“What screws us up most in life is the picture in our heads about what it’s supposed to be” - Jeremy Binns
I sat down to meditate. Ah, yes. This will be the day! My head will be clear as a bell. I will simply let go of it all. All of it, I say!
My soul will be an expansive, vast open sea full of peace. I will life-hack peace.
I set my timer. I take a breath. And then the inevitable starts… the reality of having a human head. The thoughts. The worries. The song lyrics. The grocery items. The word I read out loud in fourth grade and mispronounced. The guy across the street that I thought was waving to me but wasn’t.
… Damn it! No! Quiet! I am inner light! I am peace! Must be Instagram model of peace.
I had once heard a beautiful visualization meditation wherein you imagine yourself sitting by a stream, placing each thought, feeling or desire on a leaf and watching it gently float down the stream.
Well, my meditation experience is often more like a shaken up snow globe. There I am in the center, and all around me are glittery spirals of what ifs and to dos and Love Shack lyrics trying to grab my attention and whip me around in the riptide.
Instead of trying to fit myself into a different experience, a different shape, a different image of what my meditation “should” look like, I allow myself to settle into the reality of being me in this moment. My thoughts are merely the glitter; the decoration in my mind. In my case, with a flair for the melodramatic. I don’t try to grab it… let it settle.
This experience has got me thinking of all the areas of life where we want it to look like the image in our heads: the perfect Christmas card (where the children were probably melting down), the expertly curated Instagram vacation photo (where the couple was probably bickering), and the mindfulness stock photo (where the person is also full of completely human impulses like thoughts and desires and song lyrics).
I wonder if the point of our best intentions—being a good meditator, a good mother, a good friend—isn’t for perfect execution, but to be merciful when it turns out we’re still human.
Kate Licciardello