Many people give up on learning to meditation because they cannot clear their mind for X minutes straight. Their mind runs away, and they must bring it back to focus. They see this as failure.
Yet, this is exactly what is expected. How else to learn the invaluable skill of refocusing after distraction. If staring at a circle was so stimulating you never got distracted, then you would have no chance to build your focus muscles.
Note: this comment is mostly about the first steps into meditation. I learned this idea from Shinzo Young.
Yes, this is a real block for lots of people. When I was teaching my children to meditate, I tried to head this off a bit by telling them "you'll probably find that your headvoice will keep chattering away at first. Let it. Don't really fight it. Just acknowledge without judgment, clear your mind again, and keep meditating. Your mind will grow quieter on its own as you practice more."
This is for those of you that live by the bay. Needs a clear day but no Otis Redding song necessary.
Where I live it takes about a 20-30 mins for a ship that left the harbour to disappear over the horizon. As it leaves I can see all the details, the name of the ship, the containers or people. Lots to think about and observe. I don't take my eyes off it. Gradually it turns into a smaller and smaller square, and eventually a dot. All that it is, all the people and cargo and funnels become an ever smaller world. Somehow that grabs and keeps my focus.
Actually started to do it as an exercise for vision from too much screen time. Apparently it helps to focus on a distant object and I think... maybe... hmm... maybe it helps. But anyway, after a half hour of watching a dot vanish over the horizon, it leaves you with a _good_ feeling. Like I used to get from astronomy before moving to the city. YMMV.
When people first start meditating, they often find it very difficult to get a "quiet moment" and think that's a sign that they're doing something wrong or something isn't working. Neither of those things are true, and while you might get just a few seconds of "quiet" at first, as you practice more, that time will expand.
The basic point is that it's part of the normal progression (of anything, really). When you're doing anything new, you're going to suck at it at first and improve as you keep doing it. It's counterproductive to feel bad about the stage where you aren't good at it, and giving those judgemental feelings power can cause an unwarranted discouraging force.
This is what we say to our students. It'll run away. Just bring it back. It's OK.
The tool is great, BTW. Congrats. My only small gripe is the pulsation is too fast (for me). My relaxed breathe is 5 seconds inhale, 5 seconds exhale.
Was it my imagination or did the rate change? It seemed to slow down a bit at the end.
If it doesn't, that might be a good feature; a progressive slowdown and perhaps a config to change overall rate.
Because evening out the speed and taking deeper breaths help calming down with a couple of mechanisms.
OP had a cool idea -- wish it hit the 5/5 cadence.
I decided to start going to a therapist for some issues I've encountered over the years. He took my background information and immediately dove into an entire diatribe about meditation. Without addressing a single thing I actually said. The thing is, I've attempted meditation over the years. Not only had I already read all of his recommended source material AND watched the videos he recommended, but I knew other sources that I rattled off to him as well, including entire books on controlled breathing. I spent 2 years with it and never got anywhere.
It does not work for me and I'm not putting myself through it again. I've got three or four separate trains of thought going on at all times. It's impossible to put a cork in all of them, it isn't helpful, and it's about as useful as prayer is to an atheist.
Asking someone who has been abused as a child to instead stare into the abyss is a cop-out. Meditation as a solution to depression and anxiety doesn't bring me calm. It makes me angry.
It reminds me of: years ago I came across a book profiling the journey of a young western Jewish man seeking a path in Zen Buddhism, studying under gurus with other seekers in monasteries. As he progressed through his meditative practice he couldn't avoid feeling unsettled by the sense that none of it was "working" for him no matter how deeply he understood and how much he practiced. The gurus all just kept trying to help him improve his practice. Until he came to the most enlightened and compassionate guru who basically let him off the hook, saying, in essence, that this stuff will never stick to him and that he's just meant to practice Judaism.
It is not impossible for all to learn this type of 'skill'. It is more difficult for many, and impossible for some.
