Hey there. So I have a confession. I have a restless mind. My mind is constantly working
and thinking about things I need to do and ways to become better. This is good to a certain
extent because it keeps me driven and helps maintain my ambition, but it also has ended
up being problematic when I start falling into spirals of deep thought. Thoughts about
consequences, other people’s opinions or any of other countless things that don’t
have anything to do with the here and now.
I wanted to do something about this and so I tried meditating. I heard that meditation
is great for the restless mind and would help me manage my thoughts. I did this for a little
bit and it just sucked. I failed miserably at not thinking and simply being able to sit
still. But I figured that I wasn’t the only one who found it that difficult. In fact,
in a 2020 study out of the UK from Simmonson and colleagues, it was found that 43% of people
stopped practicing mindfulness right after learning it, while only 32% continued to practice
it from time to time. So I decided to learn a little bit more from Mindfulness professor
Jon Kabat-Zinn and see if I could shift my approach and get better at it.
One of the great misconceptions of meditations is that your mind is completely quiet and
blank. You know forcing yourself to sit there and silence your head is kinda crazy and ultimately
ends up giving you a headache. Or atleast it did for me. Especially early on, when you’re
practicing you’ve got thoughts coming in and out of your head which can be overwhelming
when you don’t know any better. However, the mind is actually like a body of water.
It can be still at times and can sometimes have emotional waves. It really depends on
the day. Even when things are agitated on the surface and have hurricane-like manifestations,
several meters under the surface, everything is level.
And the mind is very much like that. Despite what you might be feeling
on the surface, if you are able to drop into a state of awareness and calm, you can prevent
yourself from getting caught up in the turbulent tide of your mind. This all simply comes through
practice...naturally.
Meditation can often use an object of attention to direct our focus when we’re sitting still.
Whether it’s our breath, which is the most common; or it’s our hearing sensation; or
even our thoughts for that matter. This is a concept called having a thought mirror.
Now, a mirror simply reflects what’s in front of it exactly as it is, it doesn’t
restructure it or reach out and grab it. With thoughts, they come and they go, the mirror
doesn’t hang on to it or push it away. It stays neutral and sees it for what it is - a
thought that arises in the sea of awareness, and then it’s gone.
You might feel a certain frustration and anxiety - maybe you are stressed out about a job promotion
or a Covid lockdown or what somebody thinks of you. That thought event simply needs to
be allowed to show itself and not fed into. It will come and then go. And then the same
is true for the next thought. It will rise and then fall. You’re not fighting it. When
you’re judging the thought and resisting it, you tend to assign blame and think about
consequences and actions and suddenly you’re having a whole conversation with yourself.
Stop. Don’t mess around with your thoughts and entertain them. All you have to do is
see them as thought not as truth. As with all mindfulness, practice makes it
a lot better, so keep leveling up. Don’t start with the most complex thoughts and problems.
You might be meditating and focusing on your breath and realize that your mind is off at
the supermarket thinking about the ingredients you need to buy for dinner. That’s ok. You
see what’s on your mind and noticed that it’s drifted away. Simply bring it back
to your breath. Within a few seconds, it will again drift away and then you bring it back
and again and again. It’s kind of like lifting a weight, which can get difficult, but you
keep doing repetitions to strengthen the muscle. It’s just that in case, the muscle is your
mind.
So no matter how many times you get distracted, the reality is that the mind can be trained
and is tameable. You just gotta stick with it. Those are my 2 cents about managing thoughts
and adopting a greater sense of awareness through mindfulness. Thanks for watching.
Like, comment, share, subscribe. Do all that good stuff and I’ll see you next time. Bye
bye.