Disclaimer
Written by Michael Mantz, M.D.
The science is quite clear that meditation has vast benefits on both your mind and body. You may have tried to meditate only to have encountered a host of difficulties that eventually lead you to give up the practice. Meditation is one of the most powerful tools to heal and enhance the function of your mind. It is a pivotal part of my treatment program for my patients.
I have had the wonderful opportunity to teach and guide meditation with a wide-range of clients. Clients with schizophrenia, severe anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, attentional deficit disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction disorders and those clients who simply want to learn how to upgrade their minds. I learned targeted strategies and techniques to help people in each group. Over time I noticed common traps that most people encounter when meditating and if they don’t know how to navigate through them these traps can often sabotage this powerful mind-boosting practice.
Solution: I have seen and experienced benefits with as little as 3 minutes of meditation a day. Do it first thing in the morning, or in your parked car just before you go to work, or right before you brush your teeth before you go to bed. If you tend to feel restless when sitting – I have found that one of the best times to meditate is right after physical activity. The key is to do it frequently and consistently in order to sear the behavior into your brain so that it becomes one of your daily habits.
Solution: Join the club. This points to a very common misconception about meditation. It stems from a belief that in order to have a “good” meditation you need to have a quiet mind. The best way to have an unquiet mind is to fight and struggle with its spontaneous thoughts. This is the Mind vs. Mind trap. You’re attempting to use your mind to try to stop your mind – that is a double bind and your attempts will ultimately lead to frustration.
The key is to understand that ultimately you cannot control your mind. When you try to block or resist your thoughts you inadvertently give them psychological energy and power. Try using the attention boomerang technique. The attention boomerang technique is to notice whenever your attention begins to wander away and starts chasing after thoughts – you notice this happening and simply boomerang it back to the present moment. This is a very simple technique but remember simple does not equal easy. Practicing meditation consistently, you begin to catch on to your mind’s patterns and its little tricks to seduce your attention and it becomes easier and easier to both catch your wandering attention and guide it back to where you want it to go.
Solution: Solution: Meditation is not about good and bad. Through meditating you will learn how judging things in terms of good and bad creates suffering. Leave your comparator and your judge at the door when you meditate. If they start talking to you when you are meditating treat them like any other thoughts and use the attentional boomerang. If they are creating “sticky thoughts” – thoughts that are difficult to detach from – then use wisdom generating questions to help unhook yourself from them.
Wisdom Generating Questions: What happens when I get seduced by this thought? Is this thought helpful? How do these thoughts entangle my attention so quickly? Drop the question and sense, observe, and listen. With time and practice you will begin to unravel the many games the mind uses to distract you from the present moment.
Solution:This is an example of a results focused ends-justify-the-means attitude. This performance driven attitude adds pressure and makes you effort too much during meditation. Your expectations distract your attention from the moment-to-moment process of meditation which is where most of the benefit comes from. Meditation is essentially the art of learning to guide your attention with skill. A big part of learning to skillfully use your attention is to keep bringing it back to the present moment and guide your attention into your senses and observe, listen, sense and learn from your current direct experiences.
When you have expectations, you split your attention which weakens the power of the meditation as you toggle your attention back and forth between how you are currently feeling and what you want to be feeling or believe you should be feeling. It is helpful to be process focused and guide your attention to observe your direct moment-to-moment experiences. Over time you will begin to see the habitual patterns of your mind and gain the capability to update and upgrade them into more helpful and powerful tools.
Solution:Your mind has been entrained by TV, radio, computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. The media, entertainment industry, and commercial businesses design videos, articles, and audios designed to hyper-stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain to keep you engaged. When you go from very high levels of stimulation (which paces your mind into sprint mode) and then go sit down and meditate – your mind is still sprinting and cries out for more stimulation. Overusing our technology turns us into distraction-stimulation addicts.
The boredom feeling common when first learning to meditate is a withdrawal symptom from all of the chronic hyper stimulation we are exposed to. If you feel boredom arising, note the sensations of boredom in your body and let yourself open to these sensations and cover them with your attention. You may notice that right underneath the boredom are sensations of restlessness. This is another common withdrawal sign. Let the restlessness sensations dance themselves out. If you don’t try to change or get rid of them, you don’t give them any power and they will run out of fuel and die out. You weaken unhealthy mind patterns through IGNORE-ance. When you fight, control, suppress or resist what arises in your mind you inadvertently make yourself a slave to them.
Remember these 5 meditation pitfalls and play with the suggested solutions above. Be open, creative, and flexible with your practice – this will enable you to develop new customized solutions on your own. Start with frequent consistent small doses of meditation and build from there. Soon your meditation practice will begin to gain momentum and power. I generally see noticeable mind benefits after 2-3 weeks in my clients that meditate consistently (6X a week).
