15. I kept judging myself.
The greatest challenge in meditation, and my life, was what I call the “trance of unworthiness”. On some level I was always evaluating how well my meditation was going and concluding it needed to be better. This paralleled my life where I had an ideal of who I should be and chronically felt I was falling short, imperfect: I should be more generous, less self-centered, less judgmental. The effect of feeling insufficient was a lot of striving and rarely relaxing and enjoying the gratification of the present moment just as it was.
What worked for me: I became mindful of how a sense of personal deficiency and failure was a pervasive source of suffering. Rather than judging myself for getting caught up in obsessive thoughts, I would stay mindful and find the fear or hurt or longing that was driving those thoughts. — Tara Brach, meditation teacher and clinical psychologist