Process, Not Results
What the first five meditations actually looked like
January 3rd, 2021. Twenty-three days after I wrote This journal is dedicated to my spiritual journey in that blank black notebook, I finally sat down to meditate.
I know. I know. I was already worried the procrastination thing was surfacing once again. But I had promised myself no rules, no pressure, no schedule. The only commitment was to show up when it felt right. January 3rd, it felt right.
I set up in the spare room, the same little bench, the same blue blanket that I’ve already described, and opened the Insight Timer app. Then I nearly talked myself out of it. The meditation app kept glitching. I switched to Google music only to find it had been cancelled. Looking back, I honestly think it was a test. I could have easily called it a technical failure and gone to make coffee. I almost did. But something made me stay. I went back to Insight, found some piano music that reminded me of George Winston’s December album, hit play, and hallelujah, it worked. I sat there with my hands on my knees, wondering what exactly I thought I was doing.
What I was expecting: transcendence. A sign. Some immediate confirmation that I was on the right track.
What I got: a sore back, a very busy mind, and a to-do list I couldn’t stop writing in my head.
Here is what nobody tells you about meditation when you’re starting out: it is almost entirely an exercise in noticing how little control you have over your own thoughts. I spent the first several minutes of that first session composing what I was going to write in my journal afterward. I was performing for a future audience…and I knew it was happening! I was meditating about meditating. If that isn’t an <insert roll eyes>, I don’t know what is.
But somewhere around the ten minute mark, something shifted. Slowed down. I started to forget my hands. Then I’d remember them. Then forget again. I slipped, briefly, into something that felt almost like the edge of sleep, that hypnagogic state where the body gets a little twitchy and the mind loosens its grip. I came back. I tried again. I kept going.
When I opened my eyes, I sat for a minute before I wrote anything down. And what I wrote surprised me.
Focus on the process, not the results.
I hadn’t planned it. It arrived the way things arrive in that loosened state…not quite a thought, more like a knowing. I wasn’t sure if it was my own voice or something else. I’m still not sure. But I wrote it down and I kept going.
January 6th. My second meditation. I woke up early and went straight to it, which felt virtuous. I chose a drumming track with “energy” in the title. And then…I had back pain. My neck kept drooping. I kept trying to bring my attention back to my breath and losing it again almost immediately. I asked the universe to raise my vibration, a sentence I could not have conceived writing five years ago, yet tried to imagine the top of my head opening to receive whatever was being offered.
Nothing profound happened. I wrote in my journal: Nothing profound today.
January 8th, morning. Fifteen minutes of guided meditation. Very monkey mind. An itch on my eyebrow derailed me for a full minute. I noted that my back hurt again, that I’d had to readjust and shake it out mid-session, and that I kept drifting to thoughts about whether meditation could literally strengthen the brain (I’d read a study) which was itself a fairly impressive act of monkey mind, turning a meditation about stillness into a research project.
I gave the track four out of five stars anyway.
January 8th, evening, was different.
I hadn’t wanted to meditate. I was attempting sober January and after five days of no alcohol, I was definitely not feeling the benefits. No bounding energy, and my face, still puffy. I’d weighed myself that morning and the number hadn’t moved (not even water weight!), and I couldn’t quite shake the sour mood. I reasoned with myself the way I used to about karate: even when I felt at my worst going in, I always felt better after class. So I sat down and found a track called Deep Cleansing and Healing with Archangel Michael by Sofia Light Jewel, which is exactly the kind of title that would have made me roll my eyes six months earlier. Today I chose it without hesitation.
The guide led me through surrounding myself with light, inviting Archangel Michael in to clear away negativity with what she described as a sword of blue light, moving through each chakra. I tried to imagine each part of the body, but heck if I knew what root or sacral meant. When she reached the eyes (I know where those are!), “opening the veils”, she said something about who we are and who we have been, about leaving behind the negativity from past lives and sending what doesn’t belong in this life back to source. Something resonated.
And then inside me, I felt I am Giuseppi repeat and repeat.
Giuseppi is the World War II submariner I encountered in a past life regression years ago — a man who died carrying the weight of a failure he could never release. It wasn’t just that Giuseppe felt failure, but that he thought he let everyone down - crewmates, family, country. I had spent years trying to figure out what my current relationship with him was. I certainly knew that weight of failure, and of letting people down. Was that Giuseppi or was that me? Was I carrying something that didn’t belong to me?
What the guide said next felt directed right at me: accept and forgive yourself. I let it sink in for a moment, and I started to cry a little. I felt, for the first time, that I was accepting Giuseppi as part of me with no judgement…not a past mistake to be corrected.
I wrote in my journal: I felt love surround me, starting inward at my core and moving outward. Quite overwhelming.
Eight days in. I was not expecting any of that.
January 9th. I sat with no backrest and cupped hands, karate-style, and got emotional again, though this time more gently. I found a peaceful place in my mind that reminded me of Janet’s void from The Good Place…a room of one’s own inside the silence, alone but not lonely. I noted that when I woke up that morning, I had thought about writing, about this project, about the daunting task I had set myself across more than one lifetime, apparently, and for the first time I didn’t feel the familiar undertow of dread. The weight of the thing was still there. The dread wasn’t.
I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I wrote it down anyway.
January 10th. Five sessions in. I put on a guided track — Om Shanti Ananda, finding the stillness in silence. The teacher said something early on that I underlined in my mind: find the space between words, between thoughts, between breaths. That extra moment of stillness. Respond, don’t react.
Then we were instructed to chant Om Shanti Ananda, and to return to the chant whenever we wandered.
And as I got started, my inner critic, right on schedule, said: you’re not doing it right.
I almost laughed. Ten days into a meditation practice and the committee in my head had already convened to evaluate my performance. I stayed with it for a moment — the critic, the chant, the slight absurdity of the whole situation — and then something came through, the same thing that had come through on day one:
It’s the process, not the result.
There it was again. Process, not results. Not a mantra I had chosen. One that seemed to have chosen me.
Five sessions. Two visits from the same message. Maybe there is something to pay attention to here.
I’m trying to be honest about what those first ten days looked like from the outside, because I think it matters for anyone considering their own experiment. There was no dramatic awakening. There was back pain and monkey mind and a track I abandoned after three minutes because I couldn’t stand the production quality. There was a morning I nearly skipped because my meditation app crashed. There was an evening I meditated specifically to improve my mood about a number on a scale, which is not exactly the stuff of spiritual enlightenment.
Yet inside all of that, between the itch and the to-do list and the inner critic and the drooping neck: something was building. A signal I was learning to recognize. A phrase that kept returning. A tearful moment I hadn’t seen coming. A morning without dread.
Process, not results.
I was beginning, slowly, to believe it.