Dealing with an Overactive Mind

Meditation should be helping you focus your concentration and calm your mind through mindfulness. But the goal of mindfulness meditation is to also keep being mindful after your sitting. To carry the attunement you get from sitting, into your daily activities. This takes a concerted effort. It's not just about sitting for x minutes and then going about business as usual. You need to carry on what you take from your sittings and apply it to everyday life. Taming the monkey mind is not something that happens overnight. It takes a concerted effort to retrain the mind and let go of the poorly conditioned thinking process.

Reading out aloud can help this.

Mindfulness meditation is not a quick fix at all. It's a skill that needs developing over the long-term, though it does have some short-term benefits too.

Maybe you could find a better teacher? What about trying a different meditation technique like staring at a candle for a few moments before closing the eyes, or even open-eyed meditation. That's a pretty cool one.

You might also benefit from doing it in a group once a week to help support sittings on your own (if covid allows). Zoom meditation groups can work too. Meditating in groups is great because you experience the collective energies of everyone and this can enhance your overall practice.

If you genuinely feel it's not working, then maybe you'd benefit more from deep relaxation strategies which shouldn't be confused with meditation, but even with these you should try and continue with what you experience in your sessions into your daily life, or else you just undo the hard work gained in the practice.

Patience and effort is key to success, so maybe you also need to give yourself a little more time

Good luck in whatever you choose to do. Would be interesting to hear about your progress.

 

All change is subtle. We can barely see 99% of the change that is taking place in the world in any given moment, but we know it's happening. Just look at facial hair growth, or nails.

The same rule applies to recovery practices in general and meditation in particular.

As long as there is more positivity in your experience than negativity, then you'll make progress, just that you might not see or realise it straight away.

I think this is one of the hardest lessons for us to learn in recovery. Not to lose faith that we are making ground, and especially when things don't feel like they're going the way we ultimately hope they are. And even more so when we suffer the added hardships of relapsing.

Keeping short meditation log entries into a meditation diary can be really helpful. One, they are positively affirming and two, it's quick and easy to reflect over uplifting and reinforcing references for any low periods you may experience in the future.

By expanding our meditation practice to include things like journalling, reinforces the whole experience, because like I mentioned, meditation isn't just about sitting still on a seat, so the more we bring it in our lives, the more we will be able to reap it's rewards.

I'm curious.

Who taught you?

How long have you been practising for?

How long do you generally sit for?

Do you aspire to sitting for longer?

Are you aware of the benefits of going deeper in your meditations?

If I was to ask you, "how would you go deeper?" What would you say to me?