Don't chase the perfect meditation

I love this quote from James Clear's Atomic Habits.

It really sums up one of the key messages I try to get over in my meditation classes in Sydney.

You get the benefits of meditation by simply doing it, not by achieving any particular state during it.

Many of us have a certain expectation of what meditation should be like – and it's easy to hold yourself back from doing it if you're worried about not having the "perfect" meditation.

But as any productivity guru will tell you: done is better than perfect.

You don't need to be transported to some Zen-like level of consciousness every time you close your eyes.

And I can guarantee you won't be.

You'll reach that state sometimes, but the skill of becoming a meditator is in accepting that sometimes you'll get these experiences and sometimes you won't.

If you've accumulated a large amount of stress over the years that your body needs to offload, then you might not get there very often.

But that's not why we meditate. We don't meditate to get good at meditation, we meditate to get good at life.

And by putting the time aside each day to do our practice, we systematically de-excite our nervous systems and neutralise the acidic stress chemistry that modern fills us with.

Meditation is about mastering the process, not the outcomes. The outcomes will take care of themselves.

And they'll likely be in the form of benefits you notice outside of meditation – more calm, more focus, more energy – rather than within the meditation itself.