Four months of meditation
I mentioned a while back that starting to do meditation was the most unexpected thing that happened for me last year. I've been meaning to do a post about it, but took longer than I thought, because I found it quite difficult to put this stuff into words. Finally I've got something down, though, so here goes.
The backstory
For a long time, I've had a problem where work stress impacts the rest of my life. I get into cycles where I spend all my time thinking about work, dreaming about work, sleeping badly, and, in a frustratingly vicious cycle, feeling too tired and irritated to do anything that isn't work. I just exist as this little brooding ball of work thoughts with no time or energy for the rest of my life. Everything else I want to accomplish in my life gets knocked aside when work stress takes over.
Earlier last year, I got advice from a couple of quarters about practicing mindfulness to help disconnect from work things and connect to non-work things. I read a great book, The Happiness Trap, which explained a lot about what was going on with me. Man, that book was worth it just for the part where it explains how focussing on solving your problems makes you unhappy, because duh, you spend all your time focussing on your problems. The mindfulness techniques and the other advice in the book sounded interesting, but they didn't really click into place for me. I tried them and it was like, nah. Close, but no cigar.
In September, as I was leaving my old job and starting my new one, I signed up for a six week meditation course. I was grasping at straws, to be honest, because I was basically leaving a job that I loved because I could no longer accept what the stress was doing to me, and this wasn't the first time I'd had to do that. I was like, I have no idea how this meditation thing is supposed to work, but I am going to try anything that might help me break this freaking cycle.
The meditation course turned out to be really very cool. It really emphasised the wide variety of techniques and traditions of meditating, which I didn't know existed, and made meditation seem like, not some mysterious and mystical thing, but a very practical and grounded thing with a hundred different ways you can approach it. The teacher encouraged us to experiment and find our own things that worked for us, and she really emphasised the benefits of doing something daily, even if it was ten minutes.
So I started doing daily meditation, not really expecting much. The main meditation I was doing was not complex. It was ten minutes a day of just trying to clear my mind and focus on my breath, often by counting breaths. I tried other things occasionally, but that was the bread and butter. I didn't feel like I was doing anything major, but to my surprise I got some really big changes as a result of doing that. I wasn't having grand moments of enlightenment or anything, but there was a cascade of things that ended up being different about my life after I started doing this. I'll break them down into a couple of themes here, but they're all basically different sides of the same thing.
More amiable five-year-olds
Our teacher talked about something that also featured heavily in The Happiness Trap: our constant mental dialogue that plays out during our waking hours. She called it our "playground of five-year-olds" - the chorus of voices in our heads that chime in on every topic and from every perspective, like twenty different five-year-olds in a playground.
You know when you think any thought at all, and your head is then filled with pros and cons and side issues and things you're reminded of and things you know you should do and things you don't even want to think. Like, "Hm, maybe I could go to Bali while flights are cheap," and suddenly you have seventeen different thoughts rattling around in your head: You can't afford it! / I could find a few hundred bucks / Mmm, cocktails / Could I get time off work? / Mmm, lying on the beach / Who could I go with? / Mmm, shirtless hot guys / I need a new suitcase / You can't pay off the car if you go / Um, where's my passport? / and so on. And, I mean, that's a trivial topic; an idle thought. When I was deciding whether or not to take my new job, my head was filled with a massive mental storm that raged on for a week and a half before it finally blew itself out.
Now, meditation did not actually silence the playground of five year olds in my head. Rather, it made me more aware of them, which is mildly horrifying, but actually one of the points of meditation. But I found that when I was meditating consistently, the five year olds became a bit mellower and more agreeable - they didn't disagree as dramatically or as vehemently; they were more inclined to shrug and go along. I think this in itself helped with two things - I was less likely to get into a state of furiously overthinking things, and I was finding it easier to fall asleep at night. I think the more amiable five-year-olds were also key to the two other big benefits I had...
