Meditating and Thinking

I meditate twice a day. I do it when I first get up in the morning, and then again before I get ready for bed. Over the past few months, when mentioning this in conversations with friends, the most frequent comment I've heard has been something along the lines of, 'I've tried to meditate/I'm interested in meditating/I wish I could meditate, but I can't stop my mind from thinking.'

When I hear this, I say something like, 'that's kind of the point.' Then I get funny looks, which I've just had to get used to over the years for a number of reasons.

I want to talk about this comment in more detail, because it demonstrates that a lot of people don't know a whole lot about what meditation is, or what it's supposed to do.

Meditation, in the way I use it, is a type of brain training. There are many different ways in which to train one's brain. We train our brains in acquiring information, applying information, thinking critically, and comparing and contrasting, just to name a few. When I use meditation, I'm doing it to cultivate the ability to watch my thoughts and see how they affect my experience of the present moment, and of life in general. From that place of witnessing and knowing the thoughts, I can later work on understanding the role they play in my life and go about changing them or letting them go if that's what I want to do.

One of the most amazing things for me to discover, when I first sat down and began to meditate back in my teens, was that I was thinking all. the. time. I also thought that the point of meditating was to get your brain to stop thinking, and when I couldn't do it, I figured that meditating just wasn't for me and stopped doing it. This was untrue. All of those thoughts that I was having were the means through which I could acquire some awareness and insight into what I thought, how often I thought, and what happened if I shifted my focus. I started to investigate whether all of my thoughts were useful and were working for me, or if there were some thoughts that I could do without. Were there thoughts that were more persistent than others? Were there ones I didn't want to let go of because I enjoyed the emotional state into which they seemed to place me? Yes and yes. Part of meditation is experiencing the thoughts and their associated emotional states thoroughly, without getting stuck in the feelings or caught up in the thoughts, or mistaking it all for meaning something other than me being a person with a brain, and that my brain was just doing what it had learned to do over the years.

Through the process of meditation, I've learned that my thoughts have power. I've witnessed firsthand in myself how quickly I can get caught up in a spiral of negativity by thinking about situations in my life and drawing conclusions about how I have to act because of them. If I'm getting ready to do something new in my life, maybe I have thoughts like, 'I can't do this,' which cause me to feel afraid, or 'This is something I can learn,' which causes me to feel confident.

I have also learned that my thoughts are not all powerful, and am at the very beginning of understanding that my thoughts do not make me who I am as a person. I can think many things about myself, but the content of those thoughts isn't me, and not even the grouping together of those thoughts is 'me'. The part of me that's aware of what I'm thinking is as much 'me' as the thinking is, maybe even more so.

As I restarted my regular meditation practice a year and a half ago, I was initially unimpressed. I'm just sitting here and wasting time, I thought. I noticed I was thinking, and just watched the thought, feeling the restlessness and impatience that came with the thought, and it went away. Then it came back. It kept doing this for a week or two, every time I went to sit. Then something interesting started to happen in my day-to-day life. I noticed that I was going into situations that had previously been highly stressful and overwhelming but was no longer reacting so quickly to what was going on. I noticed how I was relating to challenging situations with a more balanced perspective. Joyful situations brought delight, but also the awareness that it would also pass. I noticed during meditation that I was sustaining chunks of time where I was not thinking...and then realize that I was thinking again. I began to feel calmer and more peaceful during the day as I kept this place of stillness in my life, this place where I could practice noticing thoughts and letting them move on through once I'd brought my full acceptance to them.

A few months ago, I decided to add a meditation session in the morning to my practice, and have learned a great deal about how old habits of negative thinking like to try to weasel their way in as early in the day as possible and take over. When I sit with them in silence, not judging them, not resisting them, but just realizing that brains are like computers and need to be re-programmed with new thoughts when an old program no longer works, I can become aware of the thoughts and then work on changing the ones that no longer serve a useful purpose. It is a process. It's not magic. But it brings me a great sense of calm, stability, and peace of mind that was not part of my life a few years ago.

So if there's anyone reading this, thinking they want to meditate but that they just can't because they think too much or don't have enough time, I encourage you to take 10 minutes a day (or whatever you can handle), sit down, and try it. Don't let the thinking stop you, because it's the thinking that will help you to learn how to meditate. From there, a new relationship to your thoughts, feelings, and life experience can form.

