Maybe I’m Not Doing It Wrong

(cymbal sizzles) (mouse clicks) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hey, friends, welcome back to Radio Headspace, it's Dora. Back in 2010, I was sitting in my room trying to meditate for one of the first times. I had found this recording online, one of few that existed back then, and I wanted to give it a try. The instructions seemed simple enough: focus on your breath and just follow the breath. But within minutes, my mind was spinning. Should I be following my breath, feeling it, counting the breaths? And then came this strange panic. I forgot how to breathe naturally. Like, suddenly I didn't know how to do this thing my body had been doing automatically my entire life. And that's when the inner critic got really loud. "This isn't working. "You're doing it wrong. "Meditation isn't for me. "This is too challenging, "and I'll never get the hang of it." I felt this tightness in my chest, this sense of falling short of what I thought meditation was supposed to be: calm, blissful, peaceful. And I wasn't experiencing any of that. So I stopped for a whole year and I didn't try again. Here's what I didn't understand back then. The inner critic isn't a sign that something's wrong with you, it's actually a defense mechanism designed to protect you from perceived harm. We have what's called a negativity bias, where we pay more attention to bad things because in the wild, threats were more likely to harm us than good things were to help us. The inner critic also forms during childhood as a way to navigate relationships with caregivers. We internalize the critical voices of parents, teachers, authority figures, and it becomes a coping mechanism. If we criticize ourselves first, maybe we can avoid external rejection or punishment. But when I was sitting in my room trying to learn how to meditate, there was no real danger. The threat of trying something new and failing was being misunderstood as actual danger by my nervous system. It took me a year, but eventually I came back to meditation. A mix of curiosity and desperation brought me back. And a few years into my practice, I decided to go on my first meditation retreat. When I got there, I discovered the focus was on something called loving-kindness meditation or Metta practice. It was my first real encounter with Metta, and I'll be honest, it felt really awkward at first. Every time we'd sit, there was this, "You're not doing this right. "You're not feeling what you're supposed to feel. "Everyone else is getting it, and you're not." But something the teacher said completely shifted my perspective. She said, "You can't yell at a flower and expect it to grow. "It needs care, softness, tenderness, and attention. "Humans are similar." And suddenly I realized I had been approaching my practice quite militantly. Like if I tried hard enough, I could force myself into being calm, bully myself into peace....