Day 16 of ? of meditation & blogging!

14 minutes 17 seconds

Friends,

Today I decided to mix things up a little in my daily meditation and it has yielded some interesting results!

This morning as I was waking up and getting my usual coffee and ice water made I didn’t think or notice myself engaged in much thought or imagining. I was focused on getting things set up. I spent the usual few moments bopping around a couple of socials. As I was getting ready to click on play on my playlist and start the timer on my phone, some thoughts started bubbling up as if on cue and I made a decision. Today I would start by focusing on the external stimuli of the music and then gradually turn my attention to my breathing and breaths. I pressed play on the selected music track, started my phone timer, and I began.

Closing my eyes immediately after starting the music with one hand and the phone timer with the other, I leaned back into my chair and focused my attention on the soft instrumental meditation track as I also relaxed into my breathing rhythm. Thoughts came up, as they naturally do, and as I acknowledge them I returned to focusing on the music and then gradually returned to my breath. In short order I was sinking into a focus on my breathing and then upon the sensations of my body as I followed the pathway of the air through my body. In what seemed like it was a couple of minutes the phone timer chimed. I opened my eyes enough to tap the button on my phone to silence it, closed my eyes again, briefly wondered if I had somehow messed up the timer settings, set that thought aside and continued for a while longer. I returned to the music and then my breath. A short time late I opened my eyes and stopped the music track.

I know I’ve repeatedly described that in my mindfulness sessions my sense of the flow of time changes, ‘goes sideways’. Once I was done done with today’s meditation session I picked up my phone and double checked it, it was indeed set to my chosen minimum of 10 minutes. Somewhere in todays session time fell away from me completely.

Now you might think it was a lucky thing I had that moment of inspiration to try something new. Inspiration has sources and not always divine ones. Sometimes inspiration comes to us as the result of a chain of events and our experiences and ideas we have had or been exposed to coalescing into some singular moment. So what were the ingredients in todays inspiration and its surprising result?

Well I know I’ve already posted in this series about my ADHD and it’s interplay with my attitude towards my current practice. Now one of the things I didn’t discuss there was the fact that because of the ADHD brains function we require stimulation, including a certain novelty. Here are a couple of brief and yet informative articles. In this case my (sometimes basic) understanding of how my brain works served as a bit of background knowledge.

The other piece of today’s puzzle is that yesterday I was going to try and publish a second post which rapidly evolved into a longer writing project that I may or may not eventually post here. As part of this I did a bit of a deep dive into dictionary and encyclopedia articles around the topics of Meditation and Mindfulness…

Meditation, according to our often underappreciated friends at Wikipedia, is…

“Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.^{[1][2][3][4][web 1][web 2]}“

First sentence of Wikipedia article on Meditation accessed 6/6/2024

So what I’ve been practicing and writing about in this series is ‘mindfulness’ meditation. In addition to simply referring to the state or quality of being mindful (nouns can be vexingly simplistic and self-referential sometimes) mindfulness can also refer to…

“the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis”

Merriam Webster definition of Mindfulness (as accessed on 6/6/2024)

Now this is good, but given that I am the kind of neurodivergent who sometimes reads both dictionaries and encyclopedias for funsies, it wasn’t quite enough for me. I turned back to Wikipedia to look into mindfulness and, as things sometimes do in any online encyclopedia, I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole of inter connected linked concepts as one definition led to another and soon I had spent about an hour reading.

So to paraphrase our friends at Wikipedia.. ‘Mindfulness is the cognitive skill, usually developed through meditation, of sustaining an awareness of one’s thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them and of the contents of one’s own mind in the present moment.’ (a paraphrasing of the introductory phrases of the Wikipedia entries on mindfulness and metacognition, accessed on 6/6/2024)

So if meditation is about learning to train our attention and awareness with a goal of mental and emotional calm and clarity and stability, and mindfulness is the skill of remaining aware of our thoughts and feelings and understanding where they are coming from in the present moment, then we need to treat them as skills we are developing through practice and repetition and exercises.

All of which is why I was inspired to try alternating between the two basic elements of my current practice, the background music and my breath. At least based on today’s results, this process of inspiration and it’s results have been much more of a success than I could have hoped for!

Some of you may be wondering ‘what about the sort of deep spiritual experiences you were mentioning in past posts” Well, in my last post you may have noted the italics and bold on one of the sentences… “However, that is a judgement and an observation and those are thoughts so while I will admit I savored that sensation for a moment I also accepted it and let it go.” That’s the trick.

While we can, and millions do, engage in daily mindfulness meditation for spiritual and/or religious reasons the fact is that any spiritual or religious experience had during a mindfulness practice are merely a side effect, the icing on the cake as it were. We practice mindfulness meditations to train our selves and our minds. To learn to focus. To train our attention. To be fully present and aware in the moment. To engage in the world from a place of calm, clarity, and stability. We do this to engage with the world around us and our everyday lives from a place of emotional stability and mental health. We do this so we are dealing with the world as it is in the moment, not as it seems to be based on our wants or needs or past experiences or trials and tribulations.

We do this, whatever our spiritual or religious path, so that when we do this so that when we do happen to have a peak psychological moment or profoundly spiritual and/or religious experience, we can embrace them for what they are, accept them as a part of our experience, perahps taking what we need from it or setting it aside for later thought, and move on with our daily lives.

Today I feel like I am one step closer to that place.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.

Bliss & Blessed Be,
Pax / Geoffrey