The whole way through, I’m narrating this in my head

[swan_tower]

For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying out the meditation thing — largely through an app called Headspace. I’m not terribly far into it yet, so I can’t give a full review, but the short form is that it’s a secular program developed by a former Buddhist monk that guides you through the basics of meditation. It starts off with a free series called “Take 10,” which is ten days of ten-minute sessions; then if you subscribe, it moves on to “Take 15″ (fifteen days of fifteen-minute sessions), followed by “Take 20″ (you can guess how that one goes). After that it expands into other stuff — the “Discovery Series” and so on — but I can’t tell you about those because I haven’t started them yet. The program does require you to take everything in order, but I can understand why; fifteen minutes is a non-trivial step up from ten minutes, and likewise twenty from fifteen, so working your way up to it isn’t a bad idea.

Because I’m only a little more than a month into the program, I can’t say much yet as to what it’s done for my mental health. But one thing I can say: it has exposed just how deep-seated my instinct to narrate is.

The largest portion of each session is spent focusing on your breath and letting go of other thoughts — or trying to. My mind, of course, immediately identifies this as prime Thinking About Story time. So I gently take it by the hand and lead it back to my breathing . . . until it wanders off again . . . so back to the breathing we go . . . and after a while it gets the idea, sort of. Whereupon it begins narrating my experience of focusing on my breathing. It isn’t really possible to make a story out of “this time my shoulders rose more than last time, and my exhalation was slower,” but god damn if my brain doesn’t try. And it thinks about what I’m experiencing — difficulties with not thinking included — and starts crafting the blog post in which I will tell you all about it. You have no idea how many times I’ve written this post in my head. (I have a faint hope that actually writing it will head this tendency off at the pass, but it is a faint hope indeed.)

It’s actually kind of hilarious, watching my brain scrabble for a way to narrativize what’s going on. I knew I was the sort of person who will run imaginary conversations in my head, or mentally compose blog posts, or whatever, but I underestimated just how much my thought processes are bound up in telling the story of what I’m thinking about. Turning that off is haaaaaaaaaaaaard. By which I mean, I basically haven’t succeeded yet.

This is not unrelated to my difficulty with the mindfulness thing in general: focusing on my physical experience of something, rather than thinking about other stuff while I do it. I live very much in my head, with all my imaginary friends (i.e. my characters), and if what I’m doing doesn’t demand my attention, I tend to daydream. I can focus when it’s something like karate; that’s detailed and intensive enough that I can sink my thoughts into muscle and bone and breath. But without a focal point like that, not so much.

So I keep practicing. One of these days I’ll get a handle on it . . . right?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

May I ask, without being insulting, why you want to? It comes from a genuine desire to understand, and admire, since it quite obviously comes from a place of determination and self-care, two things I very much respect.

I am sometimes advised to meditate, and at those times what springs into my head is performing ritual, when one concentrates quite deeply and visualizes. Whenever I've tried the mindfulness thing, it's reminded me of the sort of nigh-on sensory-deprivation-in-reverse thing I'd occasionally get as a child, when I was, say, trying to go to sleep, and would become completely incapable of drowning out the distracting sound of my own breathing.

What makes turning off the active voice in one's head benwficial? I can see it eliminating deep-seated underlying assumptions, but I think I must be missing something running parallel. I hope the questions isn't too incredibly obtuse.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

There are two things I've been having difficulty with, one a long-standing issue, the other more recent:

1) When something bad happens, I have a really hard time getting my brain out of an obsessive loop where I chew it over and over and over and over and over again -- well past the point of any useful effect.

2) I've also been having more difficulty focusing my attention lately.

Meditation has been recommended to me as a thing which can help with both issues. There's also evidence for it having various other beneficial consequences, like reducing anxiety/lowering blood pressure/other things I'm forgetting at the moment, but those two are the main ones that convinced me to give it a shot. It isn't that I never want that voice running in my head; it's that the ability to clear it away and devote myself fully to Thing X (whatever Thing X may be) would be useful.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I tried a mindfulness seminar for people with depression (my sister suggested it) and gave up meditation because it made me actively homicidal. That's not to say that meditation is bad, but the manic pole of bipolar means I'm prone to racing thoughts, which sorts of nixes the whole meditation thing flat dead. I have to wonder whether meditation works better for people with non-bipolar depression, but everyone else in the seminar who disclosed appeared to be non-bipolar, so I don't have any useful data points here. The only context in which meditation ever worked for me was when I was *guilt* doing my yoga DVDs regularly, and then the meditation breaks came as a relief. :p

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've heard it is very much a toss-up for people with depression: in some cases it helps hugely, while in other cases it backfires. It doesn't work for everybody regardless; for some people, focusing on breathing triggers panic attacks. Etc.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Oh, hey, that's my brain! I've never tried meditating for more than a few minutes. I usually think that walking is a better way to settle my brain down.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm too good at thinking while walking. :-P Or while doing just about anything. See my response to d_aulnoy above for more detail on why I'm giving it a shot.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I used to try to calm down by counting-- I could monitor my anxiety by how often I had to count and to what numbers. But I can count and think at the same time.

I understand the trying to live in the now. That's why I liked going to aikido when I was stressed; you can't not be completely in the moment or you're completely out of the moment. I always found myself calmer afterward because I *had* to focus.

I've mostly tried to do things that occupy Back of Brain so Front of Brain can relax a bit. Which means lots of 2048 these days.

[purplefrog26.livejournal.com]

I have a weekly meditation/writing class and we sit for around 10 mins before writing. It's really fascinating to watch my brain try to do anything during that time. I've been doing it for four years and have only "succeeded" for a few moments here and there.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I don't think meditating right before writing would work very well for me. I'd be way too prone to using it as "warm-up" thinking time. <g>

[teleidoplex]

I've found that dancing works better for me than straight meditation, because it gives me a _reason_ to focus on my breathing and posture and other stuff that gets me out of narrative mode.

Except when it doesn't, because I'm pretending I'm Swanilda and I'm totally going to leave Franz in the dust and run off with Coppelia

I ship Swanilda/Coppelia so hard.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

<lol>

Yes, I can do it when I dance (or do karate). Sometimes, anyway. But hey -- there are probably other things in my life that could benefit from that kind of focus, ne?