I grew up a practicing Quaker. While some Friends “pray” during Meeting (what we call church), others practice mindful meditation. So while I regularly practice what I believe qualifies as mindful meditation, I haven’t been formerly trained. And also, what has worked for me in helping me learn how to focus, might not work for you; it has, however, worked for some of my friends, so it could at least help someone who reads this. In addition to daily meditation attempts, which are important even they are only for 5 minutes, it might be easier if you try some other ways to learn how gain focus.
So, lets say someone you dislike does something that annoys/angers you (jerk coworker, rude driver) or your are upset by a situation (quitting smoking). Most people, when angered, spend a good deal of mental energy dreaming up the perfect witty comeback, how horrible the other person is, or how they could “punish” the offender. They will do this for many hours throughout the day/week/month without even realizing they are doing it. They have a hard time stopping because they don’t think about their thinking. So for this drill, make a conscious decision that whenever your thoughts start to stray in that direction of thinking about that offending person/situation, you are going to stop those thoughts, acknowledge that you broke your promise to yourself by thinking them, and move on to a different, unrelated thought.
The first, uh, 50 times you do this, you will realize that you had been thinking about the triggering person or event for a few minutes—possibly more—before you noticed you were doing it. You will keep doing this. And then one time, it will click after only a minute or so. And then 40 seconds. And so on. Until you realize as you start the thought that you are breaking your personal promise. You have begun to think about thinking it while you are thinking it.
That drill will help you understand what it feels like to notice, acknowledge, and redirect your thoughts during meditation. It’s the same skill, except meditation tends to be a bit harder because it’s not just one kind of thought you are blocking, it’s all but one. So if you successfully meditating for 5 minutes, you wouldn’t have had to notice, acknowledge, or redirect your thoughts about anything—you would have just held on to that original thought for the 5 minutes. But its going to be really hard to notice if this is happening or not if you don’t know what it feels like to interrupt those unwanted thoughts. Because if you haven’t learned how to interrupt unwanted thoughts, you really haven’t learned how to identify that you are having unwanted thoughts.
Another drill which I have told people—which may or may not help as I use it mainly for falling asleep, not meditating, but it still focuses the mind—is to attempt to think random” images instead of thoughts. Obviously this is not possible, but that is the best I can do at putting words on the process. When you think of an object, it is easy to quickly move from that object into some sort of story surrounding the object.
Ex. I think of my dad, and then I think of the phone call we had today, and then i think how my dad mentioned this one thing, which I forgot to do, but that’s ok I’ll do it during my lunch break tomorrow, and oh, wouldn’t a PBJ be delicious for lunch tomorrow...and on and on.
Instead, try NOT connecting the story. Think of a thought, make that thought an image, and the second you think of something slightly else, make that thought an image but don’t think about the connection between the two. Just try to force yourself to make the thought jump without a connector. It makes it easier if you try to visualize an image of the word. If you think “gorilla,” you need to mentally see that gorilla. If you think of a word that has no direct image, like “happy,” just see the word written out in your mind.
So instead of the above mental conversation, you will visualize “dad...gorilla...banana..stem...seaweed..rainbow… telephone..cord...hair..dance..peculiar...baseball..” and on and on. The words must have a correlation somewhere in my mind or I wouldn’t have thought them in that order, but I refused to let my mind try to draw the connection while I thought them. I just accept them as random (even if this is incorrect) and force myself to make the thought jump to the next image. The second your mind starts to stray and think “oh a telephone uses a cord,” (which I realized as I type this, not while I was thinking it) and you notice yourself straying (like in the first example), correct yourself and try to start making “random” image jumps again. Try to jump from image to image as fast as possible; if you stay too long on one image, it’s easy for your mind to form related thoughts.
This drill also makes it easy for you to notice when your thought process strays, and self-correct. Honestly, I don’t think it matters if your thoughts during mindful meditation are on one object (saying “ohmmm,” staring at the flame of a candle, and so on) or on many