6 Mistakes You Might Be Making When Trying To Meditate
You can’t reach monk status in a day, but here’s some common mistakes you might be making when you look inwards
Whether you have reached complete guru transcendence mode or have just recently decided to start trying meditation as part of your wellness practice there are common challenges that most people face when meditating. After many years of meditation practice between us, we have come up with 6 common mistakes made when trying to meditate.
For the many of us, the meditation journey started with the help of some kind of meditation app that we used as our digital guided coach. This is a fantastic place to start meditation practice and indeed I still use some type of meditation app to guide us through meditation.
We have also tried our fair share of meditation apps and think we have the best meditation app in 2021 - Headspace. To be honest, it is a common feeling for beginners that meditation just doesn't feel like it’s ‘working’ despite hours and hours of practice.
The truth is, every person's meditation journey will be different and will come with it’s own individual challenges - it is a very personal and subjective endeavour. Take a look below at some common mistakes that you might be making when you try to tune in..
What Are The 6 Common Mistakes Made When Trying To Meditate?
1. You Think Of Meditation As A Chore
Meditation is ideally supposed to be a pleasurable experience. The truth is, it can bring out some demons when the only thing you are listening to is the constant chatter of the mind. When meditation is, from the outset, an arduous task to bear trying to tame the mind, sit with pain and discomfort and face yourself head on, it is easy to put meditation in the box of ‘chore’. We begin this inner dialogue of coming up with all of the reasons why we can’t take 5 or 10 minutes to switch off because it’s too hard, “I don’t have time”, “I can’t switch off”. When we have to drag ourselves to the mat for a meditation practice, it can begin to seem like something we ‘have’ to do rather than something that we ‘want’ to do to commit to being a better person, partner, friend, colleague or boss.
In this case, it is important to continue to check in, to remember the reason that we were drawn to meditation in the first place - the ‘why’. If we can remind ourselves that we are giving ourselves the benefits of stress management, better sleep, better focus, better performance, relaxation and better emotional intelligence that come with meditation, we can continue to view meditation as a personal reward rather than a forced chore.
2. You Try To “Stop” Your Thoughts
Humans have 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day. Thoughts will continue to flow through the mind no matter how good you are at mediation. Often, beginners of meditation think the primary goal of meditation and mindfulness practice is to stop all thoughts. This just isn’t the case.
So what is the alternative? The meditation experts describe the analogy of clouds passing through the sky. As you watch the clouds pass by in the sky, you can observe them without judgement rather than try to grab onto them or make them go away all together. This analogy describes the way in which meditation allows you to not so much ‘stop’ your thoughts but instead to be a little less emotionally attached or judgemental of them as they arise and disappear. We become the observer.
3. You Are Inconsistent With Practice
How many times a week do you workout or exercise? If you are like most of the RG team you would answer about 5-7 times per week. We like to place meditation in the same level of importance as exercise. Essentially, meditation is a workout for the mind. In this way, it is important to give meditation the same commitment and consistency as physical training.
Doing it once is better than nothing, but if you want to build that muscle of awareness you have to keep doing the mental reps. What we find helps with regular practice is scheduling time in your calendar, setting reminders in your phone, tracking your practice on your meditation app and setting goals for yourself in journals or diaries.
Adding to this point, when a practice becomes habitual it will take much less effort and deliberation to commit to it. By setting a solid routine of meditation practice to stick to, this commitment will slowly become natural and meditation will be a part of your day that you work other things around. “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
4. You Don’t Make Yourself Accountable
Accountability and consistency go hand in hand. In a research paper by the Journal of Clinical Psychology, approximately 54% of people who resolve to make or break a habit don’t last beyond six months for the commitment, and the average person makes the same life resolution 10 times over without success.
These are bad odds but we think the issue is accountability, or lack of it. Picture the times when you have agreed to go to a morning class, event or race and you have done so with a friend or group of friends. This action creates accountability and gives you an extra commitment outside of yourself that makes you far more likely to attend despite the emotions you feel telling you it’s too hard.
The tip here is to meditate with others or you could also use one of the meditation apps like Headspace that tracks your daily meditations and gives you a “streak” counter to tell you how many days in a row you have meditated. If you love data like us, you will be surprised how much this function drives you to continue to meditate daily. In meditating with others we create the reward of positive connection with a friend or group, and in tracking meditation with an app like Headspace we create a visual reward which can both go a long way!
5. Your Expectations Are Too High
The expectation that you will reach guru, monk enlightenment level in every meditation is unrealistic. Yes, sometimes you will experience deep inner connection and transcend the constant chatter of the mind that we all experience. But, to be honest, meditation is not supposed to be a quick fix for anything that you only do until you reach that moment of epiphany or transcendence.
In fact, the large part of the benefits of meditation will show up outside of the meditation and be evident instead in your ability to have more quality interactions, be less reactive to emotions and stress, sleep better, experience less highs and lows, make better decisions and make them easier.
Quite profound benefits can be experienced after days or may not be experienced/noticed for months. Rather than set your expectation to have a peak experience every meditation, it is more beneficial to approach meditation in a way that allows you to just experience what shows up, when it shows up.
6. You Judge The Way You Meditate
There is no absolute right or wrong way to meditate. It is true that the reason you may have started or be interested in starting meditation is in fact because you are highly self critical. If this is something that you find yourself doing in meditation you may feel yourself wondering how you look, criticising the way you breath, the way you sit, the way your arms are positioned etc.
It is important to notice what you are focussing on when you sit/lay down to take some time to yourself. One of the aims of meditation is to ‘catch’ yourself in these thought patterns and simply bring yourself back to the breath.You will find that there are a number of common practices to aid in channelling the focus and shifting the mind away from the internal dialogue including repetition of a mantra (in transcendental meditation) or matching the inhale and exhale to the count of 4 or 5 seconds (whatever suits your natural breath rhythm).
By taming the monkey mind and breaking out of the cycle of judgement, criticism and negative thought by noticing and catching yourself you can have a more pleasant experience both in meditation and in daily life.