Less mental friction
So, this used to be my typical morning: Get up. Make coffee. Drink coffee on balcony. Put cup back in kitchen. Look at pile of dirty dishes in kitchen. Feel guilty and irritated with self for letting dishes pile up. Have internal debate about doing dishes. End up not doing dishes. Feel relieved about not doing dishes. But still feel guilty and irritated with self.
Then every couple of days I'd haul myself into the kitchen and do the dishes.
I found that when I meditated in the morning, I was more inclined to do the dishes after. (Not every time, trust me, but more often.) And what I think happened was, I used to look at the dishes and the chorus of five year olds would be like, "NOOOOOOOO!! OMG I WON'T DO IT YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!" while others would be like "YES YOU HAVE TO!! OMG LOOK AT THIS MESS!!!" and so on, and the mental debate was almost as tiring as actually doing the fucking dishes. But with more agreeable five year olds, the internal debate was more like, "Noo, don't wanna!" / "Oh just do it!" / "Oh FINE".
This went for many other unpleasant tasks and many other internal debates. Housework, finances, food, health, etc - basically, there's a lot less internal resentment and grudge-holding and fear-mongering etc getting in the way of the things I need to do. I ended up calling that stuff "mental friction" - different thoughts pushing at and resisting each other, which generates pointless mental heat and makes everything feel like more effort. It's like you're giving yourself mental carpet burn because you dig your heels in and refuse to do something you know you have to, or drag yourself into doing something that you don't want to do.
If I had one reason to keep meditating, it would be to keep reducing mental friction. The days when I just do the freaking dishes are much nicer and more productive than the days where I have all the frigging debate and resistance and irritation and begrudgement and guilt. Even boring stuff like grocery shopping is quicker and easier because I have less mental friction about what I want to buy versus what I ought to buy. Now that I'm more aware of that mental carpet burn, man do I appreciate having less of it.
Obvious thing is obvious
In my first few weeks of meditation I had this flood of changes I decided to make to improve my life. And the funny thing was, they all made perfect sense and fit my life easily, but a week earlier I wouldn't have even considered them. The things I decided were:
All of this stuff was really obviously a good idea for me once I thought of it, real DUH stuff, but I had literally never considered doing these things before. I mean, getting up early is an utterly, utterly alien concept for me - I identify totally as a night owl, not an early bird. But when it finally occurred to me to try it, it really worked and it was effortless to make the change.
I think doing meditation reduced my attachment to the habits I was in, and to my preconceptions about what would work. Getting up early - I normally would have dismissed that idea without even thinking about it, because that wasn't me. Part of me still thinks it's not me, but I've been doing it consistently for months now, because it's so obviously better.
I haven't had as many obvious things to change since the first few weeks, so I think I had a backlog of obvious stuff I wasn't doing. It's more like "little duhs" than "big duhs" now, but the duh moments are still useful. It's particularly useful how obvious the duhs are. For example, another thing I did was get rid of my iMac I don't use, and the associated desk, and opened up a whole new space in the living room. I'd considered doing it in the past, but a bunch of thoughts stopped me - what if I need the iMac in future, I won't get much money for it, what if I hurt my back again and need a desk, blah blah blah. But after meditation, those thoughts really didn't matter as much. It was just more obvious that I didn't need the iMac and that I was better off with it gone.
What didn't change
Ironically, meditation didn't actually solve the work stress problem. I was a lot less stressed when I started meditating, but that was mainly because I was in a new job and I didn't really have that much pressure on me yet. But a couple of months in, I had to act in my boss' job and everything blew up all at once and OMG, I was really stressed. And then what happened was, I ended up brooding instead of meditating, and being too restless and jittery to sit still and breathe, and I was not sleeping, and everything else in my life got knocked aside because work took over my brain, and it was the same pattern all over. Since then, I've had a few more repeats of that.
Close, baby, but no fucking cigar. *g*
I think meditation will help with this in the future if I continue to do it. It will make me less likely to get into the out-of-control stress state and give me better ways to come out of it. I am also starting to understand how meditation can be a bridge to mindfulness, which I can see would be a good thing if I could do it. But it turns out I can't get there from here yet. There's other stuff that needs to happen before I can join up all the dots.
