I was told that I really need to do an hour a day of meditation for two months before I could really “experience” meditation. Fine.
Times of Day Affect My Meditation
I mainly tried to meditate in the late afternoon when nobody needed me and I had nothing in particular to do. In theory I set aside time when I wasn’t feeling urgent to return to action.
Sometimes I meditated first thing in the morning. I’m a morning person and I always wake up fully alert and eager to start the day. Meditating then was definitely a “busier” experience. My mind has a LOT of thoughts and plans and Ideas first thing in the morning, and I wanted to go, go, go, not sit and meditate.
Sometimes I meditated in the middle of the night when I woke up with insomnia. The thoughts at this time had more paranoia, anxiety, and sadness. My mind was very busy with unpleasantness in the middle of the night.
I’m glad I started meditating in a calm, peaceful environment so that I could experience my body going into deep relaxation and see how differently that worked for me at different times of the day. Usually in the middle of the night I could calm myself down after about 20-30 minutes. In the morning I could calm myself in about 10-20 minutes. In the afternoon I could slip into deep calm very quickly.
I know everyone has been raving for years about how calming and relaxing meditation is. I don’t know why I didn’t care to try it and why it just rubs me the wrong way. (Still does, btw. Still irritates me how people talk about it.) It really IS deeply calming and relaxing.
Concentrating on the Breath Relaxes Me, Slows My Mind, and Taught Me How to Feel My Body More
I’m a pretty fast processor. I often have a lot of thoughts and ideas at once, and I’m pretty accomplishment oriented. It was a nice experience to slow down and feel what it’s like to not be trying to do anything. It’s so calming and relaxing that I often thought that someone who has high blood pressure would probably benefit from doing this daily. (Then I wondered if they are doing studies on this, and what the best way is to construct a study about this: get people with high blood pressure already and then would you test right after meditation or just generally overall—then I returned my attention to my breath…it’s not idea time, it’s just sitting here and being time…)
I began to notice that there was a correlation between my pulse, my breathing speed and depth, and my thoughts. I could see my thoughts reflected in my pulse speeding up and my breathing growing more shallow. I could deliberately slow my breathing and breathe more deeply, and I would feel my pulse slow down and my thoughts would calm.
Thoughts—>Actions—>Feelings Triangle and the Amazing Interplay Between Them
I spent a lot of time observing this triangle. Chasing my heartbeat and the thudding in my ears and feeling it slow down as my breathing slowed down. Seeing my mind empty of chatter and have more expanse and feel my thoughts calm. Then I’d have an idea or a thought and I’d notice my breath had quickened and my pulse had sped up. I could literally track what my mind was doing by what my body was doing. I experienced my body reacting to my thoughts. And it was especially wonderful to experience that I had the capacity and power to change my own body, my own pulse and heart rate, and my own thoughts, simply by focusing on my breath.
This still wows me.
I also noticed that when I’m in deep relaxation, there is a pause between the exhale and the inhale. As if everything stops completely. As if everything is on pause. It’s not holding my breath for a beat; I could do that, but that’s not what it is. It’s just how my body breathes when I’m fully relaxed. I can tell if I’m fully relaxed or not based on whether that pause is happening. I have no idea if this is universal or just me.
I’d been starting to notice where different feelings and thoughts “exist” in my body through IFS. But meditating gave me a sense of mindbody connection in a broader sense. I think because I began using my body to affect my mind. As opposed to in the other direction.
Just Being and Not Analyzing
It’s a funny contradiction: I really wanted to know what I was gaining from meditation. But that was in contradiction to meditation which is davka being in the moment and not using the analytic part of my brain.
A challenge in meditation is to turn off metacognition--thinking about thinking. I LOVE thinking about thinking. It intrigues and fascinates me. I'm so curious to pay attention to what types of thoughts keep coming up and what patterns and how it affects my mood and my body systems and does it change based on starting mood and time of day. And what is the meaning of the types of thoughts that come up. And how do I react when I notice them and are there patterns and how does meditation shift that. But tracking that or even planning to jot down notes afterwards severely detracts from my actual meditation.
Even trying to keep track of things or hoping to hold onto things made me too attached to accomplishment goals and detracted from the utter relaxation and freedom that Meditation could give me if I let it.
So mostly I tried not to think about the experience, not to reflect on the experience, and to just be while I meditated.
I’ll talk more about the specifics of how that went in Part III.