“Many people have discovered that mindfulness offers them a down-to-earth yet immediate way to connect with themselves. It is simple acceptance, described here as making friends with yourself. It is, as well, a means to unlock creativity and compassion. Meditation is a powerful technique for developing mindfulness, which can help us discover a way of being that is authentic, relaxed, and gentle.”
Part Three of a 4-part series on developing mindfulness and awareness through the practice of meditation. Start from Part One.
Meditation is actually very simple. Mindfulness is repeatedly returning to an object of meditation. The object can be your breath, sensations in your body, a visualized image, or a literal object, like a rock or flower. In fact, in many traditional schools of meditation, using breath, visualization, emotion, or felt senses were considered advanced practices and people learned to meditate with rocks and flowers, or repetitive activities like sweeping, cleaning, or walking.
Whatever your object of meditation, when you lose focus you return to the object. Simple, but not easy. When a lot of people start meditating, they discover their minds are like a dog that chases every squirrel and barks at every car. You can progressively train your dog by first putting it on a leash, then teaching it voice commands, and finally being able to keep it off-leash and have it stay by your side.
Training your mind in meditation works similarly. The structure of the practice teaches your mind to stay in the present moment and not chase the squirrels of the past or the cars of the future. You are repeatedly showing your mind that its home is the present moment, attending to your embodied experience of being human.
As we train in the practice of meditation, it is easy for the practice to become stiff and mechanical, vague and confusing, or an exercise for our internal critic. We also encounter difficult experiences of irritation, boredom, or restlessness. Approaching meditation with the attitude of making friends with yourself makes your meditation practice resilient and strong because you are able to show up however you are.
Making Friends with Yourself
We are often not very friendly towards ourselves. We might treat ourselves like a vehicle that gets us from place to place. We might struggle with and be very hard on ourselves by demanding perfection or expecting failure. We might constantly entertain ourselves to avoid boredom. We might simply be so busy with work, family, and responsibilities that who we actually are beneath all that has become a bit of a mystery.
In mindfulness meditation we can develop an honest friendship with ourselves. Instead of managing ourselves, we practice being with ourselves. It might seem strange, but sometimes we are the last person we want to really be with and we go to great lengths to avoid coming face-to-face with ourselves. Perhaps we don’t really see the usefulness of spending time doing nothing and just being. Yet we need a counterpoint to the often extractive relationship we have with ourselves. Just being is a refreshing alternative to trying to get more energy, more enjoyment, more peace, more this, and more that out of ourselves.
We might also avoid coming face-to-face with ourselves because we are nervous about what we might find. We act like our own personal version of the Wizard of Oz: blustering around with confidence, smarts, humor, or even depression. Whatever the go-to version of ourselves is that projected Great Oz, but what about the person behind the curtain? We don’t want to know. Ignorance, we hope, is bliss. But this kind of disconnection and self-avoidance builds up. Not looking under the bed makes the imagined monsters even scarier.
The precision and continuity of meditation practice support us in approaching the open space of who we are in the present moment. We gently pull back the curtain and find there isn’t a Great Oz or a Not-So-Great Oz. We look under the bed and there are no monsters, just a collection of cat hair and our bin of winter coats. Being with ourselves doesn’t confirm our worst fears or exceed our highest expectations. It is simple, ordinary, and refreshingly boring.
This practice of making friends with ourselves is disciplined and spontaneous, safe and challenging, calming and invigorating. Meditation gives us a structured way to express acceptance, care, curiosity, patience, and kindness towards ourselves. When we sit with the breath, we are interested in how we feel that day, at that precise moment. When it comes easily, we enjoy contentment and peace. When it’s difficult, we don’t give up. When it feels strange and unfamiliar, we are curious and patient. We don’t hold on to any single positive or negative experience and say, “This! This is truly who I am”, instead we allow ourselves to be different day-to-day or minute-to-minute.
The great psychologist Carl Rogers said, “the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” The alchemy that takes place in meditation is this: befriending, accepting, and appreciating ourselves just as we are alleviates internal struggle and frees us to truly be ourselves.
Up next, we take a brief look at two common early meditation experiences and how to work through them so they don’t derail your practice.