Meditation 🧘🏻♀️
It has been a week since I read the book "Unplug: A Simple Guide to Meditation for Busy Sceptics and Modern Soul Seekers" by Suze Yalof Schwartz. 📗 The intention was to undo my naive preconceptions about meditation. And it has been almost 2 weeks since I started to practice meditation using the Headspace app. 📲 It's very helpful because it's very simple to use and takes away the "intimidating" preconceptions about meditation. Each meditation session will have a calm voice 🗣 guiding you on how to do it and all you have to do what you are told. It also explains what the session is all about using short animations. So far, it has lived up to its mission statement of wanting to "demystify meditation and to make it more accessible, more relevant to the modern-day world, and more creatively engaging". 👌🏼
While on one of my meditations, my thought drifted and wondered who was behind this Headspace app. 🤔 It took some good control of my EQ to not cut my meditation to google it like I normally would. See, meditation has instilled some discipline in me to wait until the remaining 8 mins to be over before I do it. 😅Turns out, the founder Andy Puddicombe is an ex-Buddhist monk 👨🏻🦲 turned tech founder of this meditation app. Then I googled to see if he has written any book and he did! So I searched for an epub version of his book "Get Some Headspace" 📙 which is an introduction to the Headspace meditation technique. I use the Marvin ebook reader app which has a Text-to-Speech function that reads the ebook for you. 🗣 And I listened to his book for about 3 days this week while commuting to and from work.
While writing this blog entry, I wanted to put an image of Andy Puddicombe as a reference. And lo and behold, he's an eye-candy to boot! 👁 🍬 He looks great for a 47-year old ex-monk! I'll add "gain youthful look" to the reasons why I should continue to meditate and subscribe to the Headspace app then. 😁 Oh, and it's his calm sexy ... I mean soothing voice 💆🏻♀️ with a British accent that guides you on the app's meditation sessions, by the way. Okay, where's my credit card? 💳
Anyway, endorsing the Headspace app isn't the point of this blog. So, what was it? Oh yeah, there are some good analogies on the book that I'm going to take note of here. 📝 The book did mention that it will also be helpful for meditation noobs like me to write or take note of my meditation journey. Well, I was 1 step ahead of it since I've decided to do exactly that last weekend (see my post "My Road to Meditation: And So It Begins") before I read his book. 😜
At one point during his meditation practice, he felt exhausted and frustrated after putting so much effort into trying to meditate by controlling his thoughts and also spent efforts even on trying to do less of it. So a teacher of the author explained to him what I'm labeling for myself as the "Traffic Analogy" 🚦 (there's an animation of this on the app) which goes like this.
This is how the mind looks, to begin with. Not just your mind, but everybody’s. That’s why training the mind is so important. When you see the mind in this confused state it’s very difficult to know what to do about it. 😣 For some people, it’s difficult not to panic. Sometimes people try to stop the thoughts through force. 😖 At other times they try and ignore them, to think about something else instead. Or if the thoughts are very interesting, then they might try to encourage them and get involved in them. 😏 But all these tactics are just ways of trying to avoid the reality of what is. If you think back to the busy road, it’s no different from getting up from the side of the road, running among the cars and trying to control the traffic. This is quite a risky strategy.
Here’s an idea – rather than running around in the traffic trying to control everything, why not try staying where you are for a moment? What happens then? What happens when you stay on the side of the road and just watch as the traffic goes past? 😐🛣 Maybe it’s rush hour and the road’s full of cars, or maybe it’s the middle of the night and there are very few cars. It doesn’t really matter which it is. The point is to get used to 'holding your seat' 💺 on the side of the road and watching the traffic go by.
When you start to approach your meditation in this way you’ll notice that your perspective changes, In stepping back from the thoughts and feelings, there will be a sense of increased space. 😑 It might feel as if you are simply an observer, watching the thoughts, the traffic, go by. Sometimes you might forget, and before you know it you’ll find yourself running down the road 🏃♀️ after a fancy-looking car. This is what happens when you experience a pleasant thought. You see it, get caught up in it, and end up chasing after the thought. But then all of a sudden, you’ll realize what you’re doing and, at that moment, you’ll have the opportunity to return to your seat at the side of the road. At other times, you might see some traffic coming that you don’t like the look of. 😣 Maybe it’s an old rusty car, an unpleasant thought, and you’ll no doubt rush out into the traffic to try and stop it. ✋🏼 You might try to resist this feeling or thought for quite some time before you realize that you’re back in the road again. But the moment you do, at that moment, you have the opportunity to take up your position on the side of the road again. 😑 Over time, this will get easier. You won’t want to run out into the road quite so often and you’ll find it easier and easier to just sit and watch the thoughts go by. This is the process of meditation. 😌
Of course, if you want to think about something you can, you have that ability to reflect, to remember, or to project into the future and imagine how things might be. But what about the thoughts that just 'pop' 💥 into your mind when you sit to meditate, or when you’re walking down the street, or sitting at your desk trying to read a book? What about those thoughts? You didn’t bring those thoughts to mind, did you? They 'came' to mind."
