In terms of meditation, I am also a bit resistant to meditation. Because when I need to meditate, it is the last thing I feel like doing. Recently, someone talked to me about avoidance and removal behaviors. So if you’re feeling bad, you can remove yourself from the feelings and sort of look at them or you can avoid them and pretend it doesn’t exist. And it’s so tempting to do avoidant behaviors, like going out for drinks with friends or reading escapist literature or watching Netflix for six hours.
But what I really needed to do was to make space in myself and to have the thoughts that I was having and address them and look at them. And to me, the most enabling part of that is that I thought that meditation needed to be like me by myself, breathing for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, like a yoga practice almost, because that was where I was really introduced to it. And Buddhify was really powerful because you can choose the length that you want and you can choose the topic that you want.
So I’d be like, oh, I can’t handle this. I’m so overwhelmed. And then you open it up and there’s this beautiful rainbow wheel. And it’s like, are you feeling overwhelmed? And you’re like, yes, I’m going to click on this. And then it’s like, do you want to do this for five minutes or 15 minutes? And I would always be like, the five minute one, I can’t handle anymore.
And so it was in such small chunks and so easy to access that it was like, well, OK, like you can go do your Netflix for four hours, but just do this first. And then often, I wouldn’t feel like doing– I wouldn’t feel like I needed to do the avoidant behaviors because I was processing things more healthily. All of those were bite-sized, manageable, and addressed the problem I was having, and not just some generic, like, wellness. So I liked that.