If you find meditation difficult, one thing I suggest is adding a session before bed. I recently switched up my meditation to start meditating about an hour before I go to bed and I find it much easier to meditate. Why? Well for one I've already done everything from the day, so my mind isn't pre-occupied with thinking about what I'm going to do next.
Alongside that though it also makes for some amazing restful sleep - and a pleasant unintended side-effect of it that I've had is that I get lucid dreams every night that I meditate before sleep (if you're unaware lucid dreams are dreams where you know it's a dream and so are in control and can do whatever you like: from flying around, to visiting different countries, to floating through space, to becoming a super-hero)
Another thing I suggest is preparing for meditation. Rather than simply stopping what you are doing and immediately sitting to meditate, create for yourself a little "wind down" ritual that gets you relaxed and ready for meditation. This can be something unique to you, that relaxes you.
Some different ways you could do this:
- Dimming the lights, lighting some incense, and then laying down in bed for 5-10 minutes and just letting yourself relax. After you feel nice and relaxed, get into position and begin your meditation.
- Sitting down and counting your breathing. Breathe in for a count of 5. Out for a count of 7. Keep doing this until you feel very relaxed and almost a little drowsy. At this point begin your meditation.
- Listening first to a guided relaxation/guided meditation track, and then only after it finishes and you are extremely relaxed, do you begin your actual meditation.
This one act of actually getting yourself relaxed
before you start meditating makes such a huge difference. When your mind is busy and you sit to meditate there is naturally a tendency to want to stop meditating as soon as possible. It's like being told to stand still in the same spot for an hour, just having that instruction causes your body to want to do everything
but stand still. Meditation is the same.. but if you are relaxed, meditation just becomes a natural deepening of that relaxation, and becomes astoundingly easy. I've always found meditation to be difficult, but once I started getting myself relaxed beforehand it started to come naturally to me, and I've had some of my best and deepest meditation recently as a result.
