Many people struggle with meditation.
WORDS BY COCO NKRUMAH | First published in Spotlight: The Arts Wellbeing Collective Magazine, Edition 1
Many people struggle with meditation. Sometimes they will make an ultimatum to give it one last shot or leave the path completely, and approach meditation with a renewed determination to master the practice.
If this sounds familiar, I recommend you leave your expectations at the door and treat your meditation practice as an experiment.
Why do I say this?
First of all, we know that the nature of the mind is naturally judgmental. If you have expectations about what you are going to get out of a meditation session, you will automatically set yourself up for resistance if it’s not going the way you expected!
Naturally, your brain will stop cooperating, and you will start to feel frustrated – this mental loop results in more resistance and hesitation about the practice.
But, if we can leave all our expectations at the door, we can be softer with ourselves and our minds.
This allows us to let thoughts come and go more easily, and we are less judgmental when we have particularly stressful mental states.
Once we approach meditation in this way, we find the mind begins to cooperate and we begin to feel the benefits of meditation.
The paradox is – you may need to abandon all your meditation goals to actually realise them!
