Member-only story
How to Use Meditation While Dating
Starting a Practice is Not Easy
I remember when I was first told to try to do meditation to manage my own anxiety. It was in 2009–2010 after I was almost fired from a job, my family sued me in the context of an estate battle, and the person (whom I thought I was going to marry) ghosted me after almost two years of dating. I was a mess. I was angry. I honestly didn’t know what to do.
Meditation was not exactly new for me. I had been taught how to teach mindfulness based meditation in graduate school. Yet, I was very skeptical. While we were working with very depressed patients, we were supposed to teach them to be more “mindful” of their eating patterns by teaching them how to eat chocolate more mindfully. Given their high levels mental health needs, I thought this was a waste of time and absolutely ridiculous. In hindsight, we needed less eating and more moving our bodies but I did not know that at the time!
In 2011 I found myself in a therapist’s office dealing with a difficult life transition. She had just given me a checklist to assess my level of self-compassion and I was deficient to say the least in this skill. I think most perfectionistic, type A New Yorkers are. The solution, she told me, was meditation.
