’t worry about anything.”
This is another misconception. In fifteen years of practice, I have never disappeared into an ethereal plane of nonexistence.
But I have found myself more frequently able to pause before I react to my teenage daughter’s insouciant attitude toward her chores. Increasingly, I take a beat to observe the emotional response brewing in me when a challenging piece of news is delivered at work. Occasionally, I am better at recognizing that my wife’s raised voice and frustration can be translated as request for love in a way I wasn’t seeing (this one is some real black belt work!)
I am learning that the rude and callous behavior of the world doesn’t need to be taken as a personal offense. This is the wisdom of Viktor Frankl’s famous observation in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
As we arrived at the gate, June said she never talks to people on planes. I was so grateful that she did. Our conversation helped me see the practice of meditation differently.
It isn’t about reaching Nirvana while sitting in a quiet room. It’s about finding the freedom of choice that rescues us from our conditioned emotional slavery in the micro-moments of everyday.
Finding the the peace of the present and being pulled away from it , over and over and over. It’s how we move from the victim of circumstance to creator of experience.
I walked off the plane with my soul feeling nourished and a smile on my face. I love talking to strangers.
- Coach Kris
P.S. Shanon Lee was four years old when her father Bruce passed away. She is the author of this wonderful book Be Water My friend, The Teachings of Bruce Lee