Some of us will not find meditation through the happiness and joy of life. Some of us will not wake up until we have been through the meat grinder and the wood chipper first, metaphorically speaking, and there is a reason for that.
Some of us come into the world with a temperament that is already more sensitive to anxiety. That is the first thing. Some of us also come into a house where our parents did not have the real depth of what it takes to raise a human being with healthy self esteem and a settled nervous system. Most parents were not villains. They were in an anxiety loop. They did not have enough to give, because nobody gave it to them either. So we get a double load, a nervous system that startles easily and no one around who knows how to bring it back down.
That combination is why some of us have to do a lot more suffering before we finally give in and walk through the terrifying forest that is our own mind. We do not walk in because we are brave, and we do not walk in because someone handed us a book and we liked the cover. We walk in because every other exit has been tried and every one of them was a door painted on a wall.
The terrifying forest is the subconscious and everything it holds, mostly painful memories we filed away because we were too small to look at them when they happened.
The first instruction, and the most valuable one, is to find your way back to nature. Sit in the forest. Sit by a lake. Watch the sun go down and then get up early enough to watch it come back. Sit with a big beautiful tree. If there is no forest, find a park. If there is no park, find a shrubbery, find a weed coming up through the sidewalk, find the sky. Whatever you can get, take it, and the more of it the merrier. Then take your deep breaths. There is no more debating this. There is no more argument, no more negotiating with ourselves about whether we are the type of person who does this. We must breathe now.
This is also the time to find writing. It is the thing many people resist for a lifetime, and it works anyway. You put a pen down and you go into your own mind and you say the intimate, frightening things that nobody else knows about, the things you have been hiding from yourself behind a false identity you built when you were young and scared. The page does not flinch. The page has no opinion of you.
This is the time to find a way to be of service. It does not have to be grand. Walk your dog. Take care of your children. Sit with somebody who is worse off than you are. There are a billion ways to be useful and every one of them takes you out of your own head for a while, which is the entire point.
And this is the moment to take a deep breath and go through a gratitude list. As cliché as those sound, it is in our hardest hours that we have to be willing to do them, even for a minute, even badly, even while we do not believe a word of it. Then we go back to our pain and our suffering, because it is still there waiting for us. But the flavor of it is slightly different with a little gratitude in the mix.