Meditation does for the brain what jogging does for the heart, but the best part about meditation is that there is no actual jogging involved. I hate jogging! When you meditate you just sit there. And breathe. And be. How hard is that? Meditation may not be physically demanding, but it is demanding in other ways. We demand many things of our brains, but we rarely ask them to slow down. Our minds tend to race.
At first even ten minutes of stillness and contemplation can be an exercise too taxing to endure. What seems like a simple task – sitting still and breathing for ten minutes – becomes a hurdle impossible to vault. So lower the hurdle. Don't lift so many pounds starting out. Try just two minutes, five minutes, whatever you can stand, but keep trying. Like any new exercise, at first it is difficult but with practice becomes easier. Plus, in the beginning, it is more about setting aside the time for it. The very first hurdle is not sustaining a session for ten minutes, it is making this activity a priority and honoring it with a small sliver of your day every day.
There are 960 minutes in a waking day. If you are like most people, virtually every minute of it is spent with the busyness of life and your mind is stretched and hammered in a multitude of directions. The mind is a system of levers and pulleys and life weighs it down with no shortage of stresses. Without an effective counterbalance, the stresses inevitably predominate and mood and memory suffer. To restore equilibrium you must make a genuine commitment to devoting 10 of those 960 minutes each day to the cultivation of clarity of mind. Brushing your mind, after all, should be as important as brushing your teeth.