Good News - You’re Not Bad at Meditation.
If you’ve ever sat down to meditate and thought “I’m doing this wrong”, this one’s for you.
You’ve probably been here before: you sit down to meditate and are bombarded with thoughts - upcoming plans, your to-do list, that thing you said yesterday that will haunt you for the next three years. I’m here to tell you wholeheartedly to keep going.
One of the most relieving things I've come across in my mindfulness training is this idea from neuroscientist and meditation teacher John Yates in The Mind Illuminated: a wandering mind isn't a broken mind. It's just an untrained one. Yates spent over fourdecades studying meditation through both a Buddhist lens and a neuroscience one, and what he found was that the mind operates through thousands of tiny moments of consciousness — some focused, some drifting. Mind-wandering isn't failure. It's the default.
What meditation actually does is train your attention. Slowly, gradually, over time, those moments of focus start to outnumber the drifting ones. That's it. There's no mystical secret. It's just practice!
For Your Kit:
Next time you sit down to meditate (even for just five minutes), drop any expectation of a quiet mind. Instead, give yourself one job: notice when your attention wanders, and return to your breath without judgment. That moment of noticing? That is the practice. You're not failing when your mind wanders. You're succeeding every time you catch it.