I hate meditating

Just because it's good for you doesn't mean you have to like it

I keep thinking back to last week’s post about the struggle to stay in the present moment. Meditation is one of the tools I use to get better at that. I meditate every morning for ten minutes, except for Saturday’s. I give myself Saturdays off because I hate meditating.

I wonder sometimes if this is the thing people don’t understand about meditating. Most of the time it isn’t pleasant. I don’t frolic with my spirit animal in flower-filled fields. I’m not filled with an overwhelming sense of interconnectedness with the universe. I don’t feel touched by god. I don’t feel anything except my boring-ass breathing and, usually, my back hurting from sitting up straight for ten minutes.¹

The thoughts I have when I’m meditating are not profound. I’d say they’re probably the least profound thoughts I have over the course of the day. Most of them go like this—“Has it been ten minutes yet? Now? What about now?”

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Okay, but maybe right after I finish meditating, I get a burst of inner peace? A transcendent kick? Nope. I turn off the timer on my phone, grateful those ten minutes are over at last. I do a few yoga poses for my crappy back. I go downstairs to eat breakfast and my husband can testify, I am hardly a beacon of enlightenment while I’m waiting for my bagel to finish toasting.

So why the hell do I do something I hate every morning (except Saturdays, and oh, how I love Saturdays, except I don’t, and more on that in a bit)? Why do some people lift weights? Or go for a run? If you’re trying to learn an instrument, why play scales? Scales suck. I hate scales, too.

The answer, of course, is that it’s practice. All of it is practice. I lift weights so I can be stronger in general. I do scales so I can play the songs I love. I meditate because of what it does for me the rest of the day, even though in the moment, I hate it. I meditate because it unlocks what are—for me—super-powers. Things like the ability to just let a thought slide off my brain, all blessedly-slippery like. Oh, good-bye, annoying thought! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!

As I’ve written before, meditation is strength-training for your brain. It’s ten minutes in which you get better at letting your stupid, annoying thoughts go. It’s ten minutes in which you bring yourself back into the present moment, over and over again. It’s ten minutes in which you just breath. It is boring as hell. Also, it’s like medicine and if I don’t take it, bad things happen.

Like Saturdays. Almost every Saturday, by early afternoon, I find myself feeling unsettled. Adrift. Unable to decide how to spend my day. Fighting against crappy thoughts that are sticky like cling-wrap. I get through Saturdays, but it isn’t always pretty.

I don’t meditate on Saturdays, even though I know it’s a bad idea, because I want to give myself a “day off” and because I hate being told what to do, even if I’m the one telling myself to do it. Along the same lines of unhealthy thinking, sometimes I’ll just stop meditating for a few days. “You don’t need it,” I tell myself. “You’ll be okay.”

Spoiler—I am not okay. The last time I stopped meditating for a prolonged period of time was during phase 2 (or 2.3 or 3.0.1 or whatever) of the pandemic. Yeah, I picked the middle of a pandemic to stop meditating. I’m that kind of stupid.

I ended up back in my therapist’s office, with her gently suggesting that perhaps I shouldn’t stop meditating. “You wouldn’t stop taking your blood pressure medicine if you had high blood pressure, would you?” she asked.

Well…

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1. If you are a meditator and you do have any of these experiences or others that are anything but annoying and endless, congratulations. That’s great. Maybe that’s what happens when you meditate for longer than ten minutes. Absolutely possible. Also, probably never going to find out because the ten minutes is already a fucking eternity.