Calming the "Not Now" Mind
By Kate Johnson
I’ll just grab a cup of tea first. Maybe drink it slowly, look out the window. Oh, I should check my email too...
Some mornings, the part of my mind that would rather meditate than do anything else but not right now seems to wake up five minutes before the rest of me. When my alarm goes off and my eyes open, it’s as if the Not Now Mind is already sitting on the edge of the bed, drumming its fingers, tapping its foot, and winking at me.
The Not Now Mind usually takes the anxiety-provoking approach, bringing to mind the task list with unfinished items, the stack of unanswered emails, and the calendar that looks like a losing game of Tetris. It argues that I simply don’t have time to meditate, that I need to throw myself into my day right away so I don’t waste any potentially productive seconds sitting.
Every so often, maybe for variety, the Not Now Mind simply sings me back to sleep, pointing out how tired I am, how hard I work, and how much more valuable an extra half hour of sleep would be than half an hour of meditation.
Whatever its tactic, if I bite the bait of the Not Now Mind, throwing off the covers and heading to the computer without even glancing at my pillow, dozing until the last minute, or wandering through the morning, dancing around the meditation cushion but somehow never actually sitting on it, I lose my practice session.
When we struggle to build or maintain a meditation practice, we often point to busyness or laziness as the main obstacles to our goal of regular sessions. So we create new rules, give ourselves ultimatums, and promise we’ll buckle down and really make it happen this time. We bargain with ourselves by buying a new meditation bench, a new timer, a new book to inspire us and make the practice more appealing. But often, only days or weeks pass before we’re back to meditating later. Tonight. Tomorrow, we swear.
The problem is that for many of us, the Not Now Mind isn’t really a matter of logistics or time management. It’s a matter of attitude. And while it may disguise itself as laziness or restlessness, my experience working with my own mind and the minds of others reveals that perfectionism, driven by fear and doubt, plays a much larger role in resistance to sitting.
At work or school, our perfectionism was probably validated throughout our lives. But when we return to our practice, we often find that the qualities of impatience, excessive effort, and dissatisfaction, which seem to give us superpowers in daily life, become major obstacles in meditation. When we can’t meditate perfectly, or can’t discern any immediate tangible gain, we prefer not to do it at all. Or we put it off for later.
Below are some reflections to calm the Not Now Mind and the cycle of perfectionism and procrastination that feeds it. Rather than trying to whip our minds into shape, which only seems to raise the stakes and make practice less accessible, cultivate calming attitudes. They aren’t exactly tips; they’re more like reminders of what we already know deep down to be true.
1) Show up.
We all know we should set manageable goals to set ourselves up for success. But when it comes to spiritual practice, maybe we’re creating standards that no human could meet and then pointing to our failure as proof of our own inadequacy. That’s simply cruel. Please don’t do that to yourself.
Create a routine that supports your life and for which your life has room right now, exactly as it is. Maybe you can wake up a little earlier to fit in a morning practice to start your day well, or skip happy hour to make space for a session after work, a speed bump to shift the evening’s gear. Or maybe it’s before bed that you can carve out a few moments to pause and sit before surrendering to sleep. Decide how much time you can set aside and put it on your calendar. Treat it as a commitment to a dear friend: your own heart and mind.
The Not Now Mind will probably say your plan isn’t good enough and suggest you wait until you can meditate for a full hour, in full lotus, in complete silence, after an hour of yoga practice. Just remind it that the best time to meditate, the best place, the best length of practice is the one you actually do. Showing up for practice today, for however long, is enough.
2) Relax.
Meditation teachers often use the analogy of meditation as making friends with your own mind, and not without reason. If in our practice we feel we’re dealing with an unsolvable case that we have a responsibility to help but fear we can’t, sitting isn’t fun at all. We’ll skip our session many times over.
From the Not Now Mind’s perspective, meditation practice requires an enormous amount of energy and skill and only “counts” if we do it perfectly. If we can’t do it right, why waste our time? Better to wait until we find a new teacher, learn a new meditation technique, or go on a ten-day silent retreat. Having perfected the practice or acquired some secret knowledge, we’ll finally be able to meditate the right way.
