my practice of mindfulness and an update on my progress.

[Spikeycloud]

Hi Guys long time not spoken. Seeing it is some time ago now that I posted here and seeing that I was really struggling with life and mindfulness I thought it would be a nice idea to let u guys know how things are going now. If you don't know me yet, I posted here quite a lot struggling with my depression for years and extreme obession to control my thoughts and being extremely ciritcal of losing awareness.

At the moment I begin slowly to see that things are getting better. I’m not where I want to be yet, but I can see now a better quality of my state of being in general. This can of course change from time to time and even throughout the day but I guess that is normal. I suspect that the thing that is really helping is het actively facing my fears. For an example, I often go to the club alone and without any alcohol while having social anxiety and littarly feeling every stimulus... I now trained myself to be ok with everything no matter which fear the mind throws at me….which is great but still very hard at times.

At the moment I’m trying to do mindfulness twice a day for 5 minutes. In the morning when I wake up and in the evening when I’m going to try to sleep. At mornings I always feel bad, and then I is very hard to focus for long on anything. At the evening I mostly can focus very well on whichever I want to focus on in the mindfulness. I still have the problem of being critical of being caught up in thought – and I can still see sometimes that I’m disappointed by this both during mindfulness but also outside. I then completely forget that it is better to be ok with it. This of course depends how I feel at that moment. If I feel good it is a lot easier than if I’m tense.

So yeah, I hope that after all these years I finally beat my depression eventually.

[JonW]

Spikey! Great to see you here again on the forum. And great to hear that things are getting a bit better for you.
Regarding practice...I'd recommend increasing the lengths of your meditations, perhaps gradually. There's nothing wrong with meditating for only five minutes at a time but longer meditations present us with greater opportunities to notice wandering thoughts, resistance, self-criticisms etc.
Also, do you limit yourself to sitting/breathing meditations or do you practice other kinds of meditations too - body scans, walking meditations, mindful movement etc.?
All good things your way,
Jon

[Spikeycloud]

Spikey! Great to see you here again on the forum. And great to hear that things are getting a bit better for you.
Regarding practice...I'd recommend increasing the lengths of your meditations, perhaps gradually. There's nothing wrong with meditating for only five minutes at a time but longer meditations present us with greater opportunities to notice wandering thoughts, resistance, self-criticisms etc.
Also, do you limit yourself to sitting/breathing meditations or do you practice other kinds of meditations too - body scans, walking meditations, mindful movement etc.?
All good things your way,
Jon

Thanks for your response. I doing now meditations made for autistic people. I learned a year ago that I'm a bit autistic and it seems that normal minfulness doesn't work that well on autistic people because of different information processing in the brain. Though I don't find those autistic meditation different from the normal ones. Mosty I do a body scan or focus on my breath or body.