Rewilding meditation

I am one of those people who always said, “I can’t meditate”. My mind has always been a bit chaotic and very busy. To turn it off and quiet my mind, felt impossible at times.

I remember when I first started to try meditation many years ago. It always became this game of connect the dots in my mind. One memory would randomly pop up, followed by another slightly related one, then another and another. It would start with something that happened the day before and take me all the way to when I was on vacation as a teen. It was kind of fun if I’m being honest. But not quite what meditation is designed to be!

Meditation is a word that trips a lot of people up. Most of us have very busy minds and bodies and sitting still and thinking less feels next to impossible. Most of us also know that there are many scientific and spiritual benefits to the practice. Knowing, however, is a far cry from doing.

Since my very first yoga retreat in 2022, I have maintained a fairly consistent practice of meditation, only missing a few days here and there. My practice was a whopping five minutes! I was and still am so damn proud of that short amount of time! I don’t necessarily think that the five minutes changed my life, but I do think the principles of meditation did.

It is not just the act of sitting still and slowing down your mind that is meditation. It can also be reflected in how we live every moment of our day. It seems silly to think that thirty minutes a day is so important if for the other 16+ hours of the day are spent traveling at the speed of light. For me, bringing more mindfulness to my every day life has been where the magic happens. But I think there is more behind our inability to calm our minds than we realize.

In a sense, meditation and mindfulness can only happen when our mind and body find complete trust in one another. If you know me, you know very well that I have an obsession with understanding the mind/body connection. After spending nearly two weeks in Lithuania studying meditation, one of my biggest take always was this; it is necessary to have a safe and regulated body to have a calm mind.

I won’t dive into the science of it all fully but most of us can appreciate the fact that our mind and body are so often in two very different places. Our body doesn’t usually have much of a choice in the matter of where it is. It is in the environment we are physically in, we will call it the present. Our body cannot linger in the past or jump into the future. It is concretely in the now. (This is not always true but we will not dive down this rabbit hole today!)

Our mind on the other hand, rarely appreciates the present. Our minds are typically flip flopping between remembering or ruminating on past events or preparing and predicting future happenings. Each of us have our own preference, living in the past or future. Neither is wrong per se, and typically, it is a pattern we have carried with us for a very long time. On a neurological level, there is an argument that this is our minds attempt to keep us safe.

Which brings me back to my biggest take away from the retreat, a calm mind can only happen when the body is safe and stable. Because our body is almost always in the present moment, it is constantly collecting data to send to our brain. In some ways, you can think of our body as the security team that is protecting us at all times. It takes in sensory information from our environment to determine if we are safe or in danger.

This is a beautiful system when it works well. Our body collects data, sends it to the brain, it is analyzed and compared to previous data and finally, our mind determines if we are safe or in danger. If we are safe, our body can let down its guard for a bit. If something is perceived as a threat, a cascade of physiological responses get triggered to prepare us to run, fight, or play dead. This process is constantly happening in the background of our daily lives. Most of the time we are unconscious to how much this process is impacting the way we walk through the world.

This is not a process we can stop or control. This is why the mind/body connection is so important and fascinating. But this process is also why meditation feels so difficult for many of us. If for whatever reason, our body has become a hyper vigilant security team that senses threat far too often, then our mind will not allow itself to be calm. That would be like asking yourself to meditate while sitting in a room filled with snakes.

The mind will be driven into action to do its best to protect us. There is no way it will allow less thoughts because the thoughts are what our mind thinks will help protect us and bring us back to safety. The problem is, our world has confused our bodies. This has caused our security systems to malfunction. Our bodies perceive our every day world as if we are standing in that room of snakes.

It is silly to ask ourselves to calm down and be more mindful when we are actively being threatened by snakes. And then when we can’t calm ourselves down, we guilt and shame ourselves for not being strong enough. It becomes a snowball effect of dysregulstion, sending us further and further away from safety.

It may seem odd to compare our world to a room filled with snakes but it is far more accurate than most of us realize. We are actively living in a world that our body and mind are not designed to navigate. By no fault of our own, our security systems are doing the best they can, but still feel as if they are failing.

This is an incredibly long and convoluted way to say meditation is an incredible tool but not where most people should start. First, safety in the body must be found. The hyper vigilant security team must be reassured that the snakes are not real. Once the snakes disappear from our daily lives, then our mind will be able to calm down and come into the present with so much more ease.

A safe body is required to have a calm mind. There are a million ways to find safety, this is not the place to give answers, tips and tools. But I will give you this; start with curiosity and awareness. Cultivating space in our lives for these two things will begin to transform us in ways we could never imagine.

At the end of the day, learning to meditate is a gift that I will never take for granted. But before I could fully access its beauty, I had to learn to find safety within my body. I had to figure out how to get rid of the snakes in my life, real and imagined.

This is not an excuse for you to still say you can’t meditate because I believe everyone has the potential to learn. It is simply an attempt to give you a different perspective. Consider perhaps you are not the problem because your mind won’t quiet down and come into the present. Maybe it’s time to start addressing the snakes in the room and listening to your body.