Here’s a quote from Praying Naked by J. Francis Stroud:

How do you find happiness? By not going after it. If you make happiness your first order of business, you’ll never find it. All you will get are thrills, excitement, and distractions, not abiding contentment. Happiness follows self-discovery. There is no possibility of it if you are a stranger to yourself. Position self-awareness before self-gratification.

He goes on to talk about the difficulty of meditating – it’s a hard thing to do if we’re not comfortable with ourselves. When we sit and breath we come face-to-face with ourselves and it can be really uncomfortable. We immediately think of all the reasons why it’s dumb and useless and we conclude we must be really bad at it because it’s uncomfortable and before we know it we’re off and running. But really there’s nothing to be bad at. You can’t fail at sitting and breathing, we do it all the time, we’re just doing it with full awareness this time around. And learning to sit with all that judgement and discomfort and let it pass with our breath is one of the best ways to get past it. It just is. This too shall pass.