The single most common reason people give up on meditation is that they believe they are doing it wrong. They sit down, their mind wanders within about nine seconds, and they conclude that they are one of the people this does not work for.
Nobody is one of those people. A wandering mind is not a sign that meditation is failing. It is the thing meditation is made of.
What the practice actually is
Here is the whole mechanism. You pick something to rest your attention on, usually the breath. Your attention leaves. At some point you notice it has left. You bring it back, without commentary. Then it leaves again.
That noticing-and-returning is the practice. It is not the interruption of the practice. If your mind wandered forty times in ten minutes and you brought it back forty times, that was a good session, not a bad one. The repetitions are the point, in the way that lifting the weight back up is the point.
The idea that meditation means holding a blank mind is the most damaging misconception about it, and it puts more people off than anything else.
Starting small enough to actually do it
Two minutes. Not twenty.
Twenty minutes is a fine goal and a terrible starting point, because the practice that helps you is the one you actually do, and almost nobody sustains twenty minutes from a standing start. Two minutes is short enough that you cannot reasonably tell yourself you do not have time for it.
Attach it to something you already do without deciding to: after you brush your teeth, before you start the car, once you have shut your laptop. A practice with a fixed home survives the weeks when you have no willpower left.
Build it up when two minutes starts to feel too short. That will happen on its own, or it will not, and either is fine.
Mindfulness is not the same as meditation
Meditation is a set-aside practice. Mindfulness is a way of paying attention that you can bring to anything: washing dishes, walking to the car, sitting in traffic.
For a lot of people mindfulness is the more useful of the two, because it does not require a separate slot in a day that has none. Noticing the temperature of the water, the weight of your feet, the fact that your shoulders are somewhere up near your ears, is a complete practice on its own.
What it does for anxiety
Anxiety runs on the future. It is a rehearsal of a thing that has not happened, and its power comes from how convincingly it presents that rehearsal as information.
Mindfulness works on anxiety not by arguing with the thought but by changing your relationship to it. Over time, with practice, a worry becomes something you notice happening rather than something that simply is the world. The thought does not necessarily stop. Its grip loosens.
That is a modest-sounding claim, and I state it modestly on purpose. Meditation is well supported for stress and for anxiety, and it is not a treatment for a psychiatric condition. If anxiety is running your life, a practice is worth having, and so is a therapist.
When meditation is harder than usual
For people carrying trauma, sitting in silence with closed eyes is not automatically a safe place to be. Stillness can bring things up rather than settle them, and interior quiet is not restful for everyone.
If that is you, there is nothing wrong with your practice. Open your eyes. Use a walking practice instead of a seated one. Anchor on external sound rather than internal sensation. And do it alongside someone rather than alone, at least at first.
Where to start
The free Mindfulness and Healing programme covers meditation together with breathwork and sound. It costs nothing and it is open wherever you are.
If you are in Georgia, Colorado or Tennessee and you would like to talk about how a practice might fit with therapy, a free fifteen-minute call is a good place to begin.
