Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends with Yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness

We often approach life as though we were defending ourselves from an attack. Many of us, when we were growing up, were frequently reprimanded in ways that made us feel bad about ourselves. Whether the criticism came from our parents, a teacher at school, or someone else, it tended to reinforce a feeling that there was something wrong with us.

This friendship with yourself is the basis, and the goal, of the practice of meditation.

We should celebrate or at least acknowledge our capacity for simple acts of generosity and gentleness. They are the real thing, and in the end they are much more powerful and transformative than aggression, egomania, and hatred.

It involves simplifying our basic psychology and our basic problems. Simplifying in this case means having no expectations about what you will gain by meditating. You just begin.

We have to start small, in an ordinary, simple way. In that sense, meditating is like collecting vegetables from your backyard rather than going to the supermarket to buy them. We just walk out into the garden and collect fresh vegetables and cook them. That is an analogy for the direct, personal, and immediate quality of meditation.

When you begin to practice meditation, you may find yourself asking a lot of questions. You may ask yourself, “Is this going to work?” “Am I doing the technique correctly? Am I making mistakes?” As we continue to practice, we relax and go along with it more fully. Many of these concerns start to seem less relevant. The practice speaks for itself.