Meditation is supposed to cure all ills. (Okay, maybe not all the ills.) It is supposed to help with crazy anxiety attacks and all that stuff.

Unfortunately, this girl doesn’t meditate well.

I understand you are supposed to clear your mind and just be, but I don’t know what a clear “just being” mind looks like.  I lie there imagining a blank nothingness, but then the nothingness becomes a thing.  It becomes irritating in it’s blankness.  To remedy that I will make it purple or red, or some other color.  The color itself becomes the nothingness.  Then little things start to crawl across the red blank background.  A paper I need to grade, a note I need to hand in to the school, a telephone call I forgot to make.  So I let those thoughts go and try to focus on the red blankness.  That’s when all the funny or ridiculous things I only think about when meditating start pressing in on the sides of my blissful red blankness.  Flying pigs, royalty, what I would do with a million dollars, underground prairie dog colony viewing stations, pet chinchillas.  Before too long there are dozens of ridiculous unimportant things demanding I either pay attention or send them away.  Before too long there is no sending away, there is only chaos.

So I have to meditate using a guided meditation program.  It’s the only way.  I have to focus on something to be able to drive out the millions of bits of nothing clamoring for my attention.

With guided meditation I can at least drift along like I used to in some of the less entertaining classes I took in school.  I may still think of things but I can push them aside, because I get to focus on the voice telling me to relax.