Practicing (and I mean practicing) Meditation

Breathe in...breathe out..breathe in..breathe out, I love you..breathe in, I love you too..breathe out "what was that loud noise coming from the living room?"..breathe in "did I start the washer? Oh crap! I'm supposed to be meditating. Right, meditating..Breathe in...breathe out..breathe in..breathe out.
So began and continued my first meditation session. In the book "Christian Meditation" Finley says "The guideline for meditation with respect to the mind is to be present, open, and awake, neither clinging to nor rejecting anything." This is more difficult than it sounds; at least the not "clinging" part was for me. It was also very hard not to judge myself for the thoughts that came and went. When I caught myself thinking about doing laundry, I felt guilty. After all, I was supposed to be meditating, right? But in the book, he says to be open to everything and let the thoughts flow though you. It reminds me of something one of my creative writing teachers had me do. She would present a topic and the class would just start writing with reckless abandon. We could not stop to judge our writing or edit it. We just wrote without a filter. Somehow by the end of the 15 minutes we spent just writing we would get to the good stuff, but we couldn’t have gotten there if we'd spent that time editing our thoughts before we even wrote them. As I was meditating it felt the same. I had to remind myself not to edit my thoughts as they came and went. After a few minutes it got easier not to edit and just to let them come and go.