You don't have to be so hard on yourself when "practising meditation" though. There's another piece on the front page of HN right now about using positive reinf

You don't have to be so hard on yourself when "practising meditation" though. There's another piece on the front page of HN right now about using positive reinforcement to influence the behaviour of children. The secular Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (Jon Kabat Zinn) and Mindfulness Self Compassion (Kristen Neff) approaches both take a curious approach to mind wandering. In meditation, every time you notice the mind wandering is a learning experience. Then you go back to focus on the breath or whatever you are doing, and repeat again and again without self criticism. If meditation feels like torture my view is that you're doing it wrong.