Lived Experience Forum

[Silenus]

This is a thread about Mindfulness meditation. I encourage you all to ask questions if you are new to it, or to share your own experiences and thoughts about it.

For me, Mindfulness is an increasingly important part of my life, and one of the most effective coping mechanisms I have...

My introduction to the Westernised concept of Mindfulness started with a book called "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. It's even available as an audio book, read by the man himself. Once you get past the funny German accent and the calm voice that sounds like he swallowed a fistful of diazepam half an hour before the recording session, it's a great way to consume his words. I used to listen to it in the car on the way to work or, even better, on public transport.

Mindfulness, simply put, is making sure that you are "right here, right now". It is a form of meditation, a way of appreciating and experiencing the world around you. Forget about your past or your future. Focus on this "Now" moment that is actually the only moment that will ever exist. Observe and experience the sensations of tasting this apple, or looking at that drop of dew sparkling in the morning sun.

I have been gradually increasing my mindfulness meditation to the point where it is a major part of my every day. For me, meditation should not be about sitting uncomfortably cross-legged for 30 minutes a day at 9:30 each morning, chanting a calming mantra and focusing on emptying my mind. That doesn't work for me. Meditation is simply living life in the now, without all of the constant chatter of my thoughts and emotions distracting me, flitting around like butterflies. Meditation can be practised at any time in any place. You can be standing in a crowded noisy train getting bounced this way and that, and still be meditating.

Meditation is calmness. It energises you. It relaxes you. It increases your resilience. It improves your focus. It allows you to cope. It makes you appreciate life on so many more levels than you ever thought possible. It is the single most important wellness strategy that I have.

The whole concept of time is just about the biggest enemy of Mindfulness. It's all about the Now moment. Time as we know it so often disregards the Now moment. We're so busy with the swirling churning thoughts in our head, worrying about deadlines or possible problems in the future, or caught up in guilt and other baggage from the past, that there is no possible way we are ever going to succeed in being Mindful or truly present in the Now...

That's the whole point of Mindfulness. Calm the thoughts and emotions tearing you away from what you are doing, sensing and feeling right at this very moment.

Your thoughts will be going "I don't have time for this. There's an exam coming up. I need to put the bins out tonight. Is it recycling week? What are we going to have for dinner? I need to go shopping. Damn! I forgot to call grandma again. She must really hate me. I hope Aunty Beryl is going to be okay..." and so on and so on and so on... thoughts, thoughts, thoughts... dragging us away...

Did you even taste that strawberry? Did you even notice that you ate it? It's gone down your gullet and you forgot to enjoy it. There is a moment of pleasure in the Now, gone. And now you feel bad about failing to be Mindful, and that then drags you away from the next strawberry...

I won't say Mindfulness is an easy thing to do at first, even though it's actually the easiest thing in the world to do. Young children do it instinctively. But we have spent a lifetime becoming indoctrinated and enslaved by our inner world of thoughts, and there is much to unlearn, much inner turmoil to still, before we can naturally and easily enter a state of Mindfulness meditation, even in a crowded noisy room...

It's well worth the effort. It's a game changer...

I will structure my thoughts some more, and write further posts on Mindfulness shortly. I wrote some things about it on another forum that I feel capture it well, so I need to find them.

Also, I am now going to go for a morning walk down on the esplanade by the water, putting Mindfulness into practice. Many hugs and happy vibes beaming to you all... 🙂

[MoonGal]

@Silenus - great thread, will revisit when I have more time. Thanks for starting it.

[Silenus]

My pleasure, @MoonGal. 🙂

[Silenus]

Hahaha... it's rainy and windy at the moment, so I thought I would delay my morning Mindfulness walk until the sun greets me with his Apollonian warmth and presence...

In the meantime, I can waffle on a bit more about mindfulness and meditation in general...

I have come to believe very strongly in neuroplasticity - the ability for us to essentially rewire our brains to a certain extent. Throughout the course of my life, I have, for better or worse, believed that it is possible to reason my way through most things.

A few spectacular failures at applying reason to the often chaotic disorder that exists in my life (especially in the internal world inside my head and my heart) have tempered this view with a touch of realism, but I still remain staunch in my pursuit of growth and personal evolution of self.

As part of that, I meditate. I meditate a lot. It would be fair to say that I spend more of my every day meditating than I do any other thing. One of my life goals is to achieve a near-constant meditative state.

As I wrote before, for me, meditating is not sitting in an uncomfortable cross-legged position chanting a mantra. It is not focussing on emptiness and blanking out my mind. It is not bringing quiet to the tumultuous thoughts and voices raging in my head. It is not removing myself from the chaos of the world so that I can have some quiet time. It is not even just Mindfulness...

Meditation is life, expressing and appreciating itself. It is beyond measurement, for the more that we measure in our lives, the more inequality and conflict we find. We can manufacture conflict out of thin air, and we do it with alarming ease.

Meditation goes beyond the internal watcher and watched. It is the peace beyond duality (for it is the duality concept that is one of the few dangerous traps of Mindfulness techniques).

In trying to describe meditation as it exists for me, I may come across as a spiritualist or a mystic, because that is the kind of language that lends itself best to trying to do the impossible - describe the indescribable...

Thus far in my 44 years of life, I have spent 40 of them in intellectual ignorance of my bipolar. My gut, however, has spent that time learning what it needed to learn in order to survive and navigate the rest of my flesh and blood to where I am now.

