Meditation: A Reminder For The Busy-Minded

I’ve caught myself re-learning the same lesson over and over again over the past few years, and I’m currently going through that process of learning it again now.

Not too long ago I wrote about sitting on the train and feeling the sun on my face, enjoying the moment and feeling pure bliss whilst those around me stared down at their phones.

I mentioned then that what led me to be in a position where I could enjoy such a moment so fondly was my meditation practice (amongst a few other things), and without it, I too would have been staring at my phone, lost in distraction.

Well, yesterday, my girlfriend and I took a day trip to a nearby seaside village in the rare UK sunshine.

It was a great day out, but I found myself stuck in a loop of negative thought completely caused by my own doing.

What I was thinking was irrelevant, the point is, instead of being fully present and happy, I was stuck in my own head.

I’ve caught myself feeling this way a lot recently. It’s taken less to frustrate me, more to make me happy, and honestly I have struggled to just feel the peace that I’ve grown so familiar with over the past year or so.

Then it clicked: I’ve let the recent home move disrupt my meditation. Instead of meditating up to a few times, but at least once every single day, I’ve barely done it at all.

I know what you might be thinking: “If you’ve had to learn the lesson multiple times, and it has that big of an effect, why do you keep forgetting it?”

It's a valid point, but one that I have an answer to.

If you were to start meditating today, you wouldn’t feel its benefits tomorrow. You wouldn’t even feel them next week. For a consistent practice of meditation to start taking effect on your daily life, you have to be doing so for at least a couple of weeks, but probably a few months. 

The same thing happens the other way around: if you stop meditating today after having done so for a while, the positive effects of that meditation will slowly fade over time before you even begin to notice the difference. 

The time it takes the benefits to pick up and the time it takes for them to fade is long enough to completely blank the connection between the cause and effect. By the time you realise what’s happened, it’s too late.

This is why it’s a lesson I keep having to re-learn over time. It's just shockingly easy for the dots to never connect. 

If you’re confused as to how meditation can be having such effects on my mind, then let me briefly explain the process.

You sit down and focus on your breath, then your mind wanders. It can be thoughts in the form of songs, images, memories, and even completely made-up things. All popping into your head, causing you to drift off into a daydream.

The more you meditate, the more times you catch yourself in that thought and bring it back to your breath. These are reps.

Do enough reps and you build the mental muscle of what I like to call mind control. The stronger this muscle gets, the more it does without you having to consciously do a thing.

So, the next time you’re sitting on a bench, with the sun on your cheeks and a slight breeze flowing through your hair, you might actually feel something instead of being lost in the past or worrying about what’s for dinner tonight.

That is why I meditate. This is why I just couldn’t feel fully present yesterday. And this is why I’m making a point to start that daily practice again.

I’m hoping by writing this I achieve two things:

One: It will help me to never have to re-learn this lesson again.

Two: So that I can come back a few weeks or months down the line and reflect, as an honest and personal experiment to see whether I’m correct or just a wacky little guy who thinks too much.

I’m excited to find out the answer. See you then!