I believe we can learn languages by (1) concentrating on mimicking and (2) learning by speaking with others and being continuously corrected by others.
The problem is that is requires a tremendous amount of work for learner and teacher.
Think how a baby or child learns and do as much of that as possible.
Initially absolutely avoid all reading, and totally avoid learning any rules.
Improve your general ability of mimicking skills e.g. by copying singers and songs, by copying famous people in the foreign language, mimicking accents or people in your own mother tongue.
People with English as their mother tongue have some advantages - we actually recognise a huge variety of vowel sounds because various English accents contain them - we also have familiarity with a variety of grammatical constructs. We also know pronunciation and writing are completely disjoint: anyone coming from a language where you say what you read has a big disadvantage.
Much of my belief comes from talking with people that have English as their second language, and looking for their successes and failures. Some people learn English well and it's interesting to look for why them? Some mistakes are common to particular groups and it's interesting to look for the root cause.
I have applied some of the above to teach myself conversational Spanish. To test my beliefs I'm definitely keen to move onto something more difficult ( I'm middle aged): the block is that I will need to dedicate many months of effort living in another country.
Not so sure about that. For example, I noticed it takes a bit of effort to get native English speakers to pronounce the ы sound, or to get them to hear how the ь letter affects pronunciation.
> We also know pronunciation and writing are completely disjoint: anyone coming from a language where you say what you read has a big disadvantage.
I don't quite agree. I come from a language where the spelling is almost phonetic (so, not totally disjoint from pronunciation), and it's very easy for children to learn reading and writing, which means they quickly move on to more important things. Meanwhile, children learning English as a first language are stuck memorising spelling and obscure rules and exceptions just to be able to write correctly. And conversely, when they hear a new word (or name) they need to look up how to spell it. I don't see an advantage, it's just a waste of energy.
It was relatively easy for me to learn the spelling of English words because I already knew a reasonable amount of French, so it was quite intuitive to spell "restaurant" or "renaissance". But for someone with English as a first language, I suspect it would have involved a lot of memorising.
But you are saying English speakers can learn it? How do Romance language speakers do? I'm just making a generalisation, which is not universal and there are plenty of vowel and consonant sounds English speakers really struggle to learn.
> children learning English as a first language are stuck memorising spelling and obscure rules and exceptions just to be able to write correctly.
Absolutely: it is a serious downside of English and plenty of adults never learn to spell well. I have seen the advantages of saying it like it is spelled in Spanish. But that isn't relevant to my point that English speakers have a natural understanding that spelling is disjoint from pronunciation. It maybe doesn't help much - hearing English speakers saying words they have learnt from books is painful!
Secondly, many English speakers often try to pronounce foreign names correctly - another habit that teaches us pronunciation (a little!)
I’ve meditated on and off, and find it sometimes helpful, but I can’t conceive of what it would mean for it to work, or not work.
It did not. I never felt any real benefit from it and I didn't enjoy the process. So to me, that's "not working."
What's your motivation for meditating? Is it something that you can tell afterwards whether you achieved it or not? And I'm not talking 'achieve' like some sigma grindset maximizing gains type BS, I mean the way if I play a video game, I'm doing it because I expect to have fun, and afterwards I can ask myself "was that fun?" and gauge the degree to which I had fun.
The benefits are “small” in one sense, but highly leveraged in another sense.
I don’t necessarily feel that I get a lot out of any single session, aside from a mental interrupt (which could also be achieved by going for a walk, or whatever).
It’s more like, doing it consistently over time moves the needle in some very small way, almost imperceptible. Like, I’ll notice I’m a little more patient with my kids, a little less anxious during a work meeting, a little slower to get angry, a little quicker to let anger dissipate.
And if I wasn’t paying attention, these changes might be so subtle that I wouldn’t even say anything had changed, and I could easily be one who says it “doesn’t work”.
