Meditation myths every beginner falls for
These are the most common traps I notice new meditators falling into when they first start practicing – how many did you fall for in the beginning?
Myth 1: You stop having negative emotions and never get triggered any more.
Sigh, that would be nice. You can’t meditate your way out of being human. You’ll probably find yourself less easily miffed and emotionally volatile, but it’s normal to still have feelings. Meditation can help you learn to move through difficult ones and give you the skills to feel and allow all feelings without letting them call the shots.
Myth 2: If you’re doing it correctly, meditation will always feel blissful or good. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t effective.
The goal of Vedic meditation is not to remove thoughts (though that experience is one that we have in meditation). On the contrary, challenging or uncomfortable meditations are a sign of deep processing taking place. This generates an experience of activity in the mind. Rather than being quick to think we’re getting something wrong, this is reason to smile – your practice is doing what it’s supposed to: resolving stress from the body.
Myth 3: You need hours and hours a day to practice in order to get anywhere.
If you have the time and space for long practice, go for it – how delightful! If you’re like 99.9999% of people and have a busy life, you can still make huge leaps and bounds with 2 x 20 minute sittings a day. That’s about 3% of 24 hours by the way – not really all that much.
Myth 4: meditation will fix all your problems. Once you learn, you don’t need to do anything else.
If anyone tells you that you should just meditate more and that’ll solve everything, run for the hills. Meditation will be of pivotal benefit and provide a foundation for lots and lots of people, but it’s not a silver bullet. You may still require therapy or other support systems on your healing journey. There’s no one path and no modality holds all the answers for all people all the time. Healing works best when we take a realistic, holistic and multifaceted approach.