About four years ago, the mental health providers who were helping me suggested I take up meditation. Since then, I’ve found settling into the mind that lies beneath surface turmoil to be very helpful to my emotional balance. No doubt many readers will find what I write to be naive, which is unavoidable given that my practice began so recently. Still, meditation helps my state of mind so much that I can’t resist commenting on a recent realization.
When I first began to meditate, my instructors cautioned me to toss out the idea of emptying the mind of thought. They taught me to observe thoughts, sensations, and emotions without trying to influence them. Of course, those first classes were all presented from a medical perspective; they followed the Jon Kabat-Zinn formulation. Other schools place more emphasis on achieving a mind less dominated by verbal thought streams. But that early teaching held, and for a long time I assumed that achieving silence in the mind would be difficult if not impossible.
Being a newcomer still, it’s no surprise that I’m finding my early understanding to be incomplete. More and more, I’m finding it easy to shut down verbal thought, and not only while formally meditating. It’s becoming a bit of a refuge, in fact. When I find myself starting to obsess, and especially when the thoughts take a negative turn (as they almost inevitably do), I find it easiest to just stop thinking. Cognitive Behavior Therapy taught me to challenge my assumptions, and recognize the distortions in my interpretations. To do so is still useful at times, but often the quicker route to relief is to simply shut down the thought apparatus. It takes a bit of effort, and it certainly requires that I remain conscious and alert, but it’s not as hard as I believed. If I were to dissect the experience, I would probably find a few echoing words deep in my awareness, but the loud and intrusive thinking is becoming relatively easy to turn off.
I sleep better as a result. It used to be that worries or even pleasant fantasies kept me awake; there was always something that seemed interesting to attend to. If I shut down the thinking apparatus, in contrast, then if my body is tired sleep soon comes. If sleep eludes me it usually means I’m not that tired, and I either get up for a while or I lay on my back and simply experience the peace in my mind. It’s another opportunity to meditate.
Once on my Twitter stream I wrote, “If you can’t think anything nice, don’t think anything at all.” Although I think this phrase was my own creation, it’s possible I heard it somewhere; it is a variation, in any event, on the old line: “Don’t believe everything you think.” Regardless of its origin, the statement was meant more as a joke than true advice, but now I’m taking it to heart. I’ve added the technique to my chest of tools for building peace and sanity.
Looking back, I realize it has taken a bit of discipline and practice to get to this point, and that my ability to achieve tranquility has gradually increased over time. Recognizing how my understanding has progressed makes me realize that meditation must have many surprises in store for me. The recent trend in mental health toward emphasis on mindfulness (seemingly the preferred label for meditation in clinical circles) appears to be well founded. Especially for someone like me with a history of substance abuse, who once pursued favorable mind states so vigorously that I became addicted to mind-altering chemicals, the discovery of self-generated tranquility is profound. Anyone dedicated to improving mental health probably already knows the value of meditation, but if you have delayed putting that knowledge into practice, I highly recommend meditating regularly.
