How I learned to stop shopping and love the bliss.

Me: Would you like to do some yoga with me?

Eric: As long as I don’t have to buy $100 pants to do it. And we call it ‘stretching.’

We had that conversation a couple months ago during one of our strategizing sessions about how to become Better People. We were both struggling with the winter blahs. But one thing we’re both really good at (and one of the biggest reasons we adore each other) is coming up with new projects to challenge ourselves with. We both constantly strive to grow.

One of the strategies I came up with for myself was to try to learn how to meditate in a way that I would find helpful. Thanks both to a great teacher and my own persistence in honing my new skills, I am thrilled to admit that meditation has made me healthier. I’m learning to stop and breathe through difficult situations and to face hard feelings head on when I feel stressed, resisting the urge to watch four hours of The Office reruns and eat spoonfuls of peanut butter directly out of the jar. I’m starting to understand how much control I really, really do have over my own responses to things. If I don’t freak out in the face of something horrible, that doesn’t make it less horrible. It just makes me less of a mess and, by extension, better able to deal with it.

It’s not magical or even transcendental. There’s nothing secret or special about my practice. I sit for an average of fifteen minutes per day listening to guided sessions on my headphones. I didn’t buy a special cushion or custom-made ergonomic bench. I don’t use prayer beads or heat any special essential oil in the room where I sit. I actually practice either on the couch or in my comfiest arm chair, usually in the raggedy bathrobe that I’ve had since high school. I think about simple questions like, “What’s going well right now?”“Where is my body hanging on to tension that I could stand to get rid of?” and, “In a tough situation, what would 'love' do?” I’m a big fan of practical, useful information that has compassion at its core. When it comes to self-help, or whatever you want to call it, it’s important to me that whatever the practice, it’s done specifically in the interest of me getting healthier in order to be more useful, more engaged with other people, and more connected to the emotions that are in and around me. It has surprised me how much this practice fits the bill.

For so long I avoided learning to do it because I didn’t think I was the kind of person who meditated. I’d tried it a few times; I went to the Shambala Centre here in Victoria once and had awkward tea with a lot of nice-looking people in scarves and spent the entire silent hour I was supposed to be practising trying to quietly sit up straight, too distracted by trying to keep my bum from falling asleep to actually relax. I coveted the $50 silk-covered round meditation cushions I’d see in stores with names like Sacred Lotus Spiral Oracle (okay that doesn’t actually exist, but it could) and think, one of these months when I have some extra cash, I’ll get one of those. And then I will meditate. And it will be Good.

I've looked up meditation benches on Ebay. I've researched retreats and classes and peace-inducing candles. I've searched “meditation for anxiety/ self esteem/ stress relief/ clarity/ energy/ motivation,” online and found a few things to listen to, all the while thinking, “I can't be doing this right. If I was doing this right I'd know where to look, not just be messing around with free information that's available to everyone.” I was surprised that my brain went there, but it really did. I believed that there was a big, secret Way of Doing It that I just hadn't figured out yet. I obviously hadn't read the right books or bought the right gear. When I did, I thought, everything would fall into place.

It turns out I didn't have to buy anything material to make this experiment successful. But this is not a story of discovering that money doesn't buy happiness. It's about the fact that whatever you want to do, the Stuff that is everywhere that begs to help you do it more effectively, in a more specialized way, means nothing if you don't have the skills to carry out the task.

What I eventually did was pay someone to teach me tools to use in building a practice that I really enjoy. I paid $10 to sit in with a few folks at a drop-in session with Brad Morris at Cowabunga Meditations a couple months ago on the advice of my friend Kelly and, lo and behold, with just his voice, he taught me how much fun meditation could be. I didn't have to clear my mind, to sit in a certain (uncomfortable) way, or to watch my thoughts float down the river like leaves. There was no competition embedded in the learning, no parade of expensive outfits (one of the main reasons I've really disliked practising yoga in class settings). I felt excited and (most importantly) totally capable of doing it. So I signed up for the 40-day series of practice he was offering (and I paid for that too).

What I have learned from Brad's way of practising meditation is that there's not a 'right' way to do it, and even if there was, it certainly wouldn't be achieved by sitting on the right cushion. I've learned that it's okay to think about meditation as a form of entertainment. It's okay to have fun and laugh and love what you're doing. It's okay to think that the whole idea of chakras is silly but still enjoy singing the tones that are meant to 'cleanse' them. There's no guru. There are no special, stretchy pants. It's just you and your brain and your body having a play date. And once you get that, the skills are free forever after. Brad had skills that I didn't, so he took my money and gave me knowledge, support, and encouragement in return. That seemed fair to me. Now I know how to do it and can help other people both to learn the things I've learned and by the fact that I'm more clear-headed, even-tempered, and just plain happier than I have been in a long time. There's no brand of lifestyle-enhancing gear that could have given me that.

There are a lot of things I've shied away from doing because I didn't think I had the right gear. Cycling, camping, running, even writing; I didn't have the Oxford English Dictionary, how could I possibly write well? When we adopted our dog from the SPCA, we loaded up on special dog things from a fairly expensive pet store – toys, treats, one of those retractable leashes -- most of which he proceeded to completely ignore in favour of lying on our cheap floor rugs and doing just fine when tied to a length of old rope. The gear myth is pretty much crap.

Sometimes I thought it was weird when I'd see people running in 'normal' clothes, or walking in the rain without a super fancy raincoat from an outdoor lifestyle store. Now I love it, because I finally get it. If you're going to go climb an icy mountain, absolutely go and get the right things that will help you not die when you're doing it. But for most of us, doing things that genuinely make us healthier and happier are pretty cheap, if not free. When they're not, we should weigh out the value of what we're paying for. My investment in learning what I know will become a lifelong meditation practice, and by extension both a preventative and a responsive health care measure, was exactly $107. My super-fancy waterproof jacket specially designed for cycling, whose zipper broke and had to be replaced two weeks after I bought it and doesn't change anything about the way that I cycle (and hangs unworn in the cupboard most of the time), was twice that.