Dealing With Thoughts During Meditation

(repost from August 2012)

It’s easy to say that when meditating one should focus on the breath and release thoughts as they arise, but it’s incredibly difficult to do.  I’ve been a bit hypomanic lately, and ideas are flying through my head.  Concentration and attention are very difficult.  Acknowledging thoughts and letting them go is hard enough on a good day.  What do I do now?

During mindfulness meditation you keep your attention on your breath, but you want to be fully aware in this moment.  So you still take note of sounds and smells, aches and pains, all that makes up the present moment.  When thoughts arise the instructions are to notice them, let them go, and return to the breath.  But to just blot out thoughts without paying attention to them would not be very mindful at all.  Don’t ignore your thoughts, work with them.

Why Work?

I’m grateful we have a social safety net.  It’s important to help people pull themselves up, and to provide care for those who cannot support themselves because of serious disability.  The net may not be cast broad enough, as too many people who need help are denied services.  That said, the most important thing that led to my recovery from serious mental illness was being denied Social Security Disability Income. 

How Guided Meditation Can Become A Distraction

I come from a long line of seekers, my mother’s side of the family known for trying on various spiritual traditions in a search for truth.  My mother herself has been experimenting with meditation recently, and has tried several forms of guided meditation.  The one that has worked best for her is Oprah Winfrey's and Deepak Chopra’s 21-day meditation challenge on the computer.

Last week she wanted to share with me a meditation she finds beneficial.  It was a busy day at her house, with much of the family in and out, so we escaped to her office to follow the guided instructions.  While I am glad so many people are following this program and finding relaxation in meditation, I found it too distracting to be truly mindful.

Introduction to Meditation Series

On Tuesday, April 16th, I'll begin teaching a four-week beginner's meditation class at Mama's Wellness Joint in Center City Philadelphia.  If you're in the area and want to start meditating, or if you have tried it before and couldn't stick with the practice, please join me.  You can find the details on the Mama's Wellness Joint website here.

And I should mention again the workshop I'm giving for NAMI PA, Main Line.  It's on mindfulness meditation for people with mental illness and those who support them, and will be held on April 14th in Ardmore, PA.  A previous post about this workshop is here.

Focused Attention

I write about, and teach, mindfulness meditation as an adjunct therapy for mental illness.  Many in the mindfulness community extol the practice’s benefits of increasing non-judgment, compassion, and acceptance.  These, of course, are wonderful things.  But I most want to help people manage their lives in a way that makes them self-reliant, productive, and true to their ideas of how they can be most successful.  So of all of the components of mindfulness, the one that helps achieve these goals most immediately is focused attention.

Moving Toward Greater Creativity

Much of the recent focus on mindfulness and meditation has been on stress management.  Few things help one deal better with the stressors of everyday life.  Just several minutes of meditation each day can reduce blood pressure, improve sleep, and mitigate the severity of episodes and symptoms of mental illnesses.  But there is more.  Meditation quiets the mind, and a quieter mind is more likely to have room for new and better ideas about the challenges one faces in life, business, and art.

Researchers at the Institute for Psychological Research and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition of Leiden University in the Netherlands found a tremendous impact of focused-attention (mindfulness) and open-monitoring meditation (observing without judging) on creativity.  “First, open-monitoring meditation induces a control state that promotes divergent thinking, a style of thinking that allows many new ideas of being generated (sic).  Second, Focused Attention meditation does not sustain convergent thinking, the process of generating one possible solution to a particular problem.”  Meditation equals more ideas.

How to Begin Meditating

(Repost from July 2012)

Meditation is quite different from sitting there doing nothing, thinking nothing.  It is instead a focused attention on one’s present experience.  A chance to minimize the distractions that pull one away from the present. Pleasant events are often spoiled by comparison to other good experiences or worry that this wonder may soon end.  Difficult experiences are often tempered by a desire for escape and the fantasy of being somewhere else doing something else.  The mind will wander all over the place and our present experience, good or bad, may be missed.

So meditation becomes a practice.  A practice to remain here, in the present moment, fully aware.  It is something that must be practiced to achieve benefit, and the practice, though simple, can be extremely challenging.  But the benefits, as described in other posts and in countless others’ experience, are worth it.

So how does one begin?