When trying to improve yourself, it’s good to stop and think about whether something really works for you in particular.
Different people are different. Just because a book, blog, or your friends tell you to do something, doesn’t mean that it’s right for you. Something that’s the best thing ever and completely life-changing for someone else may be useless or counterproductive for you.
A few weeks ago, I decided to try using a candle for meditation. I had read that focusing on the flame could be a good meditation aid. And I found it helpful for a few days.
But then I noticed a problem. I had bought a fancy large-sized Yankee Candle. It occurred to me that these candles are designed to be burned for hours at a time. But I was only burning it for a few minutes at a time. That meant that only the wax very close to the flame had a chance to melt. So it was burning a hole down into the candle instead of burning evenly.
Once I noticed this, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d wonder how long this could go on. I’d debate if every so often I should let the candle burn for an hour or so to let the entire surface melt and even out. And all this obsessing was happening while I was trying to meditate. I kept trying to drive the thoughts out of my mind and focus on the flame itself, or focus on my breath, but it wasn’t working.
So then I decided that the problem was the fancy thick candle. I switched to a cheap disposable tealight. But the tealight was still an inch and a half in diameter, which was too much to melt in the few minutes at a time that I was using it. After a couple days, I realized the same thing was happening.
The rational side of me looked at this, and thought, “So what?” A tealight costs like ten cents. If I end up wasting half of it over the course of a couple weeks, no big deal. But every time I tried to meditate, I still couldn’t stop thinking about the way the flame was burning a hole into the candle.
I thought about switching to taper candles, or even birthday candles, so this wouldn’t keep happening.
But then one night I did manage to get these thoughts out of my head. I was staring at the flames, in a meditative state. And then my eyes drifted shut. At which point I drifted deeper into the meditative state.
That made me realize that my whole issue of getting distracted by the way the candles were burning was, well, itself a distraction. My initial intention was to *try* meditating with candles to see how it worked. Then somehow my stubborn streak had been activated, and I wanted to overcome this obstacle. But really, I had my answer: Meditating with candles didn’t work very well for me. I was better off just closing my eyes.
So I stopped using the candles for meditating. I do, however, use the fancy candle to make my home smell nice when guests come over, and it works quite well for that.
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