So in the end, I got a lot of benefits from meditation, but I didn't get a magic bullet for the problem I was trying to solve. I'm actually very okay with that. I suspect that's the nature of this whole journey - what you want is never going to be where you look for it; it will resist your attempts to direct it. There's actually something quite fun about that. I'm enjoying engaging with something that seems like it's going to be just a bit playful and perverse.
Yoga and meditation
I've been doing yoga intermittently for years, so it's probably worth mentioning the relationship. For me it's not currently a very strong relationship - they're quite separate activities in my mind. I don't feel that meditation has done anything to change my physical yoga. However, I find the meditative aspects of yoga are starting to do more for me, and that an improvement in my meditation is often triggered by a concept from yoga.
I think in time the influence will start to flow in both directions, and yoga and medition will end up being less separate activities and more extensions of one another.
Future plans
So I've been meditating almost daily for four months at this point. Mostly it's been just ten minutes a day of counting breaths or something similar, with occasional longer sessions or trying different stuff. I've had a few periods when I went several days without meditating, and the difference was subtle, but definitely there.
I'm also noticing a plateauing of the effects of meditation since the course finished. I think being in the course kept me more consistent and focussed, but I also suspect that the guided meditations in class were a big source of benefit. So now I'm experimenting with other options to get a deeper or different meditation weekly. Being guided seems to help, so I'm trying various MP3s, but so far they're not doing much for me. I've signed up for another eight week course soon, and I'm hoping I'll eventually find some kind of weekly meditation class or something.
I'm not even really sticking my toe into the spiritual side of meditation yet, although I am curious about it.
I am clearly an absolute beginner at this. It's almost daunting - it's so obvious that I only know a drop in the ocean of this stuff. But that's okay. The good thing is, I really like what I've done so far and I feel very sure of the benefits. Even if all I do for the rest of my life is a daily ten minutes of watching my breath, I think it has already demonstrated that it's worth doing.
This entry was originally posted at dreamwidth (
comments).
The backstory
For a long time, I've had a problem where work stress impacts the rest of my life. I get into cycles where I spend all my time thinking about work, dreaming about work, sleeping badly, and, in a frustratingly vicious cycle, feeling too tired and irritated to do anything that isn't work. I just exist as this little brooding ball of work thoughts with no time or energy for the rest of my life. Everything else I want to accomplish in my life gets knocked aside when work stress takes over.
Earlier last year, I got advice from a couple of quarters about practicing mindfulness to help disconnect from work things and connect to non-work things. I read a great book, The Happiness Trap, which explained a lot about what was going on with me. Man, that book was worth it just for the part where it explains how focussing on solving your problems makes you unhappy, because duh, you spend all your time focussing on your problems. The mindfulness techniques and the other advice in the book sounded interesting, but they didn't really click into place for me. I tried them and it was like, nah. Close, but no cigar.
In September, as I was leaving my old job and starting my new one, I signed up for a six week meditation course. I was grasping at straws, to be honest, because I was basically leaving a job that I loved because I could no longer accept what the stress was doing to me, and this wasn't the first time I'd had to do that. I was like, I have no idea how this meditation thing is supposed to work, but I am going to try anything that might help me break this freaking cycle.
The meditation course turned out to be really very cool. It really emphasised the wide variety of techniques and traditions of meditating, which I didn't know existed, and made meditation seem like, not some mysterious and mystical thing, but a very practical and grounded thing with a hundred different ways you can approach it. The teacher encouraged us to experiment and find our own things that worked for us, and she really emphasised the benefits of doing something daily, even if it was ten minutes.
So I started doing daily meditation, not really expecting much. The main meditation I was doing was not complex. It was ten minutes a day of just trying to clear my mind and focus on my breath, often by counting breaths. I tried other things occasionally, but that was the bread and butter. I didn't feel like I was doing anything major, but to my surprise I got some really big changes as a result of doing that. I wasn't having grand moments of enlightenment or anything, but there was a cascade of things that ended up being different about my life after I started doing this. I'll break them down into a couple of themes here, but they're all basically different sides of the same thing.
