Meditation is not about stopping all of your thoughts, making your mind “blank” or emptying it of all activity because THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Our minds are thinking machines. They allow us to create, get stuff done, and keep ourselves safe.

Just because we decide to sit down to meditate doesn’t mean all of this thinking will magically stop.

Instead of trying to stop thinking/make our minds go blank, we give ours minds what’s called an “anchor” - something to focus on to settle ourselves and our attention. This anchor is oftentimes the sensations of breathing but since that doesn’t work for everyone, your anchor could be sensations in the body or even sound.

Whatever you are noticing about the anchor, moment to moment, is one part of the practice.

The other part is that as we aim our attention on our chosen anchor, our mind will get to thinking again. It will get distracted and whisked away from your anchor. This could start in a nanosecond or in several seconds but you can be guaranteed that it will happen and it does not mean that you are a failure or that you “can’t meditate”.

Paradoxically, the transformative aspects of a meditation practice come simply from (1) noticing these distractions. Over and over again. And (2) meeting yourself and your busy mind with kindness - without beating yourself up about it - as you return your attention to your chosen anchor.

So the distractions AND the returning and settling back into the present moment ARE the practice. Both of them.

Revisiting the graphic above, a more accurate depiction would be this one, with a small addition of the arrows <-> in the middle:

We toggle back and forth between a mind that's busy thinking, and one that is settled and simply aware of what's happening from moment to moment. It's this back and forth that truly is the practice. It's what mindfulness meditation is all about.

Have questions or want to learn more? Join me in exploring mindfulness in my Let's Sit mid-day mindfulness drop in class or Commit to Sit month long exploration of the practice. And feel free to reach out to set up a one on one session.

P.S. I'd like to give a nod to one of my teachers, Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the 'Stress Reduction Clinic' and the 'Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society' at the University of Massachusetts. His book Meditation Is Not What You Think: Mindfulness and Why It's So Important has inspired this series and greatly influenced my practice and teaching.

But this retreat was not just a life-long dream, it was also a requirement for a mindfulness teaching certification I was planning to complete later in the spring. So, despite a little fear and mommy guilt, I was going. What would it be like to stop all the talking, stop all of the activity and just be? These questions I had had since childhood were finally going to be answered!

And then NYC locked down due to Covid-19 and I had to cancel my registration. I put the retreat, my teaching certification and many things in my life on hold. You probably have a similar story about things you put on hold last spring…

That period was the start of “the big pause” as I like to call it. Besides cancelling a bunch of teaching engagements due to Covid, I made the tough decision to take a break from teaching all together. Becoming a Zoom + video + internet content expert AND a home-schooling mom all in the same season in the middle of a pandemic was a mountain I felt I could not climb. Instead, I hunkered down at home and became a full-time mom and housewife.

It was really scary to pause it all. Maybe you felt the same? I didn’t know whether the pause would be temporary or permanent. I spent most of last spring and summer mourning my former life. It felt like someone or something had died. It wasn’t until mid-October that I hosted my first mindfulness gathering on Zoom.

As I look back now, almost a year since the NYC lockdown, a lot of life lessons came out of the big pause. You probably have your own list of life lessons. In that long spring and summer, the most important lesson I learned was just how little control I have over life in general, if I have any at all. The ground that I thought I was standing on had come out from under me and I had to let go of everything I thought was solid and fixed. Who I was. My work. My plans. I remember there was this voice inside my head that kept prodding: I should be doing this….  I should be doing that….  I should…  I should…  I should…  It felt like I was putting my foot on the gas pedal while I was stuck in park. Revved up but unable to move forward. It was all those years of mindfulness practice that allowed me to hear that voice, to pause and lean into it, instead of pushing through it, or ignoring it, or numbing it with activity, or doing, or with substances. Difficult as it was, I stayed with the pause. Inside the pause. With all of the groundlessness and the ups and downs that it was.

Today I’m hitting the play button on part of my big pause - I’m participating in a 5-day silent retreat from the comfort of my home starting tonight! It won’t be the same as going to a retreat center and as such there’s not quite as much fear or mommy guilt. Nonetheless I’m super excited for the challenges and discoveries that await me. Will I finally have the answers to the questions I’ve had since I was a child? Or will I find a new groundlessness to abide in? Probably a little bit of both and none of either.

I’ll be putting all the tech down for the next five days and will see you on the other side. These sweet, silly slippers are coming along for the ride, of course. Wish us luck!

​xo

I didn't know anything about meditation really, except what it looked like on the outside. All of the pictures I had seen over the years of monks sitting cross legged on the floor with their eyes closed. I had been practicing moving meditation through my yoga practice for over a decade but sitting quietly like that was not something I had ever tried in all earnestness. So one January day in that new year, I literally just sat down and committed to "cultivating" a practice.

In hindsight, I think one of the wise things I did was to consider the practice as something I was "cultivating".

Cultivation implies time and effort.
There's preparation. 
A loosening and breaking up to create space and allow growth.
There is fostering. And tending.
A bit of trial and error, exploration and investigation.

There’s somewhat of a goal, a direction you are heading in.
And then there is also excitement, curiosity and letting go of the end result.
You really don’t know what you’re going to get out of it.
Just like planting seeds in your garden,
you really have no idea precisely what or how anything is going to blossom.

You plant the seeds that you would like to foster and to grow.
Sprinkle in a little faith and trust
that natural forces invisible to the naked eye
will step in and do their part.
And then you wait to see what happens.

And in the case of meditation, all sorts of transformational things have blossomed for me. It hasn’t been easy. The practice of meditation is simple but it’s not easy. On the surface it can seem like a big waste of time this sitting quietly, practicing non-doing. I get it, especially in our culture that rewards achievement and the cultivation of external agency. Those first few seeds I planted included a desire to continue to find comfort in my own skin. To show up in my life as myself, as truthful and honest and authentic as I can be in any moment.

One of my favorite quotes from the 12th century Persian poet Rumi says:

​As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

Meditation is just like that. You start walking and you see pretty quickly that there is power in sitting quietly; a beautiful, life-changing way starts to form. And then you just can’t help but to continue to put one foot in front of the other. To continue to “cultivate” the practice, to see what blossoms in all aspects of your life.

​And then 6 years ago I just decided to sit down and give meditation an honest try.
That was it. I just sat.
Without any instruction or lessons.​
​