A few weeks ago I was talking with my therapist about focus. I often find myself wandering around the house “busy” but not really doing anything. Durning our conversation meditation came up. I gushed about how much I love meditation. I have a candle, and a pillow, and I use a diffuser. The house is clean and quiet. I push play on my Headspace App and give myself a gold start for the day.
I sat proudly as I told her about my Instagram worthy meditation practice. I waited for a pat on the back telling me how good I am at mindfulness… It didn’t come.
She smiled and said that all sounds lovely, but the point of meditation is to teach us to be mindful THROUGH distraction and even more so for me, though imperfection.
She challenged me to do my meditation first before I did anything on my todo list. She said practicing meditation when I am trying to remember to make that phone call or respond to that email or even worse when I can see the pile of laundry out of the corner of my eye, will strengthen my ability to remain mindful even when life is messy. We called this “laundry meditation.”
But even though intellectually I know what she was saying, all I could think of was how uncomfortable that sounds. I was physically squirming in my chair. I told her, “That sounds awful!” She said yes, but it’s what you need.
This whole year has been about my struggle to sit in discomfort. I want to want to fix, or change, or run from anything that isn’t perfect or predictable. This quest for perfect has lead to feelings of extreme anxiety and really low self-worth. I know there is no such thing as perfect, and yet sometimes I still hold myself to this impossible standard.
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, so I said I’d give this “laundry meditation” a try…
The next day I dropped the kids off at school with the intention of meditating for 10 minutes as soon as I walked back in the door. On the drive home I was coaching myself to just ignore everything and put my butt on the ground.
I walked in the door put my purse on the table, threw my coffee cup in the trash, emptied the dishwasher, pulled out some chicken to thaw for dinner, put a load of laundry in the washer, walked back to the bedroom, made my bed, and hung up my husband’s shirts. It wasn’t until I was doing a full Marie Kondo-style sort on my t-shirt drawer that looked around and shouted out loud to myself. STOP!
I had no idea how far I would go to avoid being uncomfortable.
As I was completing each task I would say to myself, “after this one thing is done, I’ll meditate.” But even as I was thinking that another task would come to mind to jump in front of self-care. The moving from task to task, even if I didn’t finish it gave me the sense that I was productive, and therefore worthy.
It was the worthy part that troubled me. A lot of people struggle with focus. “Mom bran” is a real thing, but I started to notice how this wandering was becoming a little more serious than your average bran fog. I’m still processing this so I don’t want to get too far into it, but I will say that my wondering was born out of anxiety and desire to control.
It’s been a few weeks now and I’m getting better at laundry meditation. It’s not perfect, but then again, neither am I and that’s ok too.
Do you struggle with focus? Do you meditate? Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear about it
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