I Am Terrible At Meditation. I Do It Anyway.

I once spent an entire guided meditation composing a strongly-worded email in my head to someone who had pissed me off three weeks prior.

So when I tell you that meditation feels like the only reason I am still functional in this particular moment in history, I need you to understand: I am not speaking as someone who has mastered these things. I am speaking as someone who is desperate. And desperate people will try anything.

Because I check the news and feel powerless.

I scroll Instagram and feel worse.

I watch three episodes of something on Netflix and then feel both worse and slightly stupid.

I rant to my husband who, bless him, has already heard the rant more than thrice.

And I am confronted by this fact: my normal coping mechanisms are trash.

So what I am finding …and I say this as a person who wholeheartedly resists easy spiritual fixes the way I resist cilantro, is that the only things that actually help are the oldest, least-efficient, most-impossible-to-sell-on-a-podcast tools available: prayer and meditation. Not because after five minutes of breathing exercises the geopolitical situation improves. It doesn’t. But because it slowly improves my spiritual bone density.

This is why I loved what Jeff Warren said in our conversation yesterday: that spiritual practices are a way to drop down into the “no problem” amidst all the problems. An interior space of stillness that is no less real than exterior chaos.

Meditation (even when done poorly, or for only 2 minutes or with the help of an app…) interrupts the feedback loop — the doom-scroll-despair-numb out-doom-scroll once again loop and reminds me that there is, somewhere underneath all my noise, something un-hurtable and quiet and connected to God.

Is that enough to survive what’s happening in the world? Honestly, some days, barely. But barely is still surviving. And on the days I remember to actually do the thing (even resentfully or even half-asleep) … barely becomes enough.

What meditation gives me is this: a space to exist in which my personality is suspended, where there is nothing to be done except nothing, where I can listen for something uncreated. Even if my ego is off-line for only just 1 minute, that 1 minute is worth the cost of admission, worth the cost of fidgeting, thinking about a grievance, and returning to the breath. Worth it. Because if there is a space I visit for even one minute in which my personality, fears, anxiety, grievances etc. are off-line, that means that that place exists even when I am unaware of it (which is usually the other 23 hours 23 hours and 59 minutes of the day.)

Do you have something you consider a “spiritual practice”? Tell me about it!

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Jeff Warren is a meditation teacher and co-author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics. His Home Base Substack is an accessible forum for continual practice,support,and jokes at his own expense. Also he’s Nadia’s favorite meditation teacher!

Here’s how our conversation started:

Our full conversation is below: