Battles with experience envy ~ my journey with twice daily meditation

A friend of mine came to learn meditation with me because she describes her brain as ‘a blender with blunt blades and all the thoughts just bashing around’.  Couldn’t put it better myself to be honest.  While Dan took to our meditation technique like a duck to water, (he was so exhausted he was just happy to close his eyes for 20 minutes) I spent around 6 months intellectualising it.  I just wasn’t having the same experience as Dan. I had good old-fashioned experience envy.  But…I persisted in my daily practice as I knew it was an essential tool to have long term. Once I finally surrendered and stopped intellectualising my experience, the technique just took hold and did all the heavy lifting for me.  

So, I have two points around this if you’ll indulge me. 

The first point being, when you learn a meditation technique, don’t compare your experience with anyone else’s.  No one else has lived your life, no one else has your brain, your conditioning, your ways of thinking.  Your entry point into meditation will be like no one else’s. 

The second point is, you’ll only reap the rewards of meditation in direct correlation to your investment in it.  A whole heap of us will start our practice with blender brains, while a whole heap will also fall straight into the practice like it’s second nature.  But if you don’t invest the time (it’s called a practice for a reason) you won’t reap the immense benefits.  There’s no silver bullet, the practice requires consistency. 

We’ve heard quite a few times this year ‘if it wasn’t for the meditation I would not be coping’ from people we have taught and care about.  And nothing could possibly make me happier.  To think that we’ve passed on a tool that is helping our little community live in a way that’s more sustainable makes me feel incredibly humbled.  Being human, life inevitably throws shit at us (hello 2020).  And meditation doesn’t make that stop, but it does allow us the space to respond, rather than react to those shit-hit-the-fan moments (and much smaller moments also, those everyday little niggles that become irrelevant and absolutely tolerable).

With Love, Nic x