Mindfulness came comparatively easy to me when I first happened upon it. Perhaps this is because my gut instincts had already taken me to similar appreciations of the now moment, purely as an instinctual attempt to survive the inner storms. Mindfulness resonates with me at a very deep level, and the peace that it brings about within me has done much to restore my resilience and ability to cope with the unavoidable biochemical sloshings to and fro inside the confines of my cranium.

The past 4 years have been an incredible journey, as my eyes were finally opened to all of the unfortunate patterns of extended highs and lows. Typically, I functioned highly for about 2 years, then crashed into a profound depression lasting anywhere from a few months to 2 years (for my worst one ever).

It would appear, based upon these past 4 years, that I have broken or otherwise disrupted that pattern. For that, I am grateful. I still have much to deal with from day to day, with the turmoil of my mood disorder, but I have found that the calmness that results from a meditative state can provide a restful refuge from the sometimes constant chaos of my churning thoughts, changing energy levels and moods.

Life is an incredible journey. Even pain is an incredible journey, when viewed the right way. From pain comes much knowledge and strength and compassion and empathy. That little thought alone helps to deal with my pain as I navigate the journey of my life.

[BlueBay]

Hi @Silenus

Great post, thank you 🙂

I practice mindfulness meditation as well but I am just at the beginning.  And you're right it's not easy because your mind does go round in circles.  I know I live a very stressful life, worrying all the time about this and that. And sometimes I stop and think OMG where has the day gone, what have I done - and all i have done is stress and worry about the past, the hurt, the future - but i know i need to stop and live for the now because that's all we have.

Just last week in my DBT session with my therapist we did mindfulness while eating a raisin.  She grabbed a raisin each and we both did it.  First we held the raisin in our hand, looked at it, touched it and moved it arouond our hand.  Then we put the raisin near our nose to smell it; then we put the raisin near our lips, moved it across our mouth. Then we put the raisin inside our mouth and moved it around. Just sitting there being aware of this one single raisin in our mouth.  I moved it around my mouth and then she said to gently bite it and feel the raisin.  We continued doing this until we finally ate the raisin.  The whole minduflness took a few minutes.

It was amazing, because we normally just gulp our food down without even realising what the food tastes like, how does it feel in our mouth. 

i love being mindful when at the beach, sitting there listening to the waves, feeling the breeze in my face; having the sun shine - there is definitely something about water that relaxes me.

My pyschiatrist has said to me that the more I practice mindfulness the more I will learn and be able to cope better. I guess the hard part is putting it into practice.  But I'm trying daily.

Take care 🙂

[Silenus]

Here is one major supposed contradiction of meditation that I have found:

If I pursue it, it disappears.

If I actively try to meditate, if I sit down with the conscious purpose of putting myself into a meditative state through an exercise of my will and my conscious mind, then I have really lost the opportunity to meditate. Now, instead of the emptiness and the silence that is the natural state of meditation, I am the seeker, the person attempting to meditate, the one who is saying "shush" or yelling "Silence!" in contradiction of all that meditation is.

Where there is conflict, meditation evaporates back into the turmoil and the chaos of our everyday lives.

Meditation is the silence behind the noise. It is always there.

To me, meditation is a fading away of self, of ego. When your sense of self steps aside, you are truly able to see and hear and feel and taste and smell, all without judgement.

When we judge, who is doing the judging? When we measure something, who is doing the measuring? When we analyse ourselves, who is doing the analysing?

In essence, what we are doing is splitting ourselves into multiple parts, and from this split comes conflict. When I say to myself "I don't like this particular aspect of myself. I must find out why it is so, and then I must find out how to fix it", what am I really doing? Similarly, when I say "I must meditate", what am I really doing?

A part of myself is standing up and assuming authority over all of the other parts of myself, and saying "Everyone! We must do this!" What is this doing inside me? Can you see it within yourself, dive deeply within your own self as you are reading this sentence, and look at what is happening within you?

This authority figure part of myself is saying to do a certain thing. Other parts of myself start to rebel, to ask "Why?" or to say "No!" Then there is conflict, there is churning of thoughts, there is stress and tension and chaos. There is noise.

Not the silence I had hoped to achieve...

[Former-Member]

Thanks @Silenus

Great idea to start a new thread on this. Will take time later to go through it more.

[Silenus]

Hi @BlueBay. Wow! What a wonderful experience you have of Mindfulness. You say you are just at the beginning of your journey with it, but I say that you have already mastered it!

It is both the easiest and most difficult thing to do in our lives, I would suggest. Hahaha...

That exercise you did with the raisin, that is a classic example of the power of Mindfulness to expand our minds (and at the same time contract it to focus on these sensations and experiences happening right now).

I too love the water. I have spent many hours becoming the ocean or the river or the lake, as I meditate away my mundane fears and concerns...

Sending you lots of happy ommmmmmm vibes...

[Silenus]

Much of my understanding of meditation has been enriched by a wonderful philosopher chappy called Jiddu Krishnamurti. If I may, I would like to share a link to some of his thoughts on meditation, here.

[BlueBay]

Hey @Silenus

Now that you mention neuroplasticity!! - my DBT therapist told me about a book by Dr. Rick Hanson called How to Hardwire your brain for Happiness.  I've had a quick look at this on google and it's interesting.  You might want to have a look at it 🙂