Here is the transcription of my video blog on why I STILL hate to meditate:
(And here’s the audio on AnchorFM)
Hey everyone. Queen Mab here with a break from discussions of Hollywood Fringe to talk to you about meditating.
Now, if you look back through some of my older videos, you will notice that I have a song called “I Hate to Meditate,” and it is absolutely true. I really, really don’t like it. And I have tried it several times throughout my life. I started the first time when I was living in Brazil, and I got sort of disillusioned with my faith, and like many middle class white people, I decided to experiment with Buddhism! And so I started meditating. And it was like the thought police. Like, I just…it was not sustainable. I didn’t like it. Trying to be mindful…it felt like being ON all the time. And I actually heard Brené Brown describe it that way once. She was like, “Oh, mindfulness…it’s like ‘Oh look…a butterfly…’ and it disrupts my flow!” That idea that Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi – whose last name I will never be able to spell – came up with. And I too really like that flow feeling of a thought, and then a thought, and then a thought, like, that’s really kind of soothing to me sometimes. It can also be anxiety-provoking. It just depends, right?
So anyway, I concluded that mindfulness was not for me. And then I started going to kind of a self-help group a few years after my time in Brazil when I was back in the United States. And this group also talked about meditation, but it was after a few years of that group when I finally decided, “Okay, I’m going to sit down and make this a regular thing.” And I had this idea that meditation was going to make me less emotionally reactive, okay? So I remember I started meditating, I got serious about it, and then I had an altercation with my boss at work. Now, fortunately it was my less-powerful boss; I have two bosses. One has more power than the other, and so I didn’t get in big trouble, and I was able to smooth everything over. But I was like “Wow, I’m putting myself through all of this pain and suffering to meditate, and it’s not having the desired effect, so…enough of that!”
My third go-around was after San Diego Fringe when I had my breakdown, and I went to this workshop on Centering Prayer, okay, which is like a “Christian” form of meditation. So I gave it a shot, and I did it very consistently that whole summer, okay? And then it was time to go back to school. I’m a teacher, and that’s a very, very hard time of year for me for a lot of reasons. And I had an altercation with a family member! And you know, I managed to smooth everything over, and it was all okay, but again, here I was thinking that this meditation was going to keep things like that from happening, and it didn’t, okay. So maybe if I had understood my own neurodiversity – which is a whole other subject that I’ll have to do a whole other video on – but if I had understood that, maybe I would have been more forgiving of myself when these things happened. But I wasn’t, because I wanted the meditation to fix it. And it was so unpleasant to do that, that I said, “Okay! No more of that! I’m done!”
Well…I’ve decided to try it again, and I’m a little embarrassed to say why, because I judge myself as being very basic for listening to Glennon Doyle, but…I’m listening to Glennon Doyle, and I read her book Untamed a couple of times. And there’s a part in it where she talks about meditating so that she can listen to her own inner voice about making the decision about whether she’s going to leave her husband for Abby Wambach or stay with her husband. And I think it was revolutionary to me this idea that meditation is something that I’m doing to quiet myself and listen to my inner voice and NOT something that I’m doing to make myself more palatable to other people.
So I said, “Okay! I’ll give it a go again.” Well, I don’t know if I’m really hearing my inner voice very well. There are some decisions that I need to make that I’m really stressed about, and I’d really like to hear that inner voice and have some clarity, but literally…last time I meditated, all I could think about was the new Netflix show The Chair that I’ve been bingeing. I kept, you know, coming back to my breath or whatever…thought about The Chair the whole time. So again, I don’t know if it’s working. I don’t know if this idea of using meditation to hear my inner voice is setting myself up for another disappointment like it was when I was hoping it would make me less emotionally reactive. I don’t know what kind of goal it’s acceptable to have when one is meditating. So you tell me. Do you meditate? Does it help you with anything? Help me out here. That’s all I got. Bye!