Meditating on Meditation

That sh*t is hard.

My first introduction to meditation came from Lori*. A well-meaning (I think) therapist whose advice I stopped taking seriously after she told me, with a straight face, that  “you have to go on at least 15 dates with someone before you know how you feel about them.” 

Now, I had, up until that point, written therapists off for far less. A woman whose ears I didn’t like in middle school comes to mind. But this outrageous and quite frankly inefficient approach seemed reason enough for me to be, at the very least, skeptical of her methods.

So when I sat in her dimly lit, cramped office with my eyes closed, and she instructed me to envision a person traveling the length of the inside of my body from head to toe, I spent more of the experience remembering that episode of The Magic School Bus when the class jumps inside of Ralphie to examine his germs than reflecting inward. 

I stopped seeing Lori shortly thereafter and decided that much like the 15 date rule, meditation was not for me.