Shortly after the chaotic and near-death event that was the birth of my daughter Esmé, I just couldn’t settle my mind. Days and, most annoyingly, nights were spent overthinking, with the noise of the world – literally and figuratively – only getting louder and louder.
Post-partum depression and prolonged grief disorder, piled on top of the day-to-day drudgery of just getting by, left me feeling as though I was all at once fit to burst and unable to breathe. I cannot now recall whether it was a video, book or podcast that informed this decision, but one day, I decided to just try and meditate.
With no guidance, I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor, closed my eyes and just decided to breathe. Once my vision was limited, my hearing immediately grew sharper, and the noise of the busy main road close to our tiny flat proceeded to grow like an orchestra made up of bus engines, honking horns and yelling teenagers.
I tried to take more deep breaths. Was that something crawling on me? I let one eyelid fly open. No, nothing. Sighing, I closed my eyes again. More deep breaths. Now the shrill stabbing sound of our flat buzzer went. ‘For f*ck’s sake!’ I yelled, lurching into a yoga pose similar to Cat-Cow before rolling off the bed.
I yanked the receiver off the wall. ‘Hi, package for number 11,’ spat a gruff voice.
‘Wrong num–’ ‘Yeah I know that, love but can I jus–’ I pressed the entry key before heading back to the bed. Looking at the time, I clocked I only had ten minutes before I had to collect Esmé. Nothing about this process felt calm or relaxing.
It didn’t matter anyway, because I had already decided meditation wasn’t for someone like me. Working-class Black women didn’t have time for all that ‘self-care’ malarkey. That was for those rich enough to live in India for a year – you know, the ones who wear the massive harem pants and decide being vegan is personality trait. Yeah, mediation was for them and monks. I was neither, I reminded myself.
I shoved down the desire to get to grips with this practice that a higher me knew I so desperately needed.
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‘You have to return to this,’ a whisper said to me. ‘Later,’ I said aloud.
A few months passed before I felt the pull again.
‘You need to learn how to meditate,’ the whisper urged.
Looking back, what that whisper knew was that to try to manifest without understanding the importance of meditation is like learning to drive without understanding the importance of your Highway Code. As my taste for manifestation grew, I needed to get to grips with developing the habit of listening to myself.
By now, I had done a little more research, and I understood that guided meditation was perhaps the best approach for a novice like me. I searched up the best apps for this sort of thing and I stumbled across one called Headspace.
The flat was once again empty. I opened the app and simply searched for something for beginners. Determined to stay focused, I came armed with headphones this time, a big over-the-head pair which I was sure would block out the world of sounds around me.
I opted for the shortest session and just listened to the narrator Andy’s voice.
Sure, there were a few moments when I felt as if I would burst into flames, but before I knew it the five minutes were up.
I’ve got to keep it real. I felt so . . . underwhelmed. Was that it? Where was my moment of calm? My spiritual Big Bang? My time with the big woman upstairs? Aside from feeling relatively weightless for perhaps thirty seconds, nothing major happened – but it didn’t stop me from trying the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.
Soon, I came to understand that there is no arrival point in meditation, there is simply being.
And because we are human, sometimes just ‘being’ is difficult.
Over the past six years, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve meditated and felt as though I fully transcended. Like I rose up out of my body and could have a good old gander at what was before and what was to come. And whilst those very rare experiences are like a warm hug I could relax into for an eternity, they happen too sporadically to be the reason that I return to meditation, time and time again.
I return to meditation just to be.
In a hyper-connected world, which will fight for our attention from the second we wake to the moment we (struggle to) fall asleep, meditation is the only time I can fully be present and spend uninterrupted time with myself.
I have been extra-dependent upon meditation during times of high anxiety, confusion and helplessness. I see meditation like finally listening to your laptop’s cry for you to sort through the storage. When my mind goes into overdrive, surrendering to a moment of meditation is how I drag unnecessary files into the trash and free up some storage in my head space for the things that make me feel better. Even when I go into a meditation session with no conscious questions, it is usually through meditation – that moment of quiet – that I will hear the subconscious answer to a question I’ve clearly been harbouring all along.
Connecting with my breath, internal and external energy has been a major key for me in being clear about what I would like to manifest.
I totally understand our innate fear of sitting with ourselves. Much like going to therapy, when you allow yourself that kind of space, you are undoubtedly going to, at times, be presented with a problem, a version of yourself or a question that you have been avoiding. And there is no one more avoidant than me.
How this mindfulness technique helped me cope with anxiety.
I believe the reason we don’t enjoy sitting with ourselves is that often, a lie feels so much more soothing than the truth. The core of you, the subconscious that is always whirring away in the background – that version of you would know that, for example, you have long since given up on your marriage. But to allow that truth to expand is to face that there is often a lot of mess in between the version of you now (in this scenario, married but sad and low in self-esteem) and the version of you (happier, healthier, divorced) that you dream about. That can be too much to deal with.
Often the distance between who we are and what we want to be is longer and steeper than we imagined. And because we are OK here, as we currently are, it’s often far easier to stay busy, connected and over-worked so that we don’t have to recognise that ‘OK’ is simply that: the C-minus version of life, when what you really want is to get closer to that A-plus version of you.
Developing the habit of meditation is going to make you privy to all the desires you’ve allowed your current life to suck the colour out of. Meditation is going to help reveal the truth about your desires and how you are stopping yourself from getting there.
If you are new to all things manifesting then, like me, you might struggle to see yourself as someone who meditates. Perhaps you have never seen yourself represented in meditation. Or going deeper still, perhaps you have never deemed yourself worthy of that alone time. For some, it’s fear. The noise of the world is our greatest distraction. Allowing all versions of yourself to meet without ego is a bold and brave choice to make – and at its core, that is what meditation is: sitting with the truest version of yourself.
