10 mins a day is good to build a habit though. Sure, you can’t get deep at all in that time unless you’re already in a relaxed state, but it lets you touch the calm which is available. Over time your innate knowledge that you are able to get yourself back to calm becomes a touchstone which you can call on in times of need. Personally I think that is more valuable in dealing with anxiety than trying to meditate in the moment, although the latter can also be valuable.
An analogy I like is a dog going bananas in a thunderstorm because it’s scared. What the dog lacks is the ability to contextualise what’s going on. If you could speak to the dog, you’d tell it that despite the noise and commotion, nothing is actually really wrong. The thunderstorm is just one of those weather patterns which happens from time to time, and as long the dog’s body is safe and secure, the storm will eventually just pass of its own accord. Anxiety is like that. It’s very frightening to feel like the anxiety has you in its grip, like you might really lose your shit, like it might never end. Happily none of that is true. If you simply turn your attention to the total lack of danger you/your body are actually in and wait, the anxiety dissipating is not merely achievable but inevitable. When I get anxiety now, it’s that sense of its inevitable end, rather than meditating in the moment, which allows me to transcend it. My attitude is that all sorts of weird weather patterns go on in my brain and that nothing requires me to take them very seriously.
I’d recommend a guided retreat if possible. I really need to get to a longer one myself. I’ve only done three-day ones and it’s not really enough.
Just got an opportunity to practice what i preach! Life circumstances have conspired to send a cold front of anxiety through my brain. Not too severe, but then it rarely is these days. I have certainly experienced severe attacks in the past.
One thing to avoid, I think, is to talk in terms of conquering anxiety, bravado like “I am stronger than this, I can defeat it”. Because, actually I can’t. In fact both the “I” there, my self, and my free will are just illusions as far as I’m concerned, so it’s entirely the wrong way to frame it. I just know that this isn’t the natural state of my mind, I’ve demonstrated this to myself any number of times. The correct attitude, if you can summon it in the face of the emotional assault you’re under, is just amusement. When you really stop and think about what it is that my brain is currently convinced I should be obsessing about, when you put it in the context of my whole life, not to mention the human race and the universe writ large, it’s pretty funny.
When it comes to meditation and anxiety, I have found it useful to just be with, invite in, even welcome the feeling.
When I feel anxious, it tends to show up as this awful, sick energy in my chest. A kind of constriction or dropping. And I can tell that my body, my ego, really wants it gone. Which often leads me to habits designed to distract or cover up the feeling. But it inevitably comes back.
A few weeks ago my anxiety hit a huge spike. For days I had this feeling. I started trying to meditate whenever I felt it–really just looking at the feeling, that energy. Letting it be there. When it would come back, I’d actually say something to myself along the lines of “welcome back.” I tried to see each recurrence as an opportunity to let it be there, examine it, be with this awful feeling.
All easier said than done, for sure. But over time, I have noticed it dissipate. And when it does show back up, I see it now as a temporary phenomenon.
@ChrisV analogy of the dog in the thunderstorm is a good one.
Group meditations, or meditating with a partner, has been very helpful to me. Someone earlier in this thread likened group meditation to watching sports in a stadium with a crowd, v watching on tv. I often experience a compounding effect.
Even if you can’t do this often (meditate with other people), the experience really helps show you what’s possible.
I don’t really know anything about stoicism besides the name, but I imagine some of the prescriptions are similar to Buddhism even if the reasoning is different. Got a link?
Yeah it’s similar to Buddhism in philosophy. I think while Stoicism answers the question “what qualities of mind should we have to be without fear”, one of the major things Buddhism offers is an opinion on how you go about cultivating those qualities of mind. A lot more to it than that of course, but that’s fundamentally what I’m interested in. Like the Stoic argument is sound: it would be awesome if we all just accepted sickness and death and those things didn’t cause us fear. The Buddhist next step is: OK, but they do cause me fear. How do I go about fixing this?