More amiable five-year-olds
Our teacher talked about something that also featured heavily in The Happiness Trap: our constant mental dialogue that plays out during our waking hours. She called it our "playground of five-year-olds" - the chorus of voices in our heads that chime in on every topic and from every perspective, like twenty different five-year-olds in a playground.
You know when you think any thought at all, and your head is then filled with pros and cons and side issues and things you're reminded of and things you know you should do and things you don't even want to think. Like, "Hm, maybe I could go to Bali while flights are cheap," and suddenly you have seventeen different thoughts rattling around in your head: You can't afford it! / I could find a few hundred bucks / Mmm, cocktails / Could I get time off work? / Mmm, lying on the beach / Who could I go with? / Mmm, shirtless hot guys / I need a new suitcase / You can't pay off the car if you go / Um, where's my passport? / and so on. And, I mean, that's a trivial topic; an idle thought. When I was deciding whether or not to take my new job, my head was filled with a massive mental storm that raged on for a week and a half before it finally blew itself out.
Now, meditation did not actually silence the playground of five year olds in my head. Rather, it made me more aware of them, which is mildly horrifying, but actually one of the points of meditation. But I found that when I was meditating consistently, the five year olds became a bit mellower and more agreeable - they didn't disagree as dramatically or as vehemently; they were more inclined to shrug and go along. I think this in itself helped with two things - I was less likely to get into a state of furiously overthinking things, and I was finding it easier to fall asleep at night. I think the more amiable five-year-olds were also key to the two other big benefits I had...
Less mental friction
So, this used to be my typical morning: Get up. Make coffee. Drink coffee on balcony. Put cup back in kitchen. Look at pile of dirty dishes in kitchen. Feel guilty and irritated with self for letting dishes pile up. Have internal debate about doing dishes. End up not doing dishes. Feel relieved about not doing dishes. But still feel guilty and irritated with self.
Then every couple of days I'd haul myself into the kitchen and do the dishes.
I found that when I meditated in the morning, I was more inclined to do the dishes after. (Not every time, trust me, but more often.) And what I think happened was, I used to look at the dishes and the chorus of five year olds would be like, "NOOOOOOOO!! OMG I WON'T DO IT YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!" while others would be like "YES YOU HAVE TO!! OMG LOOK AT THIS MESS!!!" and so on, and the mental debate was almost as tiring as actually doing the fucking dishes. But with more agreeable five year olds, the internal debate was more like, "Noo, don't wanna!" / "Oh just do it!" / "Oh FINE".
This went for many other unpleasant tasks and many other internal debates. Housework, finances, food, health, etc - basically, there's a lot less internal resentment and grudge-holding and fear-mongering etc getting in the way of the things I need to do. I ended up calling that stuff "mental friction" - different thoughts pushing at and resisting each other, which generates pointless mental heat and makes everything feel like more effort. It's like you're giving yourself mental carpet burn because you dig your heels in and refuse to do something you know you have to, or drag yourself into doing something that you don't want to do.
If I had one reason to keep meditating, it would be to keep reducing mental friction. The days when I just do the freaking dishes are much nicer and more productive than the days where I have all the frigging debate and resistance and irritation and begrudgement and guilt. Even boring stuff like grocery shopping is quicker and easier because I have less mental friction about what I want to buy versus what I ought to buy. Now that I'm more aware of that mental carpet burn, man do I appreciate having less of it.
Obvious thing is obvious
In my first few weeks of meditation I had this flood of changes I decided to make to improve my life. And the funny thing was, they all made perfect sense and fit my life easily, but a week earlier I wouldn't have even considered them. The things I decided were:
- stop reading about american politics, because it stresses you out
- you're not actually that interested in any of the TV you're currently watching, so stop
- set an alarm for when you need to go to bed, not when you need to get up
- get up early every day and have your free time in the morning, instead of having your free time in the evening when you're tired and just want to collapse on the couch
All of this stuff was really obviously a good idea for me once I thought of it, real DUH stuff, but I had literally never considered doing these things before. I mean, getting up early is an utterly, utterly alien concept for me - I identify totally as a night owl, not an early bird. But when it finally occurred to me to try it, it really worked and it was effortless to make the change.
