Going from never meditating to becoming a “good” mediator is a bit like going from never lifting weights to becoming a bodybuilder. It takes time and consistency (and lots of reps!) to build the habit. In this Emotional Push-Up with Coa's Lead Product Engineer, Scotty Eckenthal, Dr. Emily explores the process of creating a safe and calm space within oneself through meditation. Tune in and let’s meditate together!

Listen to the song Generations by Dear Gravity. 

Thank you for listening! Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Monday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

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The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by Nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

Ready to break an emotional sweat? Welcome to Emotionally Fit, with me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. As a therapist, I know that staying mentally healthy takes work and repetition. That's why I'll share emotional pushups, short, actionable exercises to help you strengthen your mental fitness. From improving your friendships to managing stress, let's flex those feels and do some reps together.

Hey, there fit fans. I am so excited to be here today with Scotty Eckenthal, lead product engineer at Coa. Scotty, thank you so much for being here.

Great to be here. Great to hang, always.

Well, it's a pleasure on my end too. And today we're talking about starting a meditation practice and how complicated that can be. I'm curious, Scotty, do you have any kind of meditation practice?

I do. I have a meditation practice that I'm really bad at sticking to. It's been something I've been engaging in on and off for probably the better part of my adult life, so about the past 10, 15 years. And I started when I was in high school, and my high school English teacher is the meditation teacher that I follow now, sort of randomly, which is a very interesting side note.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah. But yeah, the meditation that I practice, it corresponds very vaguely to a bunch of East Asian, primarily Tibetan Buddhism, but it really is about just being and resting awareness and not really meditating on anything in particular.

What was it like for you when you first started?

When I first started meditating, oh, well I was but a wee child. I was, I guess, 15 or 16 years old. It's interesting, because I think when I first started meditating, I was sort of searching for an answer without a question. In the therapy world, one refrain I hear from my therapist so often is we all think that our childhoods were idyllic and perfect, and I am no different. I thought being spiritual and searching for something was just part of what you did regardless of how happy or content one is, and then it wasn't until I continued to grow that the world slapped me in the face. But I don't know when I was a kid, it was a way to try to grapple with what life was, which is so funny, because now, it has nothing to do with that.

Now it has to do with not trying to grapple with what life is. It's more a reminder of the importance of slowing down. If I've been exercising for a month, and I look at myself in the mirror, I'm like, oh, wow. I feel good about how I look right now or how I feel physically. I find it very similarly, if I've been meditating regularly for a couple weeks, I'll have a moment where rather than diving into a particular statement or a particular thought, I'm actually able to be mindful in a moment and reflect and just be present, before taking action.

I love that. I love that comparison that in a few weeks of working out our bodies probably don't change that much, but we feel different looking at them, similarly with meditation. I think that's absolutely true.

100%.

And I know for me, it was pretty complicated when I first started meditating, because it didn't really feel like anything was happening for a while. Part of the problem for me, though, was I really tried to go from 0 to 100. I was like, okay, I should start meditating. I'll just put 45 minutes on the timer and I got this. It will be great. And then three minutes in, I was like, oh my God, this is awful. I should quit forever. There's no way I can do this for 45 minutes. And so then I realized, at some point, that going from not meditating to becoming a good meditator is like going from never lifting weight to becoming a bodybuilder.

You have to start a few pounds at a time. You have to stick with it. You have to really lean into patience and repetition. And another thing that's tough about it is that I think it can be hard to trust that it's worth all the work. What are the benefits of meditation, and when do you start feeling them? So, one way I started to think about it is that meditation is the process of building a tiny house inside of yourself that is safe and calm. It takes years to create, it needs continual maintenance, but once it's there, you can go and sit inside this little house, accessing all of the safety and calm that you need, anytime you need it. What do you think about that idea?

I like it. And to be clear, I think it really doesn't matter what I think about your particular take. Whatever works for you, works for you. And that's the most important thing. How I would take that and shape it into my world is that there's already a tiny house in my brain somewhere, but maybe the tiny house is inside a giant, crazy chaotic mansion, and it's just a matter of always remembering, oh yeah, I can always go back there. For me, meditation is less about finding calm and more about acknowledging what is always there. So we don't need to think about breathing, right? You don't need to think about a number of things that your body is doing right now, but if you were to take a step back, you're like, oh, okay, cool. My back is propping my body up straight. It's resting against the back of my chair.

I can feel my feet on the ground. I can hear the whoosh of the highway outside of my window. And I can feel my breath coming in through my nose and out through my mouth. There's all these things that are just happening. And I guess that's the tiny house that's always there. There's no effort involved in any of it, which I guess is the other thing that, in hearing what you were talking about, I thought was interesting, is that meditation is really hard. It's so hard. But also it's not, because if you're meditating and it's hard, you're still meditating. You're still succeeding. There is no outcome that's required in order for you to succeed.

Hmm. Sounds like for you, there's something that's there always, and meditating is just about being present with that thing. For me, especially because I have raging ADHD, I don't feel like it's always there. I feel like I've had to really cultivate it and I've had to actually build the house. Maybe the calm existed, but I had to build the structure around that calm in order to be able to sit in it. So, I mean, I don't think these two things are actually that different, but various ways to think about it.

