It’s important to trust your meditation practice.
In order to let yourself relax during practice, you need to be okay with whatever is happening. If your mind is in chaos, you need to be okay with the chaos. You need to trust that just sitting there and watching all the chaos really works.
Otherwise, you fall into the trap of trying to fix yourself while you practice. Which just creates more chaos!
Tricky.
To let go of monitoring your success during practice (“Am I relaxing? Am I doing this right? Is this helping me?”), you can measure your success by comparing how you are before and after you practice. Give yourself a number, 1-10, for how you are before practice, then practice, and then give yourself a number after you finish. See if the number gets better after, or not.
You can measure the success of anything you like from stress levels to mental chatter. Give yourself a 0 for no stress or chatter and a 10 for maximum stress or chatter.
Before you practice decide what level of stress, etc you’re at and give it a number, then just practice with out measuring or monitoring, and afterwards check in again and give yourself a number based on how you feel now.
During practice you let go of needing to monitor, and over time as you watch your numbers consistently improve you will build trust in your practice… Making the desire to monitor a thing of the past.
If your numbers aren’t improving, that’s helpful information as well. Check in and see if there’s something in your environment that’s effecting you like too much noise. Check inside, maybe it’s time for help from a meditation teacher, friend, book or video. Or it could be time to ask for help from a therapist if you feel like your issues are too big right now.
Try it out and I’m happy to hear how it goes for you. Happy (monitor free) practicing,
ElenaMariafoucher.com