I really like to meditate. It’s the most important thing I do every morning. If I have a few minutes (or an hour) free at some point later in the day, my default is to be still and meditate rather than look at a screen or a book.
Part of my natural enthusiasm for meditation is that I’ve logged well over 10,000 hours, and now I’m actually pretty good at it. However, this hasn’t always been the case. For a long while, I sucked pretty substantially.
My first experience with meditation was a semester-long course in college named, Meditation and Relaxation. Once, the teacher had us take deep, conscious breaths, counting one on the inhale, and two on the exhale. We were supposed to see how high we could count before we “blanked out,” got distracted, lost in thought, or forgot to consciously breath or keep counting. I usually couldn’t make it past five. My record was around ten.