“Training our brain through meditation enables us to make wise choices. When we meditate, we see our stressful thought patterns. We see our reactive tendencies. We see the stories we make up. When we see through the mental chatter, it is easier for us to stop, take a conscious breath and choose a more skillful way to respond in real life.” Gloria Green
That is what this is all about. We are training our brains to be more mindful because mindfulness allows us to make better decisions. I read an article about how babies have an excess of neuro connections because they need them to learn. And the reason a baby or toddler will do the same thing over and over, like drop a spoon off a highchair, is because that is how they learn. They need the repetition to create the neuropathways. That is why toddlers like to read the same book, over and over, every day. They are creating the neuro connections to make sense of the world. When we meditate, we do things over and over, often beginning again.
Feeling Breath Meditation
Noticing the sensation of my breath in my body
Cool air coming into my nostrils
Warm air leaving my nostrils
Breathing in my chest rises
Breathing out my chest falls
Breathing in my stomach expands
Breathing out my stomach deflates
That is what we are doing when we meditate, we are trying to pay attention to the neuro connections that we want to create, and we are trying to ignore the neuro connections that we want to atrophy. We are training our brain to pay attention and to shift the focus of our attention when our attention is not where we want it. We are not trying to push anything away. We are not trying to be falsely positive. We are just trying to be aware of what is really happening. And aware of the stories we are adding on to what is really happening. Teasing out fact from fiction.
If we can become aware of those stories, we can ask whether those stories are really true or whether it is our brain lying to us again. So, we want to be able to pay attention to what is happening right now. What is the fact? And what stories are we adding on that come from the baggage that we carry with us. When we do that, we can see what is really happening so we can make better decisions. We have better information to base those decisions on. If we don’t see that all the stories we make are not true, we make decisions on false information.
Mindfulness vs. Meditation
There may be people who can be mindful throughout the day without having to develop the skill. I could not. When I started meditation, I operated at 100 miles per hour of fast asleep. The only way I could slow down the mental chatter was by learning to meditate. It was hard for me to learn to meditate as I was either moving quickly or asleep. Over time I learned to slow myself down. It probably was a good six months before I noticed a difference, being calmer and more collected.
There is a difference between mindfulness and mediation. Mindfulness is a state where we are aware, accepting, and non-judgmental as we can be of “what is” right now. Meditation is a tool to train our brains to be aware and concentrated. Some meditation apps have relaxation exercises that they call meditation. And those are good to do. But they do not train your brain to be in the present moment. It may be easier to learn to meditate if you learn to relax first. We meditate to become more flexible and tolerant to the present moment. Meditation is training to be aware of thoughts arising, so we are not jerked around by them.
We need to be ready for the stuff life is going to throw at us. We often think, once I get through this, things will be fine. But there is always something else. If we practice, we are going to be stronger so the “something else” does not feel so overwhelming. We are training our brains to be aware of thoughts arising, so we are not jerked around by them. I lived a lot of my life being jerked around by my thoughts, doing things I did not need to do.
e practice, we are going to be stronger so the “something else” does not feel so overwhelming. We are training our brains to be aware of thoughts arising, so we are not jerked around by them. I lived a lot of my life being jerked around by my thoughts, doing things I did not need to do.
Shoulder Shrug
Breathe in through your nose to the count of 5 as you bring your shoulders up to your ears
Hold for the count of 3
Breathe out through your mouth, sighing as you release your shoulders down
Sitting Meditation
Sitting meditation opens us to every moment of our life. It teaches us how to relate to life directly, so we can truly experience the present moment, free from our perceptions. In sitting meditation, you start seeing the stories that come up in your mind that you may not see as you are running through life. When you are doing, doing, doing, you don’t see the 2500+ thoughts coming up in your mind every hour. But when you sit down to meditate, you say, “I can’t do it, my mind is too busy.” It is not that you cannot do it. It is that you finally see what you could not see before you started to meditate. You have slowed yourself down so you can see what is going on.
We do not meditate to be comfortable. We meditate to have an open, compassionate attentiveness to whatever is going on. Compassionate because we don’t want to strengthen our neuropathways of being judgmental. We learn to stay with ourselves no matter what is happening. We learn to say, “I can be with this. I don’t like it, but I can live with it. I don’t have any control over it. I might not be OK now, but I am going to be OK.” We learn to stay with ourselves without putting labels of good and bad, right, and wrong; all of that stuff we layer on top of our experience.
Counting Breath
Count to 5 of 10, whichever works for you. This is not a competition.
Counting each breathe I am aware of
When my mind wanders bringing it back to counting my breath
You can choose to start over at 1 or just begin again where you left off
Why an Anchor
Often sitting meditation focuses on the breath. We breathe in the present moment, not in the past or the future. It is always with us, 24/7. You can’t breathe in the past or the future so focusing on the breath brings us back to the present moment. But breath meditation doesn’t work for everyone. For some people, focusing on the breath can be upsetting or even traumatizing. And that is why as an anchor, something to come back to when your mind wanders, you may choose to switch the focus of your attention to your feet on the ground or your hands in your lap. You need something to pull yourself back when your thoughts start spinning out, because your mind secretes thoughts just like your mouth secretes saliva. We want to become aware of when our mind secretes thoughts.
Another way to bring our mind back is to use a breath poem. This breath poem by Thich Nhat Hanh is the one I used as I was learning to meditate.
In Out…
Breathing in, I know I am breathing in
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out
Breathing in, I know I am breathing deeply
Breathing out, I know I am breathing slowly
Breathing in, I calm my body
Breathing out, I feel ease
Breathing in, I smile
Breathing out, I release
In, Out
Deep, Slow
Calm, Ease
Smile, Release
What We See
When we meditate, we see our mind is going a million miles an hour thinking about all kinds of things, and it just happens without any effort on our part. We see when we are spinning off into fantasy land. We see when we harden to circumstances and people; think about how often you have tensed up just seeing a particular person. We see when we are somehow closing down to life, we just check out.
We see our tendency to lay a lot of labels, opinions, and judgments on top of what’s happening. And we see we have habitual patterns that limit our life; like that brick wall I put up that limited my life. We also see that no matter how good we plan, it is not going to give us certainty and security. The best laid plans go awry. There will be things we cannot control.
We also see that we can handle emotional discomfort and the trials and tribulations of life. When I first started meditating, I thought it was crazy to sit through any discomfort at all. I couldn’t sit through any discomfort. I started by sitting with the discomfort of an itch. And I learned that if I just let it be there, it would go away. We need to learn to be with discomfort, because we will have both physical, mental, and emotional discomforts in our lives. We have to build up our strengths to be with them. We have to start with the little irritating things. Then slightly bigger discomforts, so we expand our window of tolerance. For example, often our impulses tell us we have to do things, but we really don’t.
Intention Not to Move
Move around until you are in a uncomfortable position.
Set the intention not to move.
Notice the urge to move coming up.
You don’t have to give in to the urge, stay still.
With practice you can avoid giving into the urge for longer periods of time.
Double-edge Sword
Training our brain to be aware can help us to be present of all the moments of joy in our lives. But the flip side is that we are also present of all the moments of sadness. Through meditation, we learn to be aware of thoughts arising so we can choose where to place our attention.
We train our brains to be more mindful because mindfulness allows us to make better decisions. We pay attention to the neuro connections that we want to create or strengthen, and we shift our attention away from the neuro connections that we want to atrophy.