From One Noisy Mind to Another, I Swear You Can Meditate
Practical, tried and tested tricks that finally helped me meditate
It’s 2022, and we’re all likely in the middle of our eighth existential crisis. We all know of the health benefits of meditation, particularly in times of stress and anxiety, so why don’t we just…start?
After nearly a decade of attempts to make meditation a habit, I can attest to the fact that the practice feels hella hard, especially if you are predisposed to anxiety. Sure, you can focus on your breath for a few inhales and exhales. Soon after, you realize your prefrontal cortex is planning ahead, mentally scanning the aisles of your local grocery store, trying to remember all the items you need to buy tonight to make grandma’s lasagna.
If you have an anxious mind and a goal, your brain probably does what mine does. You’ll obsess a bit and find yourself listening to, reading, and taking classes on your topic de jour.
When you search for meditation on Google, over 35.6 MILLION articles appear. It’s overwhelming.
To save you some time, I’ll impart some insights into meditation and habit forming that actually stuck with me. (And who knows, maybe the Karma Gods will give me some extra brownie points to cash in the next time I’m facing an existential crisis!)
Emily Pellegrino is a psychotherapist who specializes in working with highly-sensitive people in the LGBTQ+ community advises clients to take a realistic reframing to the practice of meditation:
Sure, meditation can have a huge positive impact on our life, but it might also happen in really subtle ways that we don’t notice right away.
A Common Misconception
Before you read on, please meditate on the fact that meditation isn’t a practice of getting your mind quiet. Nor will you necessarily have episodic epiphanies. Nor will you necessarily reach the peak of mindfulness, where you’re able to climb mountains barefoot and withstand extremely cold temperatures just by breathing and centering your mind like Wim Hof.
Wim Hof’s work is a fascinating rabbit hole to venture into. To spend an eye-opening 40 minutes of your time learning about how this idiosyncratic man can consciously bullwhip his autonomic nervous and immune systems into shape at will, watch this VICE documentary.
The secret to meditation isn’t to completely clear your mind, it’s to notice.
Though just noticing what’s happening in our mind is the biggest part of meditation, “even that can be challenging,” Pellegrino says.
Folks can get stuck with meditation because they feel like nothing is happening but sometimes these types of changes can show up in our bodies first before they show up in our thoughts.
You're noticing when you tap into your senses and are mindful of the breeze on your cheeks, the noise of the birds chirping, and the smell of coffee brewing. You also will undoubtedly notice the noisiness of your mind, and that’s OK. Pellegrino says:
I tell folks to make note of what’s happening in their bodies after they’ve meditated. Have the creaks in your neck shifted? Are your shoulders a little more or less tense? What is happening behind your eyes — are they tired, energized…or maybe even the same?
Viewing all these things through a nonjudgmental lens can just help you be curious about what’s happening in your body. And if your neck becomes more tense after a meditation, that’s not a bad thing. It just means that there has been a shift or movement in your body, and that’s what shows that change is happening.
Daydreaming + a Chatty Mind During Meditation = Normal
Having a noisy mind is par the course of meditation. As a matter of fact, it’s completely normal and might even mean you’re…gifted. Daydreaming has been linked to intelligence in a recent study. “People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering,” says Eric Schumacher, Georgia Tech associate psychology professor who conducted the research. He and his team concluded that a lot of mind-wandering isn’t about a failure to pay attention; it’s simply that “smart” people don’t need to pay full attention to get the gist of what’s happening around them, giving them the capacity to multitask.
Regardless, even though your brain is your own, trusty ‘lil CPU — even the best processors need to turn off from time to time. Pellegrino says:
It’s important to drop the judgment and meet yourself where you’re at. Meditation isn’t about doing it right or wrong, it’s just about showing up for yourself and noticing what’s there.
Dropping Into Meditation
I’d listened to many Buddhist lectures on meditation, read the woo-woo-est of writers, and followed guided meditations, but for many years, I couldn’t make the practice stick.
Until I listened to Glennon Doyle’s Untamed audiobook. Doyle shares her experiences of turmoil in life until she was able to crack the code to create a meditation practice.
She describes her meditation practice as sinking into herself. This visual is enormously helpful, I think. When I tried to visualize sinking, it took me into my body, into my center, my gut, which Doyle describes as The Knowing. And helped me quiet down. She writes:
Every day, I returned to the closet, sat down on the floor littered with T-shirts and jeans, and I practiced sinking. The Knowing would meet me in the deep and nudge me toward the next right thing, one thing at a time. That was how I began to know what to do next. That was how I began to walk through my life more clearly, solid and steady.
I can know things down at this level that I can’t on the chaotic surface. Down here, when I pose a question about my life — in words or abstract images — I sense a nudge. The nudge guides me toward the next precise thing, and then, when I silently acknowledge the nudge — it fills me. The Knowing feels like warm liquid gold filling my veins and solidifying just enough to make me feel steady, certain.
This feeling of warm liquid moving throughout your body— is akin to another meditative practice called body scanning, where you take notice of every centimeter of your body. From head to toe, you slowly scan down your body while envisioning the sun, or warm light, casting over your whole skin.
Doyle describes what she found when sinking into The Knowing:
Eventually, I sank deep enough to find a new level inside me that I’d never known existed. This place is underneath; low, deep, quiet, still. There are no voices there, not even my own. All I can hear down there is my breath. It was as though I’d been drowning and in my panic I had been gasping for air, calling for rescue, and flailing on the surface. But what I really needed to do to save myself was let myself sink.
