Learning To Love Meditation

By Jacqueline Atta-Hayford

The very first time I attempted to meditate was in my first year of secondary school. We were on a class retreat. The reason why is vague in my memory, but the exercise was intended to get us all to relax and open ourselves up to the experience of the day more.

It was an all-around frustrating experience. Firstly, getting a group of 11-year-old girls to ‘clear their minds’ instead of taking the opportunity to giggle with friends and prod or tickle anyone around them who had their eyes closed is a difficult business. Secondly, this concept of ‘clearing my mind’ seemed so utterly impossible to me. My thoughts are frantic, unorganised and often intrusive whether I want them or not. I’d try to picture this small house on the beach that the group leader was trying to conjure in our heads, and suddenly it was growing tentacles, or turned into an image of what I had for breakfast that morning, or worse still I couldn’t create anything at all and stared angrily at the insides of my eyelids.

Fast-forward twelve years and a discovery that these racing thoughts are a product of an anxiety disorder, and I’m once again hearing about meditation. This time it was from a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist I was seeing at the time, and he was telling me all about this concept of Mindfulness that he had been reading up on. He thought it would be something I found particularly useful, and recommended a book entitled “Mindfulness: Finding Peace in A Frantic World” by Mark Williams and Dr. Danny Penman.

Before reading the book I had been given tasks around meditation and focusing on the present by my therapist, and again I found them frustrating. One that sticks out in my memory is being asked to listen to music. No more, no less, just that: listening. Paying attention to the music, what instruments I can hear, what the lyrics say, and not to let my mind wander off to thoughts of the past or future. However, try as I might, my thoughts would whirl around in my head so quickly and loudly that I would get angry at myself for not being good enough, beat myself up for not achieving my goal, and then start to feel even worse.

Remembering that horrible, tight, and angry feeling that came with my perceived failure made me intensely anxious about, and therefore reluctant to start, the eight week course in Dr. Penman’s book.

One of the most pervasive symptoms of my anxiety is avoidance of high-stress situations. When we talk about anxiety the concept of “fight or flight” tends to be brought up; I know with almost absolute certainty that my response is always flight. Hiding, procrastinating, and convincing myself of the uselessness of tasks has been a spectacularly frustrating aspect of my personality. It took a moment of completely spontaneous bravery to decide on documenting my progress via my blog.

The blog itself was a project I had already started, but without real focus or direction. Sometimes I spoke about mental health, sometimes I used it for story writing, and sometimes I just used it as a place to house my disjointed thoughts. This way, I was able to have a regular update schedule and a focused topic for eight whole weeks.

I was aware that there were two very specific things about meditation that I had found frustrating up to the point before I started this course. First, and most frustrating, was that I found it impossible to clear my thoughts. As soon as it felt like I could not accomplish this goal, I felt utterly frustrated and angry at myself for failing, which only served to trigger my anxiety and avoidance even further.

The second thing was that it seemed to me like meditation just consisted of sitting silently in lotus position for half an hour, and then everything fell into place magically once you do it the right way.This project, however, showed me that these were based on complete misconceptions.

Meditation is not at all about ‘clearing’ your thoughts in the sense of making your mind empty. Thoughts are often involuntary and unpredictable, so to make your mind truly empty is quite a feat for many people like me. No, meditation is more about observing the flow of thoughts and understanding where our unhelpful ones come from.

Say, for example, you are at work and start to notice a constricted feeling in the chest that tells you you’re anxious. You have no idea where it came from, and the feeling tends to make your thoughts even more frantic than usual, making it even harder to find the source of this problem. Meditation is about taking the time out to observe the flow of your thoughts, observing patterns, and using those observations to understand the way your mind works much better. With a short meditation and adopting a mindful perspective you can figure out that, hey, you have been mulling over the way you accidentally bumped into someone on the train this morning and beating yourself up all day for a single clumsy moment.

Meditation is just taking time out to broaden your current perspective and reinforce the power of living in the moment with acceptance of the past and anticipation of the future, without fixating on one or the other. Once I figured this out in my first week, I slowly but surely stopped fighting with myself and started trying to understand how I work, feeling better and better for it as time rolled on.

Next was the realisation that there are so many different ways to meditate. Standing, sitting, lying down, totally still or moving about, at home or at work…all of it works. I owe this realisation to both ‘FPIAFW’ and a book called ‘Mindfulness Made Easy’ by Martha Langley. It educated me on the concept of using mantras or affirmations with meditation, having a sound or phrase to ground you and gently guide your thoughts.

The thing I want to get across here more than anything is this: when you are immersed in an action that both calms and focuses you and lessens the frantic nature of your thoughts, that action is a form of meditation. There has been a recent surge in interest for ‘Adult Colouring Books’ on social media recently because people find them focusing, relaxing, and light-hearted. The reason is because the act of colouring in, having a single, semi-repetitive, and calming task that allows you to zone in is a kind of meditation. Cooking, stretching, building a model plane or moisturising your skin in the morning after a shower can all be meditative moments.

Once I realised this I was able to better integrate meditation into my day. I realised that having an audio guide for my meditations is infinitely better for me than silence, that when I am having a particularly frantic day using a mantra works excellently (my preferred one is simply: ‘I am here.’), and the most important thing I learned is that it’s okay if my mind wanders. I am still learning not to get frustrated with myself, and often times I don’t succeed, but when I can have a session in which I do not get frustrated and simply let my thoughts be as they are, there is such a refreshing feeling that washes over me as soon as the meditation is over.

The mutability of mindfulness is what, I believe, makes it so successful. It’s perfect to try out, try on, shape to fit around your life, and to shape your life to fit around it. The methods that I like do not have to fit you and vice versa, and the importance is less in doing things the ‘right’ way and more in finding a comfortable way to progress that works for you. If your meditation method is stressful in and of itself, that is a red flag and a sign to reassess.

Now, I can comfortably say that meditation has changed my life for the better. All the learning I did since that first moment of frustration as a little girl, and all the work I did with FPIAFW, have taught me some really valuable lessons about the power that comes with living in the moment and how it changes the way I fundamentally think. From mantras to mindfulness ‘bells’, and my absolute favourite meditation the coveted ‘three minute breathing space’, I have found some really successful ways to anchor my mind in the Right Now. I have also been using my blog, entitled ‘This Is What an Anxious Mind Looks Like’, as a tool to further my progress with mindful living by reaching out to people all over and having them relate and use my words as tools for their own growth. Sharing my journey, I have found, has been a wonderful exercise in grounding and also in listening to myself better.

If you would like to share in it too, please feel free to read up on some more fragments of my mental journey, just like this one, at http://jaxxthinks.blogspot.com. I can also be followed on Twitter: @jaxxolantern