Two Years of Calm

Recently I marked two years of consecutive daily meditations with the Calm app. Here’s the main lesson I learned.

When I first started this journey, the goal, I realize now, was to fix myself. I never internally verbalized this, but it was certainly an undercurrent in my practice. It wasn’t until recently that I realized this wasn't a great goal. Here's why...

When I started meditation practice to "fix" myself, I was starting from a negative place. My main thought was, "There is something wrong with me." This wasn't a great starting point because the more I meditated the more I thought about everything I needed to fix. The more I thought about everything I needed to fix, the more power those things held.

There were times when I almost chucked meditation. But then it dawned on me, "You're not meditating to fix yourself. You're meditating to accept what is." Liberating insight really. From that point I started treating meditation as a pause in which I allowed myself to feel whatever it was I was feeling in the moment without judgment.

And that's how I continue to use it - to steal a bit of time in the pause and spend it in the space between my thoughts. The quiet. The calm. The ease.