For people who meditate, please tell me about how you do it, how you feel, what helps you concentrate and other such questions.
As part of my recovery program, I’m trying meditation. I do it for 10 minutes a day, in the morning. I started off with less time, and have gradually built up. I close my eyes and try to just be aware of my breath or heartbeat. When I get aware of my thoughts, then I try to let them go.
Is there more involved than this? I get lots of thoughts and it seems to be a constant battle to stop them. Is that the point of meditation and is this what everyone experiences?
Meditation has so many different levels with many different goals for what we are trying to attain.
I spent several months working in an eastern religious meditation temple. I had no idea of how dramatic the affect could be on someone. They would simply chant a mantra over and over for about 20 min or so every couple of hours and they appeared to be very high after each session.
I read up a little on mediation 20 years ago and morphed out my own form that seems to calm me. I simply go back to one of many happy places in my mind. It gets easy with a little practice. I may continue to work while I am doing this if the job doesn't require any or much thought. Repetitive prayer like saying a rosary for instance has a meditative affect. Each form of meditation seems to generate different chemicals and hormones. We tend to gravitate towards the ones we find pleasurable. I suspect that serotonin is what I am looking for and have found a way to produce it.
Meditation doesn’t always calm me while I am doing it, although sometimes it does. It makes me calmer overall, however.
You don’t need to stop your thoughts. Just observe them, or let them go or whatever your technique is. Over time, you will probably get less of them coming up, but it doesn’t really matter if you don’t. You are not trying to make them disappear. It’s more like breaking the hold they have over your attention.
My technique lately has just been to sit, following my breath and being open-minded about what might happen in each moment. It’s easy for me to get caught up in a theoretical analysis, or use meditation to push for answers, and this is never productive.