Sinking into one’s knowing is like throwing clay on a wheel. To build a piece of pottery on a rotating wheel, you must first center the clay to build out the form. Once your clay is truly centered, it looks like your clay is standing still as the wheel continues to spin, just as sinking deeply into the stillness of oneself helps keep one’s mind calm as the world moves calamitously on.
In time, meditation and mindfulness can give you a temporarily lingering feeling, making you less inclined to overreact or get caught in negative, snowballing thought patterns.
But it can be tough to maintain that sense of calm at the beginning.
How to Become Consistent at Meditating
Any mindfulness practice is better than none. But to get the full effects of nurturing your physiological muscle to kick into a more restful state of mind, it’s better to do it more often.
But don’t go whole-hog right away. That’s a sure way to make this practice a one-hit-wonder.
James Clear‘s Atomic Habits work shares scientifically-proven ways to create habits. He writes:
When most people struggle to build new habits, they say something like, ‘I just need more motivation.’ Or, ‘I wish I had as much willpower as you do.’
This is the wrong approach. Research shows that willpower is like a muscle. It gets fatigued as you use it throughout the day. Another way to think of this is that your motivation ebbs and flows.
Solve this problem by picking a new habit that is easy enough that you don’t need motivation to do it. Rather than starting with 50 pushups per day, start with five pushups per day. Rather than trying to meditate for 10 minutes per day, start by meditating for one minute per day. Make it easy enough that you can get it done without motivation.
The Four Laws to Establishing a Meditative Practice
The TL;DR of Clear’s book centers around four laws for establishing new habits. Here’s how you can adapt them to your meditation practice:
- Make it obvious: Put your meditation station in a very visible part of your home, where you can’t simply forget that it’s there. Seeing this area day after day should hopefully remind you to take a moment to sit and do the damn thang.
You can also use the behavioral science tactic of habit bundling. For instance, if you always make yourself a cup of coffee each morning, you could automatically sit down to meditate once the coffee is brewed and then reward yourself with a sip once the coffee is drinkable and your mind is cleansed. If you do this enough, the very act of making coffee will remind you of meditation. - Make it attractive: Make your space shine. If you have the space, build out your meditation station with whatever objects (candles, flowers, crystals, etc) make the area feel vibe-y. It’s also nice to meditate in a cozy wrap to keep you warm when you’re sitting in stillness — but remember to sit up — otherwise, you might drift off.
- Make it easy: Easy is not the best word to describe the continuous action of building habits, but these are the words of James, not mine. In practice, making a new habit easy means making the first step as tiny and easy as possible — since getting started and being reminded to do it is often the hardest part. To make meditation easy, you could set a reminder on your phone, or set yourself up for success by registering for a guided meditation (see apps below) to help keep you accountable.
- Make it satisfying: If you’re a person that enjoys box-checking, make an accountability calendar (or use one of these apps) to track each time you sat down to pay attention to what’s going on inside your noggin’. If you’re not a box-checker, trying to remind yourself of how damn good you feel after your practice can help motivate you.
It’s also helpful to keep your goals in mind when you don’t feel like putting time into your practice. Remember: You’re meditating because you want to lead a more relaxed, centered, mindful life.
Meditation Tools
While I’m not a meditation expert, I’ve tried and recommend using any or all of these apps to guide you through your mindfulness or meditation practice. Not only will they offer multiple methods to try, but utilizing guided meditations act like bumpers in bowling, prompting you to return to your center without the need to remind yourself mid-practice:
- Calm or Headspace: Read a detailed breakdown comparing these most popular apps.
- Insight Timer: Like many apps, Insight Timer has a free option — but the best part is that you can take part in free, live, guided, and topical group meditations nearly every hour of the day.
- Breathwrk: This app is breathwork*-specific, and the accompanying website has a big emphasis on the science behind its methods.
- 10 Percent: The 10 Percent app and fantastic podcast are from the wonderful mind of Dan Harris (and his trusted experts!). Dan became a meditation convert after experiencing a panic attack on national TV. Along with many of the meditations are approachable interviews breaking down the why of each technique.
- Find free sessions on Eventbrite or via your local Buddhist temple.
- If you prefer an analog approach, the 8 Minute Meditation book has really straightforward, tangible approaches to try for eight minutes a day for eight weeks.
Breathwork
*Breathwork is a more active meditative practice. Instead of simply noticing your breath, you purposefully manipulate it to get a certain type of outcome (as Wim Hof does).
For instance, you can recreate hyperventilation, lengthen your breaths, or even hold your breath for a prolonged period — which can help alleviate stress and anxiety, cause you to fall asleep more quickly, energize you, or improve your endurance.
Breathwork practices help elicit a mind-body connection or relaxation response. Relaxation responses help strengthen the body’s natural stress-countering mechanism when the parasympathetic nervous system is activated. (The body’s parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for the rest and digest functioning, whereas the sympathetic nervous system, or fight-or-flight-or-freeze, is a response to stress.)
If Your Practice of Sinking Isn’t Sticking, Consider Why
Lastly, if you’re still not meditating as much as you would like, Pellegrino encourages folks to examine why that may be:
Are your thoughts telling you that this is something only ‘woo woo’ people do, or that you don’t know how to do it right, or that you don’t have enough time? Try to challenge those notions and maybe even question what those thoughts are trying to do for you or what are those thoughts are protecting you from.
Now, go forth and commit 10 minutes to yourself a day by meditation — it really adds up!
Have any of these meditation tips helped you drop in? Let us know what’s worked for you in the comments.