It's those kinds of thoughts that just pop up from nowhere that distracts me from whatever I'm doing at the moment. Whether I'm writing process documentation at work or talking to a friend who is going through something. So I end up feeling that I haven't really achieved anything 🤷🏻♀️ or haven't really given that friend my full attention which gives me the feeling of guilt and restlessness. 🥺 And since I feel like everything I have to do is still up in the air, I panic and snap the head off of whoever happens to be in my way. 🤬 And since I'm chasing after multiple thoughts, my mind is always active. 🤕 Hence, my chronic insomnia. I can't turn it off! Which is the reason why I'm trying meditation now out of desperation. 😰
So, let me digest that Traffic Analogy 🚦 again. I am not supposed to control or stop the flow of my thoughts during meditation because that's just the nature of our mind (traffic). Just let it be. I may chase after some cars 🚗 coz it looks nice (pleasant thoughts). Or chase after the hotdog truck coz I'm hungry (almost always). Or wanting to chase away a rinky-dink car (unpleasant thoughts) by rationalizing. But as soon as I catch myself doing it (by being aware that I'm chasing), then I should just bring myself back to the seat beside the road to set some distance between myself and those cars (thoughts). And with practice, I should be able to do this much easier to gain some clarity and focus ... and some deep, restful, good night sleep. 😴
Once I achieve that good night slumber 💤 by having a calmer and still mind, I'm hoping to gain some "headspace" to focus on coming up with some side-gig ideas. 💪🏼
So how did my meditation practice go?
I do my 10-15 mins meditation right after I wake up (which is what's prescribed since the mind is calmer then), drink water 💦 and pee 🚽 on auto-drive. Since I'm still in my slumber state, I yawn several times and I just let it. I also fart 💨 sometimes. There’s no stopping that. And as the Unplug book said, saying a mantra can help to bring the focus back from wandering thoughts, I chose the mantra "I’m Gratefuuuuuuul" or just "Gratefuuuuuuul" which I am and want to be more of. 🙏🏼 Then I’d be distracted by my tummy grumbling loudly. 😳 Which will automatically make me think 🤔 what I am going to have for breakfast. 🍳Then I’ll realize that I’m on the intermittent diet. 🥴 So I give up the idea of having breakfast 🥞 and refocus on my breathing.
As can be expected as a meditation noob, I struggled to “control” my thoughts, to push it out of the way because I’m supposed to focus on my breathe! Doesn’t matter how hard I huff and puff like a pregnant woman 🤰🏻 in labor, it’s to no avail. My mind is still riddled with random thoughts. For most of my life, I have been working hard to train myself to reach a capacity of being able to take on as many thoughts 💭 as possible. To multitask by juggling 🤹♀️ several tasks of my several roles all at the same time. To dissect everything, to plan way ahead, to only take calculated risks. Until just a few years ago when I just realized and admitted to myself that I’m not as productive as I thought I was 😕 when trying to multitask than if I just do 1 thing at a time. And now, here I am, wanting to do meditation to just focus on one thing ... my breathing, the present.
The “Gain Some Headspace” book has another analogy to explain this struggle. The “Wild Horse” 🐎 analogy.
“Imagine you grab hold of one of these horses 🐴 and try to keep it in one place. Holding on to it tightly with a rope. 🧶 Impossible! No man or woman can hold down a wild horse, it’s too strong. Even if you got together with all your friends you’d never be able to hold it down in one place. This is not the way to tame a wild horse. When you first catch one of these horses, you need to remember that they are used to running free. They’re not used to standing still for a long time, or being forced against their will to stay in one place. Your mind is like this wild horse when you sit to meditate. You can’t expect it to stay still in one place all of a sudden just because you’re sitting there like a statue doing something called meditation! So when you sit down with this wild horse, this wild mind, you need to give it lots of room. Rather than trying to immediately focus on the object of meditation, give your mind time to settle, to relax a little. What’s the hurry?” 🤠
There’s a short animation for this on the Headspace app. It explains that what we’re supposed to do is to tie a lose and long rope around the neck of the horse and give it lots of space to roam at first. Then gently rope it in bit by bit. Keep doing it while keeping a close eye on it but give enough space to let it feel at ease instead of nervous. And hopefully, we’ll get to a point when finally we can say that we have tamed the wild horse! 🤠👍🏼
Going back to our wild thoughts, how do we rope them in? By acknowledging them when our mind drifted to some distracting thought. How? By gently noting what the distraction is, whether it’s “Thinking” 🤔 or “Feeling” 😣. Were you thinking of something or were you feeling something? And by “gently” noting, the author described it like tapping the thought with a feather on a crystal glass and noting it as “thinking” or “feeling”. Then just take the focus back to our breathing or our mantra. With practice, like every other skill we want to learn, the author promises that it will become second nature for us to refocus and be on the present. Click here to see the short animation from Headspace about this Noting technique. 📝
So have I made you curious enough about meditation? It started out that way for me too. I noticed the rising number of people within my awareness practicing meditation. 🧘🏻♀️ Not sure if it's a Baader-Meinhof thing again but it seems to me like it's becoming mainstream pretty quickly. If more and more people are realizing & reaping the benefits of meditation, I want a piece of that too! 😜 Well, here's to hoping that I continue to reap its benefits. 👍🏼
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