Yeah. I think just because it's always there and just because resting awareness is this foundational thing, it doesn't make it easy. It's still impossible. The world is still really hard and chaotic. I think it's more just a framing of where am I trying to go? Meditating is more about the letting go than the trying to get somewhere new. But to your point, it doesn't matter. Whatever works for you is what you should be doing.

Yeah. I definitely think there's different paths to that place. For me, I know that what finally did work was that I started a two-minute a day meditation practice. I stopped asking myself to do it for more than two minutes, but I did it every single day. Every day I woke up, I put two minutes on my timer, and I sat quietly with myself for two minutes. And then after a few weeks, two minutes started to feel too short, which it didn't at the beginning. Two minutes felt long at the beginning.

Totally.

And then all of a sudden, two minutes felt too short, so I upped it to three minutes. And then after a while, that started to feel too short, so I upped it to five minutes. And that's actually where I am now. I meditate for five minutes only, every single morning. And I do it to a song that I really love, which I'll share the name of that song in the notes and at the end of this. And what's amazing is that when I'm stressed now, I've noticed that I can sort of drop into this calm place that I've built inside of myself for about five minutes. After five minutes, I get kicked out and that's okay, because that's as hard as I've worked on my little house. So that's what's kind of worked for me.

Can you describe the feeling of your stress and all of a sudden now you're dropping into your tiny house? How does that manifest for you? I'm curious.

I'd almost feel like my body will be in that sort of sympathetic fight or flight mode. I'll be stressed, I'll be overwhelmed, and then I'll remember, okay, wait, you have this place you can drop into. And it feels like it lives here in my chest, behind my sternum. And I will feel myself actually just whew, kind of drop into it. And it's like my body unclenches and chills, and my blood pressure comes down a little bit, and I feel like I can get out of my head, and so my mind kind of quiets. And I feel just kind of still and present and calm. And then after about five minutes, it all starts whirring up again, and I get evicted from my pretty little calm house. But it's there, if I need again later,

Get out of here. It's interesting, because I think we're talking about is why do we meditate? Well, we meditate because it makes us feel good, but also it's like exercising. It is something that helps us in our day to day.

Well, I think that leads perfectly into our push-up today, which is that we are going to meditate together, right now, right here, for exactly three minutes. And everyone listening in, I hope you'll join us. I hope you'll find a comfortable place to sit and just sit quietly with yourself. There's nothing that has to come out of it. If you find your mind wandering, you can gently bring it back to your breathing or to the song that we're going to play.

I know it might sound a little trite, but just try it, because you have to start somewhere. And I will say it does get easier over time if you stick with it. So Scotty, what do you say? Are you up for meditating with me?

Yeah.

Okay. So everyone listening in, if you're able, find a comfortable place to sit and meditate with us. You can put your feet on the floor and your hands in your lap. You can close your eyes or just leave them softly open. But all I mean by meditate is sit quietly with yourself. It will blossom into much more time later if you stick with it.

That three minutes went by very quickly for me. Scotty, how was that for you?

It was challenging at first.

Yeah? Tell me about it.

I think part of it is that I am not in a great place in my own meditation practice right now. It's not something I've been able to do too much recently. I think, interestingly, one aspect of the meditation that I do a lot is not only being present with the physical sensations, I keep on talking about the chair, the breathing, but also the mental ones. Just like you can't control the fact that you're breathing, you also can't control the fact that your brain is going to produce thoughts. They're just going to happen. And actually, while I was meditating a little bit, I felt a little bit of self-consciousness and self-obsessiveness about, hey, was I communicating effectively? What were the words I was sharing when I was talking with Dr. Emily just now? How did that appear? And I was able to find myself, okay, cool. It's okay to have these thoughts. These thoughts are totally fine and totally reasonable, but let's just let them be. I found myself letting go.

That's beautifully said.

So I think it was challenging, but maybe that's also just the nature of meditating on a podcast.

I think it is. And I felt similarly. I started sort of like, oh, how did this go? How did this sound?

How is this going? How are we doing?

And then at some point I'm like, or I could just be present in this moment. I can let this not be about analyzing myself. And I was able to kind of unclench that and let it go, and that was really nice. And really quick, for listeners, I just want to share the song that I played is by Dear Gravity. It was introduced to me by James Beshara. Shout out to James. And actually, for those who want to learn more about James, you can tune into our Taboo Tuesday episode with him, where we'll be talking about psychedelics. But Scotty, I can't thank you enough for flexing your feels with me today, breaking an emotional sweat. It's really nice to hear about your approach to meditation and then to actually sit and do that with you today.

It was lovely. Thank you so much for having me. Anytime.

Have a beautiful day today.

Thanks for listening to Emotionally Fit, hosted by me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. Did you do today's pushup alongside me and my guest? Tweet your experience with the hashtag #EmotionallyFit and follow me at @DrEmilyAnhalt.

Please rate, review, follow, and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts. This podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health, where you can take live therapist-led classes online. From group sessions to therapist matchmaking, Coa will help you build your emotional fitness routine. Head to joincoa.com, that's join C-O-A dot com, to learn more, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @joincoa. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our producer is Katie Sunku Wood. Music is by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew.