The mind is a fickle, ephemeral beast – one minute you sit down to plan out your day, and the next you’re wondering what the hell is wrong with Lady Gaga.
While we could go down an endlessly fascinating (to me at least) discussion about what the mind is, and whether the mind is “you” or just a part of “you”, we won’t. Rather, let’s look at practical ways to utilize the mind as the powerful tool that it is.
The Problem
Many people are under the false illusion that they are in control of their minds, and by extent, are in control of “themselves”. We are in control of ourselves, but only to an extent. Sure, you can plan in advance what you’re going to wear to a party on Friday night, but how in control are you of your reactions to your angry boss? How in control are you of your fears? When you lose a loved one, how in control of your emotions are you?
All one has to do is sit down to meditate for the first time to become painfully aware of our utter lack of control over our mind. You sit down and say to yourself, “I will focus my attention on the breath.” You do and succeed for the first four seconds, at which the point your mind starts thinking about that party on Friday night, which leads to the conversation you had with your best friend about the party, at which point you start wondering why your friend has seemed a little distant lately. 4 minutes later you realize you’re not focusing on the breath and try once more to focus on it, only to again get whisked away into pointless thought.
At this point, that old adage about a “monkey mind” starts to make a little more sense, only it’s more like a monkey drunk on Jägerbombs in a toy store.
Try it! Right now, set a timer for five minutes and see how long you can sustain full attention on just your breath. See how many full in breaths and full out breaths you can last until your mind distracts you with anything but the breath.
And here in lies the problem – our mind, which is our direct interface with ourselves, our emotions, our thoughts and the exterior environment, is largely out of our control.
This leads to three main issues :
- You can’t stay focused – you can’t give full attention and energy to tasks, problems, and activities that you find important, because your mind is always bringing up other issues, often pointless and painful issues. This leads to a decrease in performance and general lack of ability to get things done.
- The mind ruminates on useless/painful subjects – If you were in complete control of your mind, you wouldn’t be stuck in a mire of painful emotions and thoughts about why you got dumped, or about your dog dying, or why you got fired. Feeling these painful emotions is a necessary part of life, sure, but endless ruminating on them day in and day out is pitiful.
- The mind won’t do what you want it to – Be it focusing, ending painful ruminations, solving problems or just trying to stay positive, the mind almost seems to have a mind of its own.
The Fix
Luckily, we have an easy answer to the problems of our Jägerbomb-fueled monkey mind – meditation. Meditation is one of those topics that used to be considered New Agey, “woo-woo” or, at best, fit into the category of pseudo-science.
Not anymore. Meditation has been thoroughly proven to be beneficial, not just for the mind and mental issues, but for everything from boosting the immune system, lengthening life, lowering the perception of pain, boosting brain density and cortical matter, to lowering stress and promoting neuroprotection.
Further there are an enormous variety of meditational styles and techniques to choose from, so finding one to your liking shouldn’t be too hard.
Two Types of Meditation, and How They Improve Your Life
Generally speaking, there are two basic types of meditation. One where your mind focuses on one specific stimuli to the exclusion of all others, and one where your mind remains open and passive yet alert, being aware of sensations just as they are and as they occur. To avoid dogma and any religious connotations, we’ll call these two types “focused attention” and “diffused attention”, respectively.
Most all types of meditation fit loosely into these two categories, though there are also meditations that are more like “thought experiments”, where you pick one topic and analyze certain aspects of it. A good example of this third type would be meditation on death – you’d analyze how everything born eventually dies, how there’s no stopping death, and how you should use this knowledge to motivate yourself to get as much done in this short time you have as possible.
Focused Attention Meditation
This is a pretty straight-forward concept. You pick a sensation, object or mental image, and try to focus your attention on it to the exclusion of all others. It could be a candle flame, a cross, the sensation of the breath, energy points or chakras, a short prayer, a mantra, a deity or image of a holy person, or even an abstract concept.
This has a few main benefits as it relates to your mind.
First, because you’re focusing your attention on just one thing to the exclusion of all others, you’re training your mind to do what you want it to do, to ignore distraction. This has a multitude of benefits – less distraction in your life, more control over your mind, the ability to move your attention away from the unpleasant (whether its negative emotions, negative thought loops or painful physical sensations) and onto the task at hand.
This means that as you gain proficiency in focused attention types of meditation, you gain the ability to consciously choose to remove awareness from negative or distracting stimuli, and instead place it where you want it to be – this has massive implications for students, people in high-pressure jobs, athletes, those with depression or anxiety, those in pain, and the population in general.
Further, this type of meditation is extremely calming. In fact, in Buddhism this type of meditation is called shamatha, which directly translates as “calm abiding”.
As this study states –
The results of Study 1 show that both focused (Shamatha) and distributed (Vipassana) attention meditations of the Theravada tradition produced enhanced parasympathetic activation indicative of a relaxation response.
The study Self-reported Mindfulness and Cortisol During a Shamatha Meditation Retreat (Jacobs, 2013) reports that
Larger increases in mindfulness were associated with decreases in p.m. cortisol
Remember, cortisol is our primary stress hormone, too much of which leads to irritability, feelings of stress and weight gain. Don’t forget that these benefits are in addition to those listed above – increased grey matter, improved immunity and a lengthening of life due to increased health at the genetic level.
How to perform a “focused attention” type of meditation
- Pick any object that resonates with you, either internal or external – it could be an external image of a cross, the word “love” or “God”, any mantra from yoga, anything that has appeal to you. The more appealing, the better. A candle flame in a dim or dark room is a good choice as most people hold a natural fascination with flames. I’ll be using the sensation of the breath at the tip of the nose as an example, as we’re always breathing and thus can do this meditation anywhere.
- Set a timer for 10 minutes (as time goes on, gradually increase to at least 20 minutes a day)
- Sit in a comfortable position and gently instruct your mind to remain aware of the sensations of the breath at the tip of the nostrils, and tell the mind that it can go about it’s normal ruminations after the session is over.
- Then shift your attention to the sensation and feeling of the breath flowing past the nostrils.
- Because this is a relatively “light” sensation, it will help in the beginning to either count or pair a word with the in and out breath. Breathe in, noticing the sensation of the breath, breathe out, noticing how that feels slightly different, and mentally say “One”. Repeat up to Four, and then start the cycle over again. Conversely, you can say “In” while you’re breathing in, and “Out” as you breathe out. You can use the mantra “Buddho” (pronounced boo-doh), breathing in with a “Bud” and out with a “Dho”, or, if you’re Christian, you could use Yahweh, in with “Yah” and out with “Weh”.
- Your mind WILL become distracted. This is absolutely normal and should not be a source of frustration. Try to notice when the mind slips from it’s object, then gently and non-judgementally return the awareness back to the object of meditation. This will happen again and again and again, and at this beginning stage of meditation the entire name of the game is noticing this happening and returning the awareness back to the object of meditation.
- When the timer goes off, sit for a minute or so and relax your mind. Allow it to naturally do whatever it wants. After a minute, get up and reward yourself with a piece of dark chocolate or something similar, and then go about your business.
Cliff notes – 1. Sit. 2. Instruct the mind to gently remain with the object of meditation. 3. Focus on the object of meditation, gently returning the awareness to the object when the mind wanders. 4. Sit for a moment after meditation, relaxing the mind, and then reward yourself with a small treat.
If you get a headache, feel tense or feel frustrated during or after meditation, you’re trying too hard. If, when the timer goes off, you realize you just spent the whole session lost in thought, you’re not trying hard enough. The classic analogy for this sort of problem is how you would string a guitar or other stringed instrument – too tightly and the strings will break. Too loose, and the instrument will be out of tune. You’ve got to find the right balance between sustained effort and relaxed, calm awareness.
Think of returning the mind to the object of meditation as completing reps in a workout. As you continue to bring the mind back to the object, your mind will get “stronger”. As you increase the amount of time you’re able to stay with the object of meditation, it’s like you’re increasing the weight that you’re lifting. In this way, your mind gets stronger and stronger, until you’re able to focus on what needs to be focused on and riding white elephants on rainbows just like in the image above.
Stay tuned for the second part of this post, where I detail how to use “diffused attention” meditations and how they can help you overcome the main sources of frustration and pain in your life.