I really want to know how to meditate.
I lie in my bed watching my thoughts come and go .. getting aware of my breath and surroundings..but soon I realise that I was unable to control my thoughts and meditation wasn't much of a success.
But it has happened correctly once or twice and I remember it was Peaceful.my mind slowly went blank
So how do you do it? Any short and crisp technique?
As any tool to control your mind, meditation may not be easy to learn.
If anyone told me 3 years ago that I would be able to sit still for an hour and a half “not doing anything” – I would not believe them. As a matter of fact, I prided myself on being energetic go-getter who needed to be on the move all the time. A long-time yoga practitioner, I could never fully succeed in savasana – a corps pose, which is a form of meditation. Rarely I could stop going over my to-do list, or dwelling on the unpleasant conversation at work, or thinking about what to cook for dinner – you name it - while in savasana.
Once I realized that I would never get out of CRPS (which was my chronic pain condition) unless I do something, I signed up for the meditation class. A one-day class consisted of about four 45-minute meditations, with talks and breaks in between. After taking the meditation class, I started meditating daily in the evening. It was hard. My mind would start wandering, my anxiety would start rising about 10-15 minutes into it. To make the matter worse, I was in pain from sitting still: as I was sitting, I experienced increase in pain not only in my hands, but also in arms, legs and feet. Since I lost flexibility in my joints to dystonia, I could not sit on the floor cross-legged anymore, so I had to use a chair, but the pain was still present.
I tried all kinds of meditation: guided, unguided, walking, sitting, with music or without music – until I finally found my groove.
I soon found out that guided meditation did not work well for me in any form. I was too easily distracted by the voice of the instructor, by the instructions he/she was giving me, by the prescriptive nature of the instructions. I could not focus on my breath on the count of four, or two, or any given number. Instructions were amplifying my anxiety.
One of the most popular kinds of meditation, a body scan, did not work for me either. A prescribed sequence in which I was supposed to focus on my toes, then feet, then ankles, then legs etc until I reach my head was an annoyance. I would get lost half-way along my body or forget whether I took care of my right side before switching to the left side and so on. I bought various audio guides on meditation and tried to follow recommendations on proper sitting (cross-legged), on keeping my back straight, on counting the elephants instead of breaths – and was getting nowhere. Especially hard was sitting cross-legged, since my joints were cemented by dystonia.
I finally decided to just sit on the couch, rest my arms on the pillows, close my eyes and do nothing: no counting of breaths, no body scan, no imagining a place where I wanted to be as a child or a beautiful trail in the woods.
Surprisingly, the less effort I put into following the rules, the better results I was getting. I came to believe that people like me who tend to be obsessive perfectionists and over-achievers, are too uptight and tense in following instructions. Any perceived deviation from instructions was generating extra anxiety. So, the best way to start would be to abandon any prescriptions and ease your way into the practice, which is what I did.
