Welcome Back to Your 7-Day Meditation Kickstart
Day 5
Review the previous day
What you should not look for in meditation
Misconception Buster
In today's lesson, we're going to bust the misconception about the culprit of most clunky meditations: your expectations. There's a popular saying, "Go meditate on it," which implies entering the meditation with an idea of what you want to experience in the practice—it could be an answer to a problem, or a solution, or an idea, or simply much-needed mental rest. Regardless, going into meditation looking for something super specific to happen will almost always guarantee that it won't happen.
So where do the answers live?
Maybe the answers will be found in the meditation, maybe they won't. But what's important is maintaining a nonchalant attitude about it either way. The biggest mistake new meditators make is they go into the practice with an expectation, or checklist—which feels natural because that's how we approach everything else. This should be happening, then that, then this, etc.
For instance, do you feel like these things should ideally happen in your meditation:
Your mind should feel quieter than it does when you're not meditating
The time should go by faster than it does normally
You shouldn't be falling asleep while meditating
Most of your thoughts in meditation should be different from your everyday thoughts
If you feel these are reasonable expectations in meditation, then you are 100% setting yourself up for failure—or at the very least, you’re going to have a clunky meditation experience.
Understand: you can not use expectations to control the monkey mind. The old adage applies to meditation as well: what you resist will persist. The only way to move beyond the monkey mind feeling and into a quieter experience is to not expect the monkey to go away. And if you want to go further, make friends with it.
Today's Practice:
Let go of any and all expectations about what you think should be happening in meditation
In today's 10-minute meditation, you're going to practice everything we've discussed up until now, except now you’re going to practice letting go of any and all expectations of whatever you think should be happening.
So if you're being mentally lazy, noticing your breath, being nonchalant overall, and you begin thinking something completely unrelated, or you feel yourself falling asleep, or if the time feels like it’s going slower, and you begin growing impatient, your impatience is an indication that you still have expectations in the meditation. The correction is to innocently remember that you're experiencing exactly what you should be experiencing.
Instructions
Sit comfortably
Set a your soft chime for 10 minutes, or if you feel ready to go longer, set it for 15 minutes
Close your eyes
Begin lightly notice your breathing
Remind yourself to proceed without expectations
When the chime sounds, slowly bring yourself out
Conclusion
The irony of letting go of expectations in meditation is... you end up getting what you wanted in the first place—a quieter mind. We don't realize how much our expectations can ruin an otherwise settled mind in meditation. But you'll see the difference when you get to a point where you really don't care what happens in the meditation. Tomorrow, we'll discuss another aspect to succeeding in meditation that is rarely mentioned, and seldom followed, but will make perhaps the biggest impact on your practice.
Be Accountable
Post an image that shows a representation of something you thought about in meditation, and make sure to tag #lightsmeditationkickstart so we can all follow your progress.