But while those changes are all small and subtle, the downstream impact can be enormous. The difference between staying angry for a minute versus an hour is often the difference between good long term relationships and divorce, or the difference between going to prison, or not. Lots of long-tail negative outcomes get avoided. And the benefit of having a lower idle anxiety level seems to have a cumulative impact, or a thing that kicks off a virtuous cycle. Like, I feel a little less anxious, so I make a less worse decision to not medicate with junk food, so I sleep a little better, and make another better decision the next day, and so on.
It’s hard to really convey, because it’s very subtle but the principle is, I think, that the difference between doing a little, and doing zero, has a way larger impact than the arithmetic calculation would suggest. Like the difference between spending a dollar more than you earn, versus spending a dollar less than you earn. It’s a $2 difference and seems insignificant, but it’s the difference between debt and a path to wealth.
But for others who maybe have struggled with it but haven't entirely sworn it off, I wanted to offer the following thoughts.
> It's impossible to put a cork in all of them
I know you know this given your background, but for others reading, the point of meditation isn't to silence your mind. It's one of the most confusing things about meditation at first, and it often sends people into an anxiety feedback loop. People notice their mind isn't being silenced and start to feel like a failure for not silencing it, which makes their mind less silent etc. I have an anxious kid, and this fear feedback loop is the hardest part.
But really, stripping away the traditional/religious background, IMO the main thing is activating the parasympathetic nervous system in a controlled way. Putting aside relatively abnormal cases, if one is angry or anxious then one hasn't successfully activated the parasympathetic nervous system, even if one is sitting in a meditation posture and trying to focus on the breath. So this it's pretty easy to tell whether you're deploying this skill successfully.
From trial and error, I've found that asking people to breathe out slowly is the least error prone method to get people to successfully activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Sometimes it helps to take a breath, hold it for a few seconds and then breathe out slowly. Other methods, like telling people to take a deep breath I've found to be less effective and more prone to errors. (For example, some people try to breathe hard or fast or even hyperventilate).
Once you can do that reliably and habitually, then you can start promoting other skills, like watching your mind without judgment. But I'm not sure it helps to, for example, non-judgmentally watch yourself have a panic attack. So IMO the ability to step back from the brink should come first for a lot of people, and then the harder skills should be built on a foundation where you know you have the ability to intervene if you need to.
The only times I do clear my mind intentionally now are the times when I am waiting. Kinda like fast-traveling to the future in video games (or, indeed, meditation mechanic in Witcher games). Makes airport experience a lot better, actually.
Meditation is a tool, and no tool is useful for everyone. And some folk don't use the tool as intended.
The way I get through it is to remind myself that the only reason to avoid doing anything is fear of death, and I know for sure that sitting here for 1 minute will not kill me, therefore I have no reason not to force myself to just do it.
Aim to make it all the way to 6 seconds. Tell yourself this is a major accomplishment for you - a 100% improvement.
Then you need to take a break, have something to eat. Stretch your muscles, do some shadow boxing and see how far you can make it beyond 12 seconds.
Scream inside your head, YES I'VE MADE IT!
The other thought processes deserve to be mocked like this.
YMMV
Telling myself to breathe slower is fine. Just not at some predefined interval (or worse, whatever interval the yoga instructor feels like I should be breathing at)
Maybe that's the point. Because you have to follow a certain timing, your body is not on autopilot anymore, so you have to be conscious of your oxygen needs, maybe even adjust them (for example, by calming down).
A lot of it is breathing slower, or faster than your body requires (including retention of breath, or holding with no air in the lungs), in order to elicit mental and physical states.
Another example of this is Wim Hof, where you over breathe intentionally and then hold the breath for extended periods.
Breath is a really interesting topic, being an autonomous system for the most part, but one which we can take voluntary control over.
If you are interested in learning more, I'd recommend the book "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art" by James Nestor.
Edit: After trying the meditation, I also found it was a little quick if I was trying to sync my breathing to the dot. It may be intentional if the aim is to improve focus and alertness for an upcoming task, rather than relaxation!