I think I got a taste of what mindfulness tastes like. My main focus was my rising and falling stomach. I caught most every thought that came up (and there were a LOT of them) and said “okay, that’s ‘planning’” or “worrying” or “being excited” (a lot of them were “excited” because I was all like “oh man I’m finally doing meditation right*") or whatever, and then I saw them as if they were photos in a slide show, they’d go to the right and soon fade.

This lasted maybe a few minutes. But I think I learned a few things:
1. what it feels like to “do it right*”
2. how important it is, really, to be gentle with yourself the whole time, really; this feels more likely than anything else to get you somewhere.
3. how easy it is, once you’ve done it right*, to get super attached to reproducing that same state**

* I know I know, all meditation is good, it’s not right/wrong/etc, no seriously, the rest of this meditation I’ve been doing (and maybe any meditation that you’re doing that seems unproductive) is not wrong

** okay I want to keep this post short so I won’t go into any more detail, but whenever I read a book about meditation and it talks about some of the more advanced mental states, it’s really interesting. maybe I’ll talk about this later.