The Spiritual Practice I Resisted for Years

I had a fixed set of associations with anything that fell under the category of mindfulness or meditation and none of them were flattering. It was something for people with disposable wellness budgets and manageable lives.

It was soft and imprecise and probably did not do very much that a good night's sleep and a sensible routine could not accomplish more efficiently. I was 25, working in financial technology in Toronto, and my relationship with my internal state was functional in the way of someone who has developed high competence at ignoring it.

I worked hard, drank coffee aggressively, managed stress by staying busy enough that it could not catch up, and considered this a reasonable and effective system. At 27, the system stopped working.

A sustained period of work pressure combined with a difficult personal situation produced an anxiety level that my usual management tools could not absorb. A friend suggested meditation with the kind of casualness that suggested she had no idea how completely I had categorised it as not for me.

I tried it anyway, out of genuine desperation, with a ten-minute guided session on an app at eleven pm in my kitchen. I did not feel transformed. I felt slightly less wound up, which was modest but real. I tried it the next night and the night after that.

Within a month, the practice had become a daily habit not because I had become a convert to anything but because the ten minutes produced a consistent small effect that compounded in ways I had not anticipated.

The anxiety that had been running as a constant background process became something I could observe rather than something I was inside of. I started noticing the moment stress arrived in my body before it had escalated into a state I had to manage.

I became, over several months, slightly better at the gap between a stimulus and my reaction to it - which is a small thing that turns out to have enormous practical value in meetings, in relationships, in the ordinary difficulty of daily life. I have meditated almost daily for four years now.

I still do not use the vocabulary that surrounds it in certain communities and I am not interested in the associated lifestyle. I am interested in the tool, which works in a specific and measurable way that I can no longer honestly dismiss. My earlier certainty that it was not for me was not discernment.

It was a closed mind wearing the costume of one.