I think doing meditation reduced my attachment to the habits I was in, and to my preconceptions about what would work. Getting up early - I normally would have dismissed that idea without even thinking about it, because that wasn't me. Part of me still thinks it's not me, but I've been doing it consistently for months now, because it's so obviously better.
I haven't had as many obvious things to change since the first few weeks, so I think I had a backlog of obvious stuff I wasn't doing. It's more like "little duhs" than "big duhs" now, but the duh moments are still useful. It's particularly useful how obvious the duhs are. For example, another thing I did was get rid of my iMac I don't use, and the associated desk, and opened up a whole new space in the living room. I'd considered doing it in the past, but a bunch of thoughts stopped me - what if I need the iMac in future, I won't get much money for it, what if I hurt my back again and need a desk, blah blah blah. But after meditation, those thoughts really didn't matter as much. It was just more obvious that I didn't need the iMac and that I was better off with it gone.
What didn't change
Ironically, meditation didn't actually solve the work stress problem. I was a lot less stressed when I started meditating, but that was mainly because I was in a new job and I didn't really have that much pressure on me yet. But a couple of months in, I had to act in my boss' job and everything blew up all at once and OMG, I was really stressed. And then what happened was, I ended up brooding instead of meditating, and being too restless and jittery to sit still and breathe, and I was not sleeping, and everything else in my life got knocked aside because work took over my brain, and it was the same pattern all over. Since then, I've had a few more repeats of that.
Close, baby, but no fucking cigar. *g*
I think meditation will help with this in the future if I continue to do it. It will make me less likely to get into the out-of-control stress state and give me better ways to come out of it. I am also starting to understand how meditation can be a bridge to mindfulness, which I can see would be a good thing if I could do it. But it turns out I can't get there from here yet. There's other stuff that needs to happen before I can join up all the dots.
So in the end, I got a lot of benefits from meditation, but I didn't get a magic bullet for the problem I was trying to solve. I'm actually very okay with that. I suspect that's the nature of this whole journey - what you want is never going to be where you look for it; it will resist your attempts to direct it. There's actually something quite fun about that. I'm enjoying engaging with something that seems like it's going to be just a bit playful and perverse.
Yoga and meditation
I've been doing yoga intermittently for years, so it's probably worth mentioning the relationship. For me it's not currently a very strong relationship - they're quite separate activities in my mind. I don't feel that meditation has done anything to change my physical yoga. However, I find the meditative aspects of yoga are starting to do more for me, and that an improvement in my meditation is often triggered by a concept from yoga.
I think in time the influence will start to flow in both directions, and yoga and medition will end up being less separate activities and more extensions of one another.
Future plans
So I've been meditating almost daily for four months at this point. Mostly it's been just ten minutes a day of counting breaths or something similar, with occasional longer sessions or trying different stuff. I've had a few periods when I went several days without meditating, and the difference was subtle, but definitely there.
I'm also noticing a plateauing of the effects of meditation since the course finished. I think being in the course kept me more consistent and focussed, but I also suspect that the guided meditations in class were a big source of benefit. So now I'm experimenting with other options to get a deeper or different meditation weekly. Being guided seems to help, so I'm trying various MP3s, but so far they're not doing much for me. I've signed up for another eight week course soon, and I'm hoping I'll eventually find some kind of weekly meditation class or something.
I'm not even really sticking my toe into the spiritual side of meditation yet, although I am curious about it.
I am clearly an absolute beginner at this. It's almost daunting - it's so obvious that I only know a drop in the ocean of this stuff. But that's okay. The good thing is, I really like what I've done so far and I feel very sure of the benefits. Even if all I do for the rest of my life is a daily ten minutes of watching my breath, I think it has already demonstrated that it's worth doing.
This entry was originally posted at dreamwidth (
comments).