Acceptance, Resistance, and Judgment

I was having a conversation with a friend not too long ago and she mentioned something about how she liked talking with me because I was non-judgmental. It was high praise. As I suspect is the case for others, we rarely judge others as much as we judge ourselves, and when it comes to myself and my own perceived shortcomings, I am perhaps the harshest judge of all. With the passing of time, I find a little more compassion for myself, a little more willingness to drop something I've been telling myself for many years that I could have sworn was the truth but that my life experiences are showing me is not as true as I thought.

Earlier today, I thought about this as I drank tea and attempted to find something funny to watch on Netflix. I was thinking about the stuff I have to do to get ready for the school year, my concerns about being off on my triathlon training schedule, the trash needing to be taken out, the weather, and my slightly lower-than-normal energy level over the past few days. I wondered if I was at the very start of becoming sick, since there has been some kind of virus going around. My inner sense was that the low energy had to do with my body dealing with something and not quite falling over into full-blown illness. Then I wondered if I was just playing a game with myself and trying to get out of doing stuff that I haven't been feeling super psyched about doing lately. The reason I'm not feeling super psyched is because I've been feeling low on energy. It's fabulously circular reasoning, and until I wrote it out just now, I didn't realize it.

Something else that's going on beyond this surface level of thinking is that I have a tendency to become judgmental of myself when my energy drops. It took me a long time to be aware of what's going on when my energy drops. I started to notice that I would see the energy drop, and then I'd get curious about the drop and an answer would come to me. It's usually something like 'you're getting sick' or 'you've been staying up until 3 am the last four days' or 'you did just run five miles'. At this point, one of two things happens. Either I am able to accept what is going on and deal with it from there, or I start to resist it. In today's situation, the judgment hit as soon as I started resisting that I wasn't feeling well in the form of, 'you're just trying to get out of doing stuff that you have to do, and if you don't do it, it means you're failing at everything you're doing.'

Once I start resisting the way an experience is for me, things go downhill quickly. If I'm getting sick and I don't want to be sick, it takes me no time to start judging myself and berating myself in an attempt to rally and motivate myself into doing stuff even when I'm not feeling well and know that the best thing to do to care for myself is to just chill out. Sometimes the judging shows up when I'm taking a big ol' leap out of the status quo and trying to change something that is important to me and matters in my life. Over and over again, I find that the best thing to do in these situations is to let go of the judgments and the resistance. This lets me just be with however I'm feeling in a place of gentle acceptance.

Yeah. Not so easy to do. I know.

Part of the reason it's not so easy is if we're really good at judging ourselves and resisting ourselves, we might not even know we're doing it. The only way to deal with this, as far as I know, is to be willing to start noticing when we're judging ourselves, or to notice when we're feeling agitated, or when something is happening within our emotional or physical experience of ourselves that we just want to get the hell out and not come back. When we have the awareness, we have to just acknowledge that this is what is going on and not use it to beat ourselves up some more.

Another reason it's not so easy has to do with our understanding of what it means to accept something. Acceptance has nothing to do with rolling over and letting life batter you about while you submit resignedly to your fate. It has to do with being aware of what is happening in a situation and staying with it, without needing to change it right now and make it different right now. In order to accept difficult feelings or thoughts in a moment, it's helpful to realize that they all eventually pass, and when acceptance happens, a lot of the tension and struggle that surrounds something passes, too. If you resist that something is happening, you render yourself powerless to do anything to change it. Accepting something means that you are aware of it happening and that you are present with your felt experience of what is happening, rather than just observing it with intellectual distance.

So, as hard as it is to just kind of hang out and be generally non-productive without beating myself up for it, that's what I'm trying to do today. I can be all right with being tired. I can totally embrace the fact that I don't want to do something without getting caught up in the 'not wanting' part of it. The funny part is that, as I do just hang out and accept that I'm feeling resistant, or notice that I'm judging myself and handle it with a soft touch, it gets easier for me to treat myself with greater kindness. The judgment eases up, the resistance may or may not linger, and I find myself able to do what I absolutely must in that particular moment to care for myself.