Meditation Is Not For Me. I Can’t Do It

Yeah, right. May I please prove you wrong? Most people I met have meditated at least once without ever realizing it. If you scanned your memory of timeless and special moments, you would see what I mean.

Have you ever?
- Stopped what you were doing to gaze at a sunset and felt like time ceased to exist
- Looked at the fire, enchanted by the dancing flames
- Were in the wilderness at night and lost yourself in the sky
- Sat by the ocean and were lulled into a different reality through the murmur and roar of the waves

If so, you have undoubtedly gone inside a meditative state.

Because many custodians of meditation traditions lived in the East, we tend to think of meditation as something given to us by someone wise and ancient.

Nothing can be further from the truth. We are born being able to meditate, just like we are born with the ability to eat, walk, talk, etc. It is about developing and using these abilities.

A word on science. The autonomic nervous system has 2 modes: sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest).
When your body needs adrenaline (to run away from a tiger or run a difficult meeting), a sympathetic branch is activated, you feel stressed, and that stress helps you get things done. Big hello to fellow adrenaline junkies out there! Yes, those of us who submit the project 30 minutes before the deadline after pulling 2 or 3 all-nighters.

To repair the damage from the all-nighters, our bodies go into the parasympathetic mode: heartbeat slows down, blood flows to the belly, and we feel relaxed and satisfied. The body repairs itself.

When looked through the lens of physiology, meditation is
- techniques to activate the parasympathetic
- a set of skills to stay within ourselves while the good old parasympathetic heals and prepares us for another day

And turns out that gazing at beautiful things, watching or listening to something with a rhythm (music, waves, our breath), activating our senses (smelling a cinnamon stick or the snow melting) shifts us into the parasympathetic.

The practice of meditation is to extend these fleeting moments into minutes.

And being able to access that restfulness not only when we are sipping Mai Tai somewhere in Waikiki but also when it is 2 pm on a Friday afternoon, and it seems as if the Universe is actively conspiring to defeat us. Manifesting as the mailbox exploding, a deadline hanging above our head like a guillotine, the dog throwing up something she shouldn't have eaten, and the kids will be home any minute to bicker with each other and distract us from work.

So, my busy-brain colleagues, the point is this: If you have a nervous system (which you still do, I hope, even on a Friday), you can meditate. The only thing you are missing is learning how to do it.

So, instead of saying, "I can't meditate," consider a more accurate and optimistic statement: "I am yet to learn that."