Oxford: meditation

In my previous life as a person who didn’t meditate, I was regularly told that I should maybe try to meditate. Because I have various problems, and meditation apparently helps with basically all problems. Or because it is also great, on top of that.

So I would occasionally try to meditate. And I didn’t like it. Mostly I couldn’t really avoid having thoughts, and if I managed to mostly think about whatever boring waves or breathing or vague relaxingness that a tape wanted me to think about, that was boring. Thinking about feelings in my body was worse, because it usually made me anxious or beset by OCD somehow. I tried going to a more extensive mindfulness course, with whole hours of meditation in it, and it would straight up cause me to have a panic attack. Which the teacher thought I should just be mindful about and carry on, but I thought I wouldn’t. Also, as far as I could tell, the benefits of meditation included lack of thoughts, and possibly being less conscious or destroying yourself, if you were really successful. Which all sound like the opposite of good.

Then lately I tried it again, just because I was told to for five minutes as part of something else. And it went really well. My mind seemed like an empty space, which thoughts kept on entering one at a time, at a nice distance where I could see them. Instead of being down among them, each one seemed like a distinct object — with a location and a color even — that I could identify and examine then set aside. Being able to see my own thoughts from some higher level seems much better than not having thoughts, and I am told this is still some kind of meditation.

There were thoughts that were clearly OCD compulsions. I usually feel like I am supposed to identify thoughts as OCD-related and then discard them. Which made a lot more sense from this vantage. Usually I’m down in the thick of the thoughts, and discarding them is hard, maybe like discarding a boat that you are in. Whereas this was more like being God looking down at the boats, and effortlessly flicking some of them out of existence.

And even for thoughts that weren’t obviously malign, I think it felt more like I could see the options about what to think, and make a choice, rather than swinging blindly from one thought to the next. Not to mention, just knowing what kinds of things I think seems pretty good — I am usually distracted by actually thinking the thoughts, and so have trouble saying later what my thinking is like.

One interesting thing I noticed was that my thoughts were often not in words, but also not in wordless thoughtstuff. They were sort of like zip files of words. Where I could then unzip them and there was a definite answer to which words were owed, but I didn’t actually hear or say the words in my mind in the usual course of things.

I have meditated more since, with less success, but still enjoyably and in a similar direction. Hopefully the limits to my success save me from getting any of those terrible meditation rewards.