1 Big Mistake I Made When I Was First Getting Started In Meditation

Stop trying to stop your thoughts and emotions but use them to your advantage

Photo by Anna Stoffel on Unsplash

Like most beginners, I made a lot of mistakes when I first started practicing meditation.

But this was the biggest one, by far:

Trying to stop my thoughts and become thoughtless

Here's what happened:

I don’t where and when but I had picked the notion that “meditation = stopping your thoughts.” I see this fairly common fallacy and a common question from new comers who are trying meditation. Worse yet, even some of the popular apps online take you down this path.

I would try to stop my thoughts as I sat through my meditation sessions.

This fallacy lead to extremely frustrating sessions.

I would walk out unhappy because there wasn’t a moment of peace in the meditation session.

It felt that my mind was fighting itself—the mind tells the mind to stop thinking and the mind fights back the mind—fun, fun and fun :-).

But, it's also worth acknowledging that making this mistake taught me a ton.

Now if you have done a meditation practice where you have tried to stop your mind from thinking, you know it doesn’t work. It’s like asking you to NOT to think about pink elephants and all you can think about are pink elephants.

This is where I discovered that there are easier and better ways to meditate. In fact, you can use your mind and emotions to lead you into deeper meditation. Over the years, I learned that gratitude is one of the best ways to learn meditation—it is in fact all you need if you are meditating for some peace, quiet and beating stress.

PS: I believe in this particular version of meditation so much that I ended up creating a short course work for it as means to spread it. Do check it out.