Working With Sound

This post builds on my post, Our Fear of Silence, that was published on PsychCentral.  It originally appeared in January.

With all of the focus on keeping one’s attention on the breath, mindfulness meditation begins to sound like an internal experience.  But if the goal is full awareness of the present moment, we must not shut out the external world while placing our attention on the breath.  For this reason, I often find it effective to remain present by focusing on the sounds around me.

To Let Go Of Or To Set Down Thoughts?

In a post of mine published on PsychCentral, “Handling Intrusive Thoughts While Meditating,” I wrote about how to label and let thoughts go during meditation.  But currently, I’m in the midst of a crisis in my family and some pretty significant thoughts about it come up during meditation.  I don’t want to let these thoughts go.  They may help me figure things out, resolve things, and make things better.  If I let them go I may just lose them without any benefit of having had them.  This also happens when very creative ideas pop-up while meditating.  Why just let a good idea go and return to the breath?

Keep Quiet - State Your Intention, part two

I wrote in May in a post called “State Your Intention” of a meditation that helps to establish an intention and put it to use in working toward your goals.  Framing a positive and present intention can help us stay to directed and achieve what we want.  Intention can be a guide as we work to become the person we want to become.  Make sense?  Well, not so fast.

Working With Limitations

Limitations.  We all have them, but sometimes illness adds new ones that we never before had to deal with.  Accepting this fact was a challenge.

When I was hit by one episode that left me psychotic, suicidal, and hospitalized I was 31 and had just been promoted to VP of Sales at the company for which I worked.  An incorrect diagnosis and my poor response to the medications prescribed, as well as my refusal to accept mental illness and my subsequent noncompliance with my doctors’ orders, left me reeling for years.  I fell into a string of small jobs, just to keep health insurance, and checked into and out of psychiatric hospitals several times.  The hole in my resume became so large, and my ability to deal with stress so frail, that it became clear that I was not going back to the executive suite.  The effect that stress had on my moods, and the moods themselves, severely limited the amount of responsibility I could handle on the job.  I continued to work, but limitations were holding me back.

Compassion

Even a casual survey of popular media will insist on countless benefits of mindfulness meditation.  Practice will make you better able to deal with stress, reverse the cognitive effects of aging, spur creativity, improve test scores, promote deeper sleep, and who knows what else.  If all of the claims are to be believed, mindfulness meditation may just one day save the world.  It all may be a bit overblown.  However, for more than 2,000 years mindfulness meditation has been practiced to alleviate suffering, both in the meditator and in others.  Its track record in promoting compassion is strong and accepted.

Is This Mindfulness Thing Working?

(repost from August 2012)

I haven’t been mindful at all lately.  I chewed up my daughter’s Elmo fork in the garbage disposal, I keep making trips to the basement for things I forgot to get the last time I was down there, and I drove off with my lunch bag containing my phone, wallet, and lunch sitting on the roof of the car.  It seems I spend a half hour each day meditating and the rest of the day overlooking things.  Meditating is difficult and often boring work.  At times it can be very unsettling.  So why do I bother?

Open Meditation

Tonight I began leading an open meditation group at Mama's Wellness Joint in Philadelphia.  We'll hold it every Wednesday night from 7:30p to 8:30p.  If you're in or around Philly, drop-in.  It will be great to see you.

Information on Mama's website here.