Insight #4: Cutting myself some more slack (part 2)

While still in India, I sincerely thought I would continue meditating and doing yoga back home. In my fantasy, I would get up an hour earlier than I used to to meditate and I used my nightly Sex and the City or Grey's Anatomy hour for yoga and meditation. In reality, I ended up not meditating at all. I wanted to, but there were many other things to keep me busy. I had a birthday party. I wanted to see my friends. I wasted countless hours online. I tried doing yoga, once, but my laptop wouldn't play the DVD I bought from the ashram.

Weeks of just talking about how great meditation was but not actually doing it felt cheap. For a while, I believed that that was it - I could not make mediation and yoga part of my daily routine, after all. However, to my surprise, the past few weeks have been different. All of a sudden, I've found time - I've been to yoga at least once a week and meditated at least a couple of times a week. And it feels amazing.

Again, cutting myself some slack - realizing that perhaps my expectations were a tad unrealistic - helped. Considering 10 minute meditation a success instead of thinking that it was 50 minutes short on what I was supposed to do has been a big win. Now I actually want to meditate. Maybe not quite 2 hours a day, but at least a little bit before going to bed. Sometimes that little bit doesn't even feel like enough and I end up sitting for much longer.

So what is meditation like, then? Sitting in a beautiful lotus pose with a slight smile on your face? Brad Warner, a Buddhist priest and punk rocker, describes meditation better than I ever could: "It's about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren't bliss. I'll tell you that right now. You're a mess. We all are." There. It (usually) doesn't feel particularly good. Or bad, for that matter. It just feels that you're....right here. Present. And being present and facing the truth feels like something each of us should do once in a while. If not two hours a day, give it what you can. It's definitely worth it.