Coach Yourself Sometimes

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• when you’re feeling grouchy

• when you’re feeling scattered or mentally foggy

• before, during, or after a boring or emotionally charged meeting or conversation

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I feel lucky to have discovered guided mindfulness exercises before they became so ubiquitous.

Old-school guided meditations

In the past, finding clear instructions for practicing mindfulness on a cassette tape was a big deal. When I found one that didn’t make me roll my eyes, I listened to it repeatedly, following along as best as possible. Whenever I felt confused, I told myself that clarity would come with practice. Sometimes, this turned out to be true.

Once, I found a refreshingly original exercise for bringing mindful awareness to running. I would listen to it while jogging along the bike path, with my bright yellow Sony Walkman flapping against my hip. (While the cassette version is no longer available, you can find it on Audible and Sounds True.)

Eventually, I learned to anticipate the steps of an exercise that clicked, and I discovered that I could remember most of them without the recording. Still, there was something comforting about having that familiar voice to help keep me on track.

Intensive practice

Participating in annual silent meditation retreats taught me to rely on the techniques I’d learned between retreats—and for much longer durations than I was used to.

There's no way to estimate the number of times I've sat in a meditation hall yearning for someone to ring the bell to end a sit. Some of that wishing involved cursing the person I thought had fallen asleep or was just being cruel. Pain makes it easy to find someone to blame.

Over the years, I've learned several practice options. While intense existential crises—in the middle of a meditation or real life—have become less frequent, they still occur from time to time, even after twenty-two years of consistent practice. The difference is that I now have more tools for responding to them without making them worse.

The real benefits of practice become apparent not during meditation but when it feels like life has pulled the rug out from under me—or when I pull it out from under myself—and I find myself resisting the pain less on the inside.

My talent for internal escalation is persistent and impressive, yet its gradual erosion has been worth the consistent effort. A little less resistance to discomfort leads to a lot less misery. I couldn’t have imagined the difference because it’s more visceral than intellectual.

Meditation apps

Meditation apps can’t address all aspects of mindfulness practice and can interfere with developing what I call attentional agency—the ability to decide for yourself what to focus on. Excessive emphasis on breath awareness and relaxation can lead to trying to feel something that’s unavailable and feeling like you're lacking something when things don't go well.

Learning to align your internal and external circumstances with the most appropriate mindfulness exercise options would be much more beneficial. This is a lot to ask from an app. Our emotions are complex and unpredictable, and we don’t have a shared language for describing them well.