So I meditate every morning. It’s something I’ve been doing for years, and when the app I use–Insight Timer–said they were having a “refresh and reset” challenge for January 2024, I decided to give it a try. Why not? It was free, the meditations were ten minutes, and I do it every morning anyway.

The first week was full of guided meditations that were hosted by someone whom I’ve been following since I started using the app and the next two weeks were also good. But this wee has been about manifesting and visualization and it was … weird.

Let me describe what I am talking about. You sit down, put on the app, start the meditation, and the guy starts talking about how we’re going to work on manifesting the life we want. Then he says what the day’s “category” is: relationships, money, and spirituality for instance. And then you’re told to “picture what your perfect life would be like” and to figure out the steps to make it happen. There’s also a part where he says something about envisioning what it would be like if your life were “miraculous.”

I get what the point of this is, but I have to tell you that I am horrible at visualizing. And trust me, I’ve tried–both in my daily meditation practice and in actual therapy sessions. Today, when I was supposed to be visualizing serving others, I thought about weaving in and out of traffic and the fastest way to get downtown from here. Other days, I’ve been distracted as fuck and thought more about the day ahead and ignored everything he was saying. Other days, I found myself falling down mental rabbit holes of song lyrics and movies and sports stuff. And even when I am doing it right, I can’t see anything. Most of it’s a feeling, like I’m pushing against something or fighting with something or running underwater or … sometimes, it’s hard to describe. Then I have to remind myself that there’s no real “doing it right.” This isn’t math class and I’m not going to get points off of the assignment.

Which is a whole other post.

Anyway, the other thing is that I have found this manifestation exercise silly. And a bit woo woo. Whenever I think of manifesting and visualizing, I think of shit that used to be on Oprah back in the day, like The Secret. I also think about how this can be used to feed our culture’s materialism because I’m under the impression that I should be visualizing a bigger house, a better car, and more money. Now, I can envision more money or at least what it would be like to have my debt paid off, but the fantasy of having things and envisioning more things is … well, obviously against my mission here. And I don’t know what this says about me, but I find that whole thing kind of gross.

Maybe that’s because I don’t have a concrete vision? You ask me what things look like in a few years and all I can say is that I want to be more financially stable and independent, so this is not about accumulating money but instead not having to worry about it as much as I do right now. But the bigger picture is fuzzy because when I do think of a few things, I ask myself: “Is this what I really want or what I have been told that I am supposed to want?” I know it sounds pathetic coming from a middle aged adult, but I have done a lot of journaling and had a lot of therapy sessions about it in the past year and have seen how strong expectations put on you (either directly or indirectly) by the adults you grew up around can be difficult to shake. Really, think about why we carry on certain traditions or retain certain attitudes–it’s what we’re “supposed” to do, think, feel, or be even though we know we want something different or in the very least find what we are supposed to do unappealing or unfulfilling. I’m not talking about adult responsibilities like working, paying your bills, or feeding and clothing your child; I mean just what I talked about earlier. Do I want the house or the car because I really want it or because I have been told doing so means that I will get the A I am looking for?

My wife put things into perspective when I complained about this all being too woo woo. She asked me what I had been able to envision and when I said that all I could really think of was feeling comfortable but I couldn’t picture what that looks like and that I felt that wasn’t a good enough/ambitious enough goal, she said that maybe the goal doesn’t need to be ambitious. She also said that maybe the vision I had about traffic was a way of saying I am looking for either something or the path to something. It does put it into a better perspective and makes me a little less skeptical. But for now, I’m going to skip the visualization and just focus on centering myself.