Meditation – You Gotta Be Kidding Me!?!! (Part 1 of 3)

In 2006 I made a huge decision that changed the course of my life. Everything I knew was turned upside down as though the perfect drawing was on an Etch A Sketch, and then it was shaken and handed back to me with the question, “Now what?”  Every day I felt raw, like a freshly peeled potato with all the moistness under the skin revealed.  Most moments of these days I literally felt like flinging my skin off.

A friend of mine gave me a stack of books on meditation and said, “I think it would help you if you learned to meditate.”  I smiled politely,  took the books home with me and set them on the living room floor. I thought: “Seriously?  If learning to meditate means reading those books, then it is never going to happen!”  Not only were these books thick, the language was dense and I felt as if the only way to read them was with a dictionary next to me.  Yep.  Not going to happen.

I was in Half-Price Books a week later and saw a book that seemed more realistic, Meditation for Wimps.  I paid my $5 and some change and took it home.  I tried one or two of the poses it said I needed to do to accomplish this supposed relaxation and state of Nirvana.  Yep, that book also ended up in the stack on the floor with the other books.

Two years later, I had a mentor who said, “Beth, you have to learn to sit still.”  She assigned me homework of sitting for five minutes every day in silence with my eyes closed.  I thought:”Of course, I can do that.  Five minutes?  Give me something harder to do.”

I sat in a chair in the area of my apartment that I designated as the meditation area.  I set my kitchen timer for 5 minutes and closed my eyes.  The conversation in my mind went something like this:  “Oh my God, pure torture.  When will this end?  I know the problem.  This damn thing is broken.  I only think I set it for five minutes, but really I set it for 30 minutes.  What if I never really pushed the start button, and this timer has really been going for 45 minutes?”  So I cheated.  I peeked open one eye and looked at that timer.  A whopping 30 SECONDS had passed.  If that wasn’t a sign that I was in trouble, then I didn’t know what was.  I could not even sit still with my eyes closed for 30 seconds.

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My next blog will be Meditation – The Exploration Phase (Part 2 of 3).  The piece I leave you with is what those days felt like to me:

Clawing My Skin Off

“Each day I busy myself with one more thing to do,

One more project to finish, one more call to make, one more hour to stay at work, one more way to help someone else in her life,

If I sit still, my thoughts will surely catch up to me and then the true havoc will begin,

I will hear the “not good enough”, the “not smart enough”, the “not going fast enough”,

The “not enough” that runs her daily marathons,

With anxiety humming through my veins and depression waiting at the door to take her turn,

There is no chance that I will let any of that catch up to me.

I just have to learn to move faster…or do I?”