Actually, the Not Now Mind has a point there. It’s not possible to do meditation entirely the “right” way; there’s no external authority, after all, who can enter our minds and guarantee we’re on track. The good news, though, is that it’s also not possible to do meditation the wrong way. As long as we show up with genuine intention to work compassionately with our minds and hearts, we can relax and know that in some sense, we’re already okay.
Sit in a way that’s easy to maintain. Bring the attitude that there’s nothing in your experience you need to control or fix, and you’ll be available to experience the perfection that’s always here, the truth that everything you need to awaken is with you now.
3) It has nothing to do with you.
Very few of us start meditating because we want to become professionals in mindfulness competitions. We start meditating because we want to be present in our lives in a more meaningful way, with less stress and more ease. We think that by doing so, we’re generating a great deal of courage, vulnerability, patience, determination, and love, and we trust that we’re benefiting the world when we help bring more of these qualities into it.
When the Not Now Mind shows up, it’s easy to forget that our meditation practice was never meant to be a tool for judging our individual worth or for comparing ourselves to the person we think we should be. Meditation practice seems to work best when we emphasize less the evaluation of our personal progress and more the revelation of our inherent human capacity to connect with others in meaningful ways.
When we discover we’re resisting sitting in meditation, it can be motivating to set a practice intention that includes our desire to cultivate kindness toward ourselves and also toward our friends, family, and loved ones, even people we don’t know. We can choose to dedicate the fruits of our practice to a person or group of people who needs comfort and peace. If we do well with accountability, arranging to text a friend before sitting or joining an online meditation community can remind us that when we offer support to others, we often feel supported in return.
Even for experienced practitioners, the Not Now Mind arises from time to time. When it does, if we stay attentive to the sensations or thoughts that signal its presence, we can see it clearly for what it actually is: a set of strategies our minds created to protect us from suffering, but that actually cause us more suffering. As we build confidence in our practice by sitting the best way we can, one day at a time, the arguments of the Not Now Mind become less and less convincing. They may come and go, but they won’t stop us from sitting.
If you’ve had difficulty starting your meditation routine or returning to it, don’t worry. Stepping away from practice is, in some way, part of it. Don’t let perfectionism lead you into procrastination. The best time to return to practice is right now.
Originally published in Tricycle Magazine
Some mornings, the part of my mind that would rather meditate than do anything else but not right now seems to wake up five minutes before the rest of me. When my alarm goes off and my eyes open, it’s as if the Not Now Mind is already sitting on the edge of the bed, drumming its fingers, tapping its foot, and winking at me.
The Not Now Mind usually takes the anxiety-provoking approach, bringing to mind the task list with unfinished items, the stack of unanswered emails, and the calendar that looks like a losing game of Tetris. It argues that I simply don’t have time to meditate, that I need to throw myself into my day right away so I don’t waste any potentially productive seconds sitting.
Every so often, maybe for variety, the Not Now Mind simply sings me back to sleep, pointing out how tired I am, how hard I work, and how much more valuable an extra half hour of sleep would be than half an hour of meditation.
Whatever its tactic, if I bite the bait of the Not Now Mind, throwing off the covers and heading to the computer without even glancing at my pillow, dozing until the last minute, or wandering through the morning, dancing around the meditation cushion but somehow never actually sitting on it, I lose my practice session.
When we struggle to build or maintain a meditation practice, we often point to busyness or laziness as the main obstacles to our goal of regular sessions. So we create new rules, give ourselves ultimatums, and promise we’ll buckle down and really make it happen this time. We bargain with ourselves by buying a new meditation bench, a new timer, a new book to inspire us and make the practice more appealing. But often, only days or weeks pass before we’re back to meditating later. Tonight. Tomorrow, we swear.
The problem is that for many of us, the Not Now Mind isn’t really a matter of logistics or time management. It’s a matter of attitude. And while it may disguise itself as laziness or restlessness, my experience working with my own mind and the minds of others reveals that perfectionism, driven by fear and doubt, plays a much larger role in resistance to sitting.
At work or school, our perfectionism was probably validated throughout our lives. But when we return to our practice, we often find that the qualities of impatience, excessive effort, and dissatisfaction, which seem to give us superpowers in daily life, become major obstacles in meditation. When we can’t meditate perfectly, or can’t discern any immediate tangible gain, we prefer not to do it at all. Or we put it off for later.
Below are some reflections to calm the Not Now Mind and the cycle of perfectionism and procrastination that feeds it. Rather than trying to whip our minds into shape, which only seems to raise the stakes and make practice less accessible, cultivate calming attitudes. They aren’t exactly tips; they’re more like reminders of what we already know deep down to be true.
1) Show up.
We all know we should set manageable goals to set ourselves up for success. But when it comes to spiritual practice, maybe we’re creating standards that no human could meet and then pointing to our failure as proof of our own inadequacy. That’s simply cruel. Please don’t do that to yourself.
Create a routine that supports your life and for which your life has room right now, exactly as it is. Maybe you can wake up a little earlier to fit in a morning practice to start your day well, or skip happy hour to make space for a session after work, a speed bump to shift the evening’s gear. Or maybe it’s before bed that you can carve out a few moments to pause and sit before surrendering to sleep. Decide how much time you can set aside and put it on your calendar. Treat it as a commitment to a dear friend: your own heart and mind.
The Not Now Mind will probably say your plan isn’t good enough and suggest you wait until you can meditate for a full hour, in full lotus, in complete silence, after an hour of yoga practice. Just remind it that the best time to meditate, the best place, the best length of practice is the one you actually do. Showing up for practice today, for however long, is enough.
2) Relax.
Meditation teachers often use the analogy of meditation as making friends with your own mind, and not without reason. If in our practice we feel we’re dealing with an unsolvable case that we have a responsibility to help but fear we can’t, sitting isn’t fun at all. We’ll skip our session many times over.
From the Not Now Mind’s perspective, meditation practice requires an enormous amount of energy and skill and only “counts” if we do it perfectly. If we can’t do it right, why waste our time? Better to wait until we find a new teacher, learn a new meditation technique, or go on a ten-day silent retreat. Having perfected the practice or acquired some secret knowledge, we’ll finally be able to meditate the right way.
Actually, the Not Now Mind has a point there. It’s not possible to do meditation entirely the “right” way; there’s no external authority, after all, who can enter our minds and guarantee we’re on track. The good news, though, is that it’s also not possible to do meditation the wrong way. As long as we show up with genuine intention to work compassionately with our minds and hearts, we can relax and know that in some sense, we’re already okay.
Sit in a way that’s easy to maintain. Bring the attitude that there’s nothing in your experience you need to control or fix, and you’ll be available to experience the perfection that’s always here, the truth that everything you need to awaken is with you now.
3) It has nothing to do with you.
Very few of us start meditating because we want to become professionals in mindfulness competitions. We start meditating because we want to be present in our lives in a more meaningful way, with less stress and more ease. We think that by doing so, we’re generating a great deal of courage, vulnerability, patience, determination, and love, and we trust that we’re benefiting the world when we help bring more of these qualities into it.
When the Not Now Mind shows up, it’s easy to forget that our meditation practice was never meant to be a tool for judging our individual worth or for comparing ourselves to the person we think we should be. Meditation practice seems to work best when we emphasize less the evaluation of our personal progress and more the revelation of our inherent human capacity to connect with others in meaningful ways.
When we discover we’re resisting sitting in meditation, it can be motivating to set a practice intention that includes our desire to cultivate kindness toward ourselves and also toward our friends, family, and loved ones, even people we don’t know. We can choose to dedicate the fruits of our practice to a person or group of people who needs comfort and peace. If we do well with accountability, arranging to text a friend before sitting or joining an online meditation community can remind us that when we offer support to others, we often feel supported in return.
Even for experienced practitioners, the Not Now Mind arises from time to time. When it does, if we stay attentive to the sensations or thoughts that signal its presence, we can see it clearly for what it actually is: a set of strategies our minds created to protect us from suffering, but that actually cause us more suffering. As we build confidence in our practice by sitting the best way we can, one day at a time, the arguments of the Not Now Mind become less and less convincing. They may come and go, but they won’t stop us from sitting.
If you’ve had difficulty starting your meditation routine or returning to it, don’t worry. Stepping away from practice is, in some way, part of it. Don’t let perfectionism lead you into procrastination. The best time to return to practice is right now.
Originally published in Tricycle Magazine