How I Misjudged Meditation (And Why I'm Grateful I Gave it a Second Hearing!)

“What do you do to restore yourself?"

The year was 2010 and the expression on my face in response to that question was utter bewilderment. “What does that even mean?!”, I stammered back at my mentor. She laughed, and replied, “well that answers my question!”

She proposed that I needed to inject some “restoration” in to my hyper-extroverted and fast-paced life and her prescription was meditation…which I was skeptical of to the nth degree. At that point in my life I believed all zen-state, ‘ohm’-producing activities went hand-in-hand with having to denounce your possessions and join a hippy commune… and I really couldn’t pull of tye-died clothing.

Meditation’s only redeeming quality was that I’d read a lot about how powerful a tool it had proven to be for Winston Churchill, a leader famous for being able to use meditation to blank his mind in 30 seconds. Having two teenage brothers, this sounded like the equivalent of some kind of super power.

So I tried meditation… maybe for 5 minutes. I did not achieve enlightenment.

I felt like I’d been sold on one of those “too-good-to-be-true” infomercial spiels and ordered the product, only to find it really was too good to be true. Disheartened, though feeling that my low estimations of meditation had been somewhat validated, I called my mentor. “I tried it, it didn’t work… I couldn’t blank my mind”, I said quite emphatically. She was unwilling to take my ‘case closed’ assessment. Instead, I got my A-type head chewed off; “Holly, will you please ditch your myopic focus on outcomes. It’s not about perfection; it’s about attendance. All you need to do is rock up and when you feel your mind drifting, just bring it back to your breath”.

Hold on, I just have to rock up and it doesn’t really matter what happens? I had definitely missed a memo… possibly several memos.

Smarting, I committed to trying a month of “attendance”. I knew it took 30 days to build a habit and I wasn’t too proud to admit I’d been completely petulant/arrogant/naive in passing judgment on meditation so quickly… I honestly cringe at reading this exchange now.

Within two weeks of creating the space for 20 minutes of meditation a day I was starting to see benefits. I still couldn’t blank my mind (I’d reconciled that maybe that was solely the Dalai Lama’s domain) but I was able to clear the noise. When I felt like I had 500 things competing for brain space, even ten minutes of meditation would see me reapproach a situation with incredible clarity… I started to understand why Churchill had found meditation so powerful! Amazingly, during meditation your metabolism and your breath rate go down to a level of rest, twice that of deep sleep.

I also came to see the power of restorative habits- meditation was like a muscle that grew every time you exercised it. Over the 30 days I not only saw the growth in the impact of the practice itself but also in the spill over impact it had on the rest of my life. I’d started to become better at being present and calmer in my decision-making. I was beginning to take a liking to this meditation stuff.

Research says that 95% of our behaviour is habitual and only 5% is conscious. Our willpower is not only weaker than we think but it takes far more energy than we think every time we employ it. So the challenge we face it to systematically build habits in to our lives that allow us to put energy enhancing behaviours like meditation on autopilot. All high performers rely on positive rituals to manage their energy and regulate their behaviour, and the more pressure we’re under, the more rigorous we need to be about ensuring we practice our rituals.

I’m clocking up my fifth anniversary of meditation this month and my daily practice has become one of the most powerful tools in my toolkit. Some days my meditation amounts to 60 seconds of deep breaths, other times it’s 20 minutes worth of a guided meditation but I’m unwaveringly deliberate about carving out the space to meditate.

As for my quest for this elusive goal of a ‘blank mind’, I’ve abandoned it. I think Deepak Chopra got it right when he said:

“Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It’s a way of entering into the quiet that’s already there – buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.”