Picture this, you’re sitting cross-legged on the floor, trying your hardest not to think.

 

Suddenly, you realise for the last 2 minutes, all you’ve been doing is flip-flopping between: trying to remember what you need to buy for dinner. Stewing over that weird comment that girl at work made yesterday. And internally humming along to a Billie Eilish song that’s been stuck in your head since breakfast!

 

D’oh!

 

So much for not thinking.

 

You frown a little, and try harder…surely you can manage a coupl’a seconds of mental white noise!

 

…But no, no you can’t! The rando thoughts are coming thicker and faster!

 

F this, you think…

 

What’s with this meditation BS? It’s impossible…

 

And now you feel more stressed out and annoyed than when you started! How can some people find it relaxing?!

 

You decide  it’s just not your thing, and you’d best stick to yoga instead.

 

Can you relate? Has this been your experience of meditation up until now?

 

If it has, I feel you!

 

You’re definitely not alone.

 

That used to be my experience too.

 

But now I’m one of those weirdos that does find meditation relaxing…BUT, that’s only because I now know a secret about meditation most newbies don’t…

 

Wanna hear it? *I’m leaning in*

 

 

Got that?

 

In fact, you shouldn’t even TRY to stop your thoughts…that’s a losing battle for sure…

 

Meditation is actually really simple.

 

The basic gist is:

 

1. Focus your attention on an object of concentration (e.g. a mantra, your breath, sensations in your body, a candle etc)
2. When your mind wanders, catch yourself and re-focus.

 

Rinse and repeat. Again and again. (And again…in the beginning, the untrained mind is like a bunch of monkeys on meth so there’s a LOT of catching to do)

 

Notice how instruction #2 EXPECTS your mind to wander? That’s because that’s the nature of the mind, to wander and to think. We don’t want to fight against nature and create more stress and tension.

 

Thankfully, as well as your thinking mind, you also have your aware mind (more on this next week).

 

As you catch yourself getting lost in thought, you’ve already achieved something great! You’ve noticed you’re lost – which means you’ve become aware (or in other words, mindful)! Hurray!

 

Learning to better access your aware mind is where all the good meditation juju comes from.

 

Why is this important if you have anxiety?

 

Because a lot of your anxiety lives in the thinking mind. Intrusive thoughts. Worries. Rumination. Catastrophising etc.

 

When you’re not aware, you can become trapped in your anxious thoughts. It’s as if you’re stuck in a tiny, dark, stuffy room and can hardly breathe.

 

When you first start to cultivate awareness, it’s like cracking open a little door and letting some air into your mind. You can breathe a little. There’s some light shining through. It’s not quite so suffocating.

 

When you get better at accessing the aware mind, it’s like you can open the door completely and even step outside into the garden…the anxiety might still be there, in that little room, but you’re no longer trapped…and there’s more to your present moment reality that just the anxiety. There’s the garden and the spacious sky too (your awareness).

 

Idk if that makes sense right now, but if you start practicing meditation, it’ll click.

 

And no need to take my word for it either…but you can take the word of science! There’s literally been THOUSANDS of studies showing that mindfulness meditation  drastically improves anxiety symptoms.

 

So if you’ve struggled in the past, maybe you want to give it another chance and NOT fight against your own thoughts.