This is for the people who hear “clear your mind of thoughts” and get infuriated – it’s not possible.
Especially for the beginners – Meditation is about practicing conscious control of your body and your thoughts. (You’re in the driver’s seat, body follows mind’s lead)
You’ll often hear grounding yourself with “breath”. Breath is important for many reasons.
Breathing is a basic function to… living. Not breathing means you need to be in a hospital.
Breathing is a function that has automatic mode and manual mode. As you read this, you may have shifted into manual mode and become conscious of your breathing.
Continuing manual mode, regardless of what’s happening outside (TV, random bird chirping, etc), you get to control breathing. Nose or mouth. Shallow lung or deep in your belly. How long inhale, how long exhale, or just straight up holding. We know that fast shallow breathing physiologically builds tension/anxiety, think hyper ventilating. We know that slow intentional deep breathing physiologically releases tension, lowers heart rate and blood pressure.
Building that mind/body connection.
Breathing in builds tension and strength (Think, opening a jar or lifting a weight). Breathing out releases tension. When you consciously do it, you can release tension in places that habitually hold tension. Such as jaw, eyebrows, shoulders, neck, thighs, etc. It’s hard to get quality rest when you’re tense.
Short term tension building is useful, such as doing a pushup. However, for long term sustainability, you need to have a good relationship with breathing. Try to do 20 pushups or run a mile while holding your breath.
Breathing is multi sensation. You feel the air moving in your nose and mouth. You feel the coolness (or maybe you doing hot yoga). You feel your chest and gut expand and fill and empty. You can manual mode push in and out with your diaphragm. Literally feeling out your body is a skill and noticing sensations, or lack thereof.
Ok now to the meditation part!
Every time you feel an intrusive thought pop in and drag you away from focus, THATS NATURAL AND NORMAL. Outside stimuli and stuff will continue to happen – you don’t get to control that.
The literal practice is to let go of attaching to it and not processing it more (what you want for dinner, that weird noise outside, what’s on your phone, can wait), and REFOCUS on the grounding (often, refocus on your breath. Count in count out. It takes time to process the though to “Not now, I’m going back to what I was doing”. Focus on stuff related to your breath. The intrusive thoughts will keep coming and that’s ok it. It’s about not allowing it to take over and become that ‘emergency’ that needs attention.
Internal focus; keeping what you choose to focus on in the drivers seat is the goal. The progression is that its easier to let go of thoughts the more your practice. It become easier to deal with more stimuli and keep your focus. It gets easier to manage your stress response, as well as your other autonomous responses like flight or flight.
Try 1-5 minutes of meditation: just doing it at all is the success.