Charlie Cates
Meditation – 5 lessons I learned from doing it every day for a year
I always thought meditation was some woo woo kind of thing where you would sit in silence and pretend like you were floating while discovering the answers to your deepest questions. I thought there was a perfect meditation position that you needed to sit in in order to attain the benefits of meditation. And, most of all, I thought that meditation, while an intriguing concept, just wasn’t for me. The “perfect meditation position” was extremely uncomfortable, my mind would be racing constantly, and I would often wonder how much time I had left before the alarm that I set for myself went off.
Then, back in 2015, I started using the popular app Headspace to guide me through meditation exercises. I wanted to see if a regular meditation practice could help me manage my stress a bit better. I was also starting to hear of the many health and brain benefits of meditating, and wanted to experience those for myself.
When I first got the app, I really enjoyed using it. I completed the first 10 days in a row, then the first 30. Somewhere between days 30 and 60, however, I fell off the wagon and stopped using the app altogether. I would open it up every now and then for a 10-minute meditation session, but those times were few and far between.
But then, last April, I decided that I wanted to start meditating using the app again. I wanted to see if I could meditate every day for an entire year and set the goal to do so. The app has a nice feature where it measures your current meditation streak, so that would be easy for me to track. It also has markers along the way at days 3, 10, 15, 30, 90, 180, and then finally 365.
So I started the “woo woo” activity, sitting in a more comfortable position than what I had originally believed was appropriate, and just dealt with the fact that my mind was wandering a lot during my practice. And I did that everyday for an entire year.
