Mindfulness, yoga, and spirituality have interesting features which I still wonder about. And that is that we can’t quantify the progress easily. I can explain what has changed, but can’t put any tangible measurement to it.
In the Western world, we currently live in a performance-focused era, where we are always in the face of improving things. Ourselves including. If you don’t believe it, have a look at the billion-dollar industries across, which moved from the self-help book with “Do these 5 steps to have a happy life”, through inspirational TED talks to 20-second TikTok videos and we managed to watch six of them every minute. How? You now have two videos playing at the same time!
More books, more videos, more inspiration, more performance!
And on the way we try to measure everything. What is the point of doing something when you cannot measure your progress and performance? We should improve in everything we do, right? Right?! Maybe it’s just my problem.
You might not be able to do one pull-up. Then you do one, then two, five, ten. And it’s easy to remember that you weren’t able to do a pull-up and now you do ten.
It’s much harder with meditation. How do we track progress?
“I would obsessively overthink this type of issue for two hours, and now after two years of meditation I managed to get out in 15 minutes”?
“I’m aware of my impulses better and overeat only twice a week instead of every day”?
“I’m aware of beating myself for the smallest mistakes and can work with it, but it doesn’t stop me from doing things.”?
“I’m compassionate towards strangers, whilst before I would despise them for the smallest thing.”?
When I started meditating I had no idea what to expect, I just wanted to find a way to get better. Now years later I can say that I am better off for starting practicing. How much is a question, which don’t have an answer for. I could track how many days I’ve done meditations, what kind, and when in the day. I could have possibly tracked how my anxiety felt and if there was any correlation. I could journal and try to get some quantifiable measures out of the “it’s odd how I was thinking a year ago when I felt strong anxiety from early morning”.
However, the biggest benefit isn’t anything that I could measure. It’s a change to the way how I think and how I work with myself and I cannot put a number to it. And I don’t even want to as every day I feel like a beginner and that’s ok.
Just above average 