Everyone tells you to meditate. Nobody tells you this…
I've been meditating for a few years now and I still get it wrong regularly.
Not wrong in the way people think; distracted, mind wandering, losing the thread. That's not getting it wrong, that's just meditating. What I mean is wrong in a more fundamental way. Showing up to the cushion without having done any of the things that make it possible to actually land there.
I used to think meditation was the thing you did to settle yourself down. Feeling scattered, anxious, too much in your head “just sit down, close your eyes, breathe”. But what I've slowly learned is that meditation works best when you've already done some of the settling before you get there. Not all of it. Just enough.
Here's what I've found needs to be in place first.
Move your body before you try to quiet your mind
This is the one nobody told me and the one that changed everything.
If I sit down to meditate first thing without having moved at all, my mind is like a browser with thirty tabs open and no way to close them. The thoughts aren't just passing through, they're circling, competing, demanding attention. No amount of breath focus touches it.
But twenty minutes of walking first, not a workout, not anything impressive, just movement and air, and something shifts before I've even sit down. The body has discharged enough of whatever it was holding that the mind can actually slow down. I'm not fighting the restlessness because the restlessness has somewhere to go.
I think a lot of people who've tried meditation and given up were sitting down too soon. Not because they lacked discipline but because they were asking their nervous system to be still before it had been given permission to move.
Don't go in looking for something
This one is more subtle and harder to catch because the wanting is often unconscious.
I used to sit down hoping for calm. Or clarity. Or that particular quality of stillness that occasionally arrives and feels like everything slows down and you’re part of something bigger. And the hoping itself was the problem. Because the moment you're waiting for something to happen you've stepped outside the experience and into the position of observer checking whether it's working yet… “am I doing it right… it kind of feels like I’m nailing it right now’”.
Meditation doesn't really work when you're monitoring it for results (see my blog post “When Parenting broke my Equation” for more on that one!). The calm isn't something you produce. It's something that's already there underneath the noise, and it becomes available when you stop trying to get to it.
The shift for me was going in with a different intention. Not to achieve a state but just to breathe and see what's there. Some sessions something opens. Some sessions it's just twenty minutes of a busy mind that slowly, slightly, quietens toward the end. Both are fine. Neither is the point.
The point is just showing up without a destination.
The chatty mind is not the enemy
This one still trips me up. For a long time I treated the thinking mind as the thing meditation was supposed to defeat. If thoughts were arising I was failing. If I got lost in a thought I'd wasted that stretch of time.
But the thinking mind isn't in the way of meditation. It's just what the mind does. Noticing you've been thinking and coming back, that is the practice. Not the silence between thoughts. The returning.
I've had sessions that felt like nothing but returning, over and over, for the whole time. And I've noticed those sessions often left something behind that I couldn't quite name, a slight loosening, a bit more space around things. Not because I achieved stillness but because I kept practicing the return.
Let go of the version where you're doing it well
There's a particular trap for people who take their inner life seriously (guilty), which is turning meditation into something else to be good at (guilty). Another area of self-development to track progress in, to get right, to feel quietly proud of (also guilty).
I know this trap intimately because I fell into it and stayed for a while.
The best meditation I do now is guided, lighter, following a voice rather than trying to generate a state myself. It feels less impressive than the serious unguided sits I used to do. It also works better. Because I'm not performing it. I'm just doing it.
What actually helps beforehand
Beyond movement, I've noticed a few other things that make a real difference to whether a session lands or not.
Being outside before sitting inside. Even briefly. There's something about having been in air and light that makes the transition to stillness feel natural rather than forced.
Not going straight from a screen. The phone especially. The phone accelerates everything, faster inputs, faster thoughts, faster comparison. Sitting down to meditate straight after scrolling is like trying to slow a car down by accelerating first.
Having eaten something light, or not having eaten and being okay with that. Sitting down hungry or overfull puts the body in a state that's hard to settle from.
And crucially, not needing it to fix anything. The sessions I go into carrying a specific problem I need meditation to solve are almost always the sessions that don't deliver. Meditation isn't a solution generator. It's more like a place you visit where things occasionally become clearer without you trying to make them clearer.
The thing I wish someone had told me
Meditation isn't the practice of achieving stillness. It’s returning to a version of you stripped of all the personalities, identities, character traits and concerns of the week.
Some days that's a short distance. Some days you've wandered quite far and the returning takes the whole session and you end up roughly back where you started, which is fine.
The value isn't in the special sessions where something opens. It's in the ordinary sessions where nothing particular happens and you show up anyway.
And the showing up works better when you've moved your body first, let go of what you're hoping for, and arrived without needing it to be anything other than what it is.