I started my meditation journey when I was nine years old. You'd think that by now I would be enlightened or something but I feel like or I felt like I was "bad" at meditation for years.
I could have days were I could mediate deeply, sometimes for hours and then other days when my eyes itched, my body ached, my head was a fuzzy mess.
Some where along the line I wanted a perfect meditation, a perfect practitioner (me).
I have read and practiced all kinds of meditation and it was only when I began to write and share my own did I begin to see what meditation was, or maybe could be.
Because it is like a state of being, or several states of being and can be challenging, even to the most practiced there is this mystic that it MUST be complicated. It MUST be difficult? Or maybe I'm "not good at it"? Right?
Yes there are depths to it but no-one starts to swim by swimming the British channel! You start small. I had made the mistake of trying to make it huge.
Meditation is the practice of just being you. I have heard it called "dwelling with your breath" and I like that.
Guided meditations aside it's hard to be comfortable with you, all of you, or even some of yourself. We spend almost all our waking effort avoiding ourselves in one way or another. Must keep busy, must not complain, lets work, or play or exercise until we are so tired we just sleep. Or maybe just that one glass, or that one bottle. That one bag of what-ever it might be.
Yet at it's core meditation is simple. It is as simple as counting three breaths.
It's not complicated.
Exhale.
Close the eyes.
One.
Two.
Three.
If you get distracted you don't have to berate yourself, just start again at one.
Just breathing.
You don't need a special room, or a special retreat, or a special place. You just need three breaths. It is something with you everywhere. It is something with you every when.
Anyone can take three breaths and you can take more, just take three more. No pressure. No perfection. Just, three, breaths.
Of course you can do more than three breaths. You could do thirty, or three hundred. But if you do it in simple threes you make it about the now, the present.
Just in.
Just out.
Meditation is special in it's ordinariness. No-one can meditate like you because your mind, your being is unique. There are no perfect dreams, feelings or thoughts. No perfect people. Just humans doing their best, one breath at a time.