Just wanted to say thanks for this (and all you’ve shared in this thread and the Mental Health thread). I’ve seen some version of this numerous times, but sometimes a certain phrasing comes at the right time and an idea you have heard over and over clicks in.
Anyway this has been really helpful to me in recent weeks to keep myself from spiraling.
On a perhaps related note, is anyone else here “absent-minded”? It’s a problem for me (always has been) and I seem to forget some basic things around the house for example that I should remember. It seems to get worse whenever we are in a new place/environment, but I think the issue is exacerbated by stress, so being somewhere unfamiliar might play a role too.
If so, have you found mindfulness meditation to be helpful? It seems like it should, given that it should help with focusing on the present, but was wondering if anyone else can relate.
One other thing to watch out for with Stoicism is that it is being coopted a bit by the mens rights / Joe Rogan crowd. So some of the information out there on Stoicism is just another fresh package on toxic masculinity.
Agree. I recommend either reading “The Obstacle Is the Way” for an easy to read modern take or “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. But yeah, avoid the Rogan and 4 Hour Work Week flavors and go directly the source.
I have started noticing an interesting phenomenon when I meditate for longer periods of time (30 to 40 minutes). … When I start, the first 10-20 minutes is really a process of my mind starting to slow down. It’s typically thick with thoughts, all of them fairly mundane and relevant to whatever has been going on or kicking around in my head.
After 20 minutes though, sometimes there is a change. I experience thoughts, yes. But also … I’ll have flashes of scenes. Two people talking, for instance. But these are not me. They don’t seem to involve me, in ways I can grasp. They feel like snippets of a movie I’ve never seen, simply dropped into my brain.
I have very little recall of these. I almost never remember what was said, for instance, only that something occured. In this way they feel like dreams–and that seems like a plausible explanation, that these are simply mini-dreams, whatever happens at night this is the same mechanism kicking in very briefly? Except. They feel so random and foreign.
Anyway, does anyone else every experience this or something like it?
It’s common to have semi-hallucinatory experiences like lights and colours or more complex visions during meditation. These are simply little flickers of activity going on in the brain, which most likely happen all the time in waking life, but mostly your brain is not quiet enough for them to come to awareness. The brain does a remarkable amount of editing before anything gets promoted into conscious awareness, for example you had no awareness of how your right big toe was feeling until I mentioned it just now, now maybe you do. People who use isolation tanks report a whole bunch similar hallucinatory sense data.
There are similarities with dreams but I think they’re a distinct phenomenon, the way meditation is similar to sleep in some ways but fundamentally different.
I dipped into stoicism for the first time a couple days ago and now have become a bit obsessed with it. I’ve read The Obstacle is in the Way and am now working my way through Meditations. Searched for a couple daily podcasts in English, Spanish, and French, watched a video from that Italian guy (Pigliucci I think) and am reading a couple threads in r/Stoicism. It really clicks with me and seems like the perfect compliment to a strong meditation practice. Great rec by clovis!
Awesome glad to hear. I really think it makes a perfect compliment to mindfulness. Together they have formed the foundation of my psychological self care regime.
Started a new meditation routine today. Gonna do an hour a day of meditating broken up into 3 parts:
20 minutes upon waking, even before eating or checking phone
20 minutes immediately after a poker session (mind will be racing, dwelling, but it will be good practice to train a racing mind)
20 minutes right before bed, after which I’m no longer allowed to check phone or other electronics
I haven’t been great at sticking to routines (to be fair I’ve felt like shit most of the past 2 months, just now starting to feel a bit normal again), but hoping to maintain this for a month and then re-evaluate. I’d eventually like to get into deeper meditation, maybe a vipassana retreat to really jump-start my practice.
I’ve also been pretty addicted to consuming media on stoic philosophy. So far I’ve read The Obstacle is the Way and Meditations, and just ordered another Ryan Holliday offering as well as Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life and another Marcus Aurelius book: Maxims and Teachings. Actually, I’m not sure that’s the title, the latter 2 I ordered in Spanish.
Already starting to put a couple of the rituals and teachings into practice in my real life and really excited to see where this combo leads me.