I haven’t been consistent with my mediation practice for most of this year, but I returned to it this morning. When I started my sit and closed my eyes, I told myself, “this is my time.”

Not my wife’s, not my parents’, not my closest friends’. No one else’s on this planet. This is about me.

And it was then I realized the epiphany I was experiencing was the one constant throughout my life: it will always be me here. I'm never going to be someone else; I will always just be me and my thoughts, and I need to be at peace with that.

Being hard on myself or upset with myself serves no purpose. I need to let that go. If I’m not happy with myself, not at peace with myself, then I can’t be at peace with anything. My internal world can’t be full of strife because it will filter and dampen the external world coming through.

I guess that’s what people mean when they say you need to love yourself—you need to be okay with yourself, you need to accept yourself for all that you are. Your mind is with you all the time, and thus can’t be an impediment; it needs to be a boost, a trigger to motivation and willpower and an open mechanism to the outside world, this crazy experience we call the universe.

Anyway, I then had a crappy meditation, because I hadn’t done it in a while. That’s okay, try again tomorrow.