Yeah, we’re all different and there’s no one size fits all. I find meditation helpful, when I remember to actually do it, but I hate running with the white hot hatred of a thousand suns. :)
I find that meditation does get easier with practice. I’ve been told that running also gets easier with practice but even when I was a pretty healthy and HWP teenager, every single week of cross country was as miserable as the last.
All you have to do is guide your mind back to focusing on whatever meditation you’re doing with an endless kindness and compassion that you would have for like some adorable puppy or baby that’s trying to wander away. They don’t mean to do wrong, but they also can’t be reasoned with. you just have to guide them back to the right place.
100%! Acknowledge the thought and then let it go. It isn’t about perfect execution. The benefits come from trying. Although, it can get easier with practice.
And even if what I’m doing is not “real” meditation, whatever it is, it’s an extended moment of niceness.
FWIW I took a multi week class on meditation with a licensed psychologist (who trained with the folks who wrote a very popular book on meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy) and what you’re saying sounds a lot like what we were taught. There may not be a single arbiter of meditation authenticity, but your practice sounds legit to me.
Meditation can help. Therapy can help. Doing something engaging to distract yourself can help (ideally something that isn’t gonna make you feel worse in the end, playing with a pet or listening to music > binging on junk food or booze)
Remember that you can’t control whether crappy things happen but you choose how you react to them. (Of course, easier said than done)
Jumping between Mac and Windows I keep accidentally awakening Cortana when I try to copy and paste. Now that god awful, universally reviled feature if finally getting deprecated but it still brings up the damn window/modal/pice-of-shit just to tell me that it’s gone. If you want to be gone, then go! Don’t make a fuss telling me about it. Just go. No one wanted you in the 1st place. Fuck.
NOM!