#1

Not Quite Levitating:

My Meditation Journey.

By Sid Watson

Illustrations by @megmayoillustrations

I have been staunchly against meditation for the large majority of my life. I’m nineteen years old and in that time I have been faced with a Buddhist nanny, an aggressively spiritual mother, an irritatingly in touch with herself sister (I say that with love, Cath, if you’re reading), several sports coaches, yoga teachers, mental health seminars and an actual monk, all encouraging me in the same direction: meditation will help you in all aspects of your life. But, despite all this, I resolved that it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t tell you why, probably a mixture of teen angst, a healthy dose of self-importance (I couldn’t possibly take ten whole minutes out of my day to “listen to my breathing”), and no small amount of laziness. 

Anyway, I hope by now you’ve gathered that my determination to not meditate was flawless, couldn’t be cracked – I would never give in to my mother and sister and the forces that conspired to make me… care for my mental health. Except that, whoopsie, my resolve could be cracked, and in fact it was cracked four weeks ago when lockdown number three was announced.

“deal with them healthily, without spiralling myself into a black hole.”

I, probably like many of you, finally broke down. I had denied it for a long time, but I finally was forced to face up to the fact that COVID (and for that matter many other things) SUCKS. And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, but once you face those feelings, and let them in, they do not stop coming. Thus I (and I have a sneaky feeling many of you can relate to me on this one), needed a way to face those emotions, and hopefully, deal with them healthily, without spiralling myself into a black hole. 

Enter: meditation. I was encouraged to do it most recently through a truly lovely little podcast called 10% Happier (do feel free to mock me for the fact that a trained monk couldn’t get me to meditate but a podcast could), which resonated with me because the host was also aggressively anti-meditation before he tried it. So, I started, and as of today I’ve been doing it for about three weeks, probably four to five times a week – so hardly a monk (yet). 

I can’t say that I have achieved Nirvana, or levitation, or even the most basic of promises: a completely empty mind. However, for me, I don’t think that’s the point; the reason I come back to sitting cross legged on the ground almost every day is because in some small (but growing) part of my brain, there is now a voice that fights toe to toe with my inner critic, that forces me to look my fears, worries and sadness in the face and not push them to the side but start to work through them, and approaches not only my thoughts but me with compassion. And that, for me at least, is what is truly profound.