Day 19 of ? of meditation & blogging!

14 minutes 36 seconds

Friends,

Today’s session was a bit of an uphill battle emotionally and mentally.

Distracted, not only by the usual random thoughts but strong emotions and a litany of my current worries simmering inside me. The cause was relatively minor, unimportant really. I an unpleasant interaction the other day with someone rando online who was being rude derisive and hateful in a comments thread I was in. Their petty and mean spiritedness combined with my ADHD to leave me very off kilter emotionally and mentally until I fell to bed in the wee morning hours.

I woke up today and definitely felt my ADHD at work in the cascade of thoughts and emotions I was feeling. Despite trying to set that one negative interaction aside my mind kept coming back to it and adding to it a litany of my fears and memories of being bullied many times over many years and my genuine worries all in a cascading avalanche of thoughts; from which I wanted distract myself. I was feeling wildly out of sorts and unbalanced BUT…meditation is a practice the training of our focus and awareness. Gods know I needed to adjust my focus! To not spiral internally. I set aside the internet and all its shiny distractions. I cued up today’s chosen music and my phone alarm and began.

Thoughts assailed me as I established my breath and tried to focus on the music… or my breathing… or… well *something* other than the circling thoughts and spiraling emotions. I noted and pushed the thoughts away as best I could and focused on the music, but I had trouble settling my breath into a relaxed even rhythm. I found myself thinking that the session wasn’t feeling like anything except someone trying to sweep away a hoard of oncoming ants with an old broom. Of course, that’s a thought, so I noted it and tried to push it away along with the rest of my mental and emotional avalanche.

I took a deep breath and mentally began repeating my chosen charm of “it is what it is” filling my mind with the phrase to keep the thoughts and feelings at a distance as I began to calm and my mind to quiet… somewhat. I was able to focus on the music and my breath and the air’s journey through my body. I began to settle down inside. In through the nose out through the mouth, my “mantra” fading along with the music as I began to turn more deeply inward, into a place of calm and much needed peace. Thoughts still came but … more leisurely and somehow they were less intense or my emotional response to them was less intensely felt. I could notice them as thoughts and let them go, sometimes summoning back my friend and familiar phrase “it is what it is” in repetition until it faded once more and I was with my breath once more.

After a while the timer chirped and I stopped it and returned to the the place of hard won quiet and inner stillness. A while after that I opened my eyes.

We are not always in “the right frame of mind” to engage in a mindfulness practice.

These are often, unless we are in active danger or incapacitated, the times we need to meditate the most though? What sort of use would all this practice and training be if we were not able to apply the techniques and awareness and focus we learn in our everyday life moments as well as times of personal crisis and turmoil as well as when we sit (or move) in practice? So we return to practice, again, and again, and again. Rain or shine. Through annoyance or turmoil or tribulation.

I will return sometime tomorrow, and wish you all well!

Bliss & Blessed Be,
Pax / Geoffrey