It says 8 classes, but that includes a 5-minute introduction.

One of the offerings on Peloton is meditation classes.

I had put on sleep meditations a couple of times before bed - I’m not sure if they worked or not (we’ll come back to that idea) - but I had never done a sitting, awake meditation.

There’s a 7-day ‘Start Your Meditation Practice’ program on the platform, and I figured, well, if I’m doing 100 Days in a Row, I could spend a few of them giving this a whirl.

As far as an introduction to mediation, this was fine. 10 minutes per class for 7 classes is not a lot of time for me to invest. I tried to do it first thing in the morning before the house comes to life. That’s a good, quiet time for me.

But I’m kind of not really sure what’s supposed to happen.

This didn’t bode well from the beginning: I have problems with someone telling me how to breathe. You know the routine - an instructor does the old, “Take a deep breath………….let it go” type of thing.

For me, that’s not a relaxing thing. They’ll say, “Take a deep breath,” and immediately my mind is off to the races: “How deep? Am I supposed to be inhaling this whole time? Do I just hold my breath? Wait, did she forget to say ‘exhale?’ Did she already say it and I missed it? Should I exhale now and catch up on the next breath? Should I wait? Did I just exhale and inhale?” And then the instructor says, “…And exhale.”

Sometimes they talk in between the inhale and exhale and that throws me off.

So, breathing exercises inside of a meditation exercise don’t exactly put me in a meditative mindset.

It was reassuring that very early on the instructor said that while the goal is to pay attention, it’s OK to get distracted. You just kind of have to acknowledge it and reel yourself back.

I couldn’t really sit cross-legged on the floor for 10 minutes so I sat on the couch. I don’t know what the ideal space for meditating would be for me.

I do honestly think - however meditation is supposed to make you feel - I did feel that way for a tiny portion of one of the early classes.

I kind of felt my mind go elsewhere - it was like that brief moment where you’re falling asleep and you were unaware that you were falling asleep until you snap back into a waking state - but it could have just been that I was falling asleep.

Which maybe is fine for meditation?

Maybe the more you do it, the longer you can capture that feeling. I don’t know - and I might not know.

By the third or fourth day I was kind of over it. I don’t know if it’s for me.

She ended the classes by saying something like, “Come back to your body and come back to the space you are in.”

I can’t honestly say I ever really left my body or that space.

I don’t know that I can ever learn how to.

If I do, it’ll take more than a week of 10-minute classes, I guess.