Have you ever lied in your bed in the middle of the night annoyed, angry just repeating the same thing over and over to yourself? Justifying it more and more, digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole. “I will show them tomorrow morning! HOW COULD THEY COME UP WITH THAT?! WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!”
You have a similar dialog in your head for 5th time, it’s 1 am. Your partner wakes up and asks you if you can’t sleep because you were just flipping from one side to another for the last three hours. “It’s those buggers at work! You know what they did?!” you grind between your teeth. “Yes, I know love, you were talking about it the whole evening. Just go to sleep.” they reply. “I wish I could, do you think I want to be angry?” you finish the conversation while turning your back to your partner. Your smartwatch thinks you are in the middle of a marathon and your feet have cold sweats even when it’s 18 degrees in the room.
You somehow manage to fall asleep at 3 am, just for the alarm to wake you up after what feels like 2-hour sleep. You are groggy, tired, and disappointed in yourself that you can’t get proper sleep. After all, why do you have to be angry in those situations and bring it back home? You bet others don’t get annoyed.
Even just a few of those nights in a row is rough.
“I hope you are not going to tell me that I should just mediate when I’m annoyed!!! It’s like telling someone depressed just not to be sad.”
Hold on… Hold on… no need to get angry, again.
Meditation is a practice that helps us not to “listen to ourselves”.
Imagine an activity you enjoy. Maybe you like to play an instrument or some sport. When you are engaged in it and in the flow, you are probably not spending the whole time thinking about what you need to do the next day, what groceries you need to get on your way back, or whom you need to call this week. Those thoughts might pop up, but they disappear very quickly because you need to focus more on what you are doing. If they don’t disappear, use this as a second practice example.
That is not to say that flow is meditation, but it is a good example of what it means not to listen to your own thought. All of us have some of those activities every day, we are just not aware of them.
Even though meditation comes with a lot of interesting philosophies, it is at its core regular practice. When you are angry for five hours in a row, it is a good time to realize that meditation might help, but it might not be the easiest time to start. Similarly, a street fight is not the best way how to start learning how to fight.
How to meditate? Just Google it and pick what you find interesting. I got there through some podcast with Sam Harris and his Waking Up book and app. Nowadays, in the western world, we also use mindfulness as a synonym for meditation.
You will find yourself failing miserably. You might start by focusing on your breath. When you start to think about anything, hopefully, the meditation guide will prompt you to refocus on your breath every minute or so. It is surprisingly difficult, to try to focus on breathing even for several seconds! Hoping to go 10 minutes without paying attention to any of your thoughts is like running an ultramarathon, so don’t be discouraged. Don’t be hard on yourself for not doing it every day either. One of the last things you want is to judge yourself for not being able to do it “perfectly”.
One of the outcomes of the practice is that when you get annoyed and you will start to get into the spiral of, what used to be, no return, you might have built up a mechanism, which will trigger a thought “Wait, why am I thinking about this? Do I want to do it?”. You are not safe yet though! It is easy to push this aside and go back to your rightful annoyance. “HEY! I didn’t want to get back to this! Brain, YOU LITTLE…!” you tell yourself. Ok, what now then? Try to focus on your breath, focus on reading a book, or washing dishes. Whatever you were originally trying to do.
And you will go there and back quite a few times. Meditation practice offers you those opportunities to take over from your chain of thought. The more you practice, the more those opportunities will be.
Your consciousness has its patterns, which are way too often not designed to our best interest. Meditation practice gives us one of the tools how to break them.
Last time I was laying in bed annoyed. It took me probably around an hour for the first trigger to appear “Hey, I don’t want to think about this, I don’t get anything out of this.”. I’ve tried to refocus on my audiobook, just to switch after 10 seconds back to the previous chain of thought. I went several times there and back in the next half an hour before I fell asleep. One of the things I learned is that this is quite a difficult thing for me to do, so I shouldn’t be too harsh on myself for not doing it perfectly!
Good luck!
Just above average 