Saturday, July 04, 2020

How to Fail at Meditation

I’m not usually one to get publicly excited about my calendar, but as we went around the room on the first day of a weeklong meditation retreat in Northern California, I found myself explaining my obsession with controlling every aspect of my day.

I held out my iPhone and opened my iCal app: a slew of perfectly organized, multi-colored cells, stretching on for months. I should have been embarrassed, but when someone gasped, I was quietly satisfied.

Not long ago, I decided to get into the meditation game. I went into my calendar and blocked off a chunk of time for it each morning. The further into the future I scrolled, the more time I scheduled for it, confident that by a year out, I’d be meditating for an hour every day.

I downloaded a few meditation apps, settling on one called Headspace, and got to work improving my happiness. But while I didn’t know it, the experts would say I’d run into a problem before I’d even started.

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