Blogpost: “Can’t” Meditate? Try This!

For the longest time I considered myself someone who just “can’t” meditate, no matter how hard I tried. Each time I tried to sit down and give this meditation thing a try, my mind became flooded with distractions and resistance. However, with a lot of practice and advice from various yoga teachers and books, I eventually managed to overcome this hurdle.

Before I share my best tips that helped me, I’d like to quickly clarify that it’s completely normal if your mind gets wildly distracted while meditating. Each time you notice this is happening, you’re actually meditating. Trust that the time meditating is time well spend and don’t beat yourself up for getting distracted, simply, with kindness, redirect your attention back to your meditation.

Meditation doesn’t necessarily have to look a certain way. If for you, right from the beginning, it’s possible to meditate in silence, sitting in a meditation posture, then that’s awesome.

Only recently, after years of practicing yoga, have I started to be able to really do these silent meditations.

Especially in the beginning, I preferred the more active forms of meditations, such as asana classes (“asana” refers to the physical part of yoga aka the poses) or Qi Gong.

Being mindful basically just means, that you focus 100% of your attention on the task at hand. You practice mindfulness doing anything, really. I personally enjoy drawing, a lot of people also love to color or cook to practice mindfulness.

This visualization technique is good for emptying your mind when you feel overwhelmed by thoughts. Picture yourself sitting by a riverside. Whenever a thought enters your mind, imagine writing it down on a leaf and gently placing the leaf in the water, watching it slowly drift away.

Some people also like to physically write down all their thoughts on a piece of paper while doing this meditation.

I highly recommend using an anchor, especially at the beginning of your meditation journey. An anchor is something you can redirect your attention back to, whenever you get lost in your thoughts while meditating. The breath is a great anchor to start with. Simply refocus your attention on your breath as soon as you notice, you’ve been distracted. Counting can be a great anchor too. One popular technique is to simply count your breaths in your mind. Count until nine (or any other number of your choice really) and once you’ve reached nine, start from nine again.

Another piece of advie I really love is imagining a pause buttom on top of any distracting thoughts that interrupt your yoga- or meditation practice. Simply imagine pressing that pause buttom and tell the thought it can come back again after your practice.

This technique is quite similar to the river-visualization-technique and it’s great for detaching from your thoughts. It works by simply imagining your thoughts as clouds in the sky, cars on a highway, or floating soup bubbles. Or any other similar scenario of objects just entiring the scenery and then calmy leaving it again.

There are a bunch of great guided meditations on YouTube you can try. Especially in the beginning, this can be a great place to start, as it’s a lot easier for most people to follow a guided mediation than to meditate by themselves. Plus, guided meditation often have beautiful music in the background, which can enhance the experience a little bit (however, some people also find music distracting, just experiment until you find what you resonate with the most).

Do you have more tips that helped you with your meditation practice? Feel free to share them in the comments! :)