Meditation Day 2 = FAIL

How does someone fail at meditation you say.  Say, not ask, because it’s not a question.

Easy, I say.  I have never learned to turn my brain down, much less off.  I’ve been a chronic insomniac for as long as I remember.

This is easy to believe if you know me IRL.  I frequently have dark circles under my eyes. My new trick is to go to bed with my iphone, playing NPR podcasts at low volume just a few inches from my ear.  There is something about the proximity to my ear. The way I have to focus to hear them.  It works most of the time, within an hour.  And I usually sleep for a few hours before I wake up again, startled by the sound of some strange man’s voice (it’s always a man).

Anyway, for years people have been telling me to try meditation.  That it would bring so much to my life. And I’ve never doubted that fact.  Not once.  It just didn’t seem like something I could do.  I’m the chick in the yoga class who gets restless during those 5 minutes at the end of the class where we’re all supposed to be lying quietly in corpse pose.  I start to tap my fingers against my mat.   Still just isn’t my thing.

Then my physical therapist started to nag me about it.  And some of my other coping mechanisms (I tend to grab for junk food when I’m stressed, and that’s no big deal,  as far as bad habits go it’s not that bad - except that I’ve put on a few pounds in the belly lately and now my favorite little dresses don’t fit right and that makes me sad which makes my insomnia even worse) are no longer working for me.  So I decided I really needed to give this meditation thing a sincere try.

I mentioned it to a friend.  That I’ve been trying to figure out how to meditate but couldn’t seem to make myself.  And he suggested that I let a friend of his help.  She’s a yoga/fitness pro and someone who’s been meditating for years.  He said that she’d be happy to do it.  So this weekend she came by my apartment with her favorite CD (gongs and rain and stuff like that) and gave me a lesson of sorts.

Today was my second day.  I’m suppose to play the CD and listen and breath and not do anything else or think of anything but my breathing for 30 minutes.

Yeah, that so didn’t happen.  After about 4 minutes I realized that I was thinking about things I needed to do later today.  I made myself stop and go back to counting my breath.  And then a couple of minutes later I realized I was thinking about how I was going to write about how I failed at meditation.  And so I made myself stop.  And then a couple of minutes later I realized that I was thinking of the skirt I bought yesterday and whether or not I should keep it or return it for the black dress I didn’t buy.  It went on and on like that for a while.

Eventually I gave up.  15 minutes had passed.  Which is progress.  Yesterday I gave up after only 10 minutes.

Wow, I really suck.