Meditation is hard

I'm here to break some news. If you're Type A, slightly OCD and have an anxiety disorder- meditation is really friggin hard!

I'm assuming meditation is really hard no matter what because turning off your thoughts and turning in to your breath is no easy feat. But when you approached meditation for the first time, as I did, thinking to yourself "I'm going to meditate the shit out of this." You're doing it wrong!

A friend of mine who also has difficulty with anxiety had a panic attack every time she meditated for 7 months (and she meditated daily) until she figured out something that worked. Apparently there's an app for your iPad- she loves it!

Anyway, so I'm treating meditation like it's a race to be won and I'm failing miserably. To the point that I'm basically avoiding meditation all together. (This was about a month ago.) Then I got my umbilical hernia diagnosis. So I decided to lay off the urdhva dhanurasana and focus on meditation. Where in the universe proved that it knew exactly what I needed. Physical yoga is something I have, I love and I always want to work on. The only way to force me to focus on meditation is to take away my 'crack'.

I was talking to a very dear friend the other night about meditation (which he's been doing for 10ish years) and he said something truly profound: Meditation is like being in a river, sure you can try to swim up stream, but that's exhausting and fruitless; instead simply stand in the river and allow that which is upstream flow down to you.

Finally, it clicks! Am I suddenly transcendent? No. Is meditation suddenly easy? No. But instead of trying to meditate. I just try to sit and clear my head and relax my breath and see what happens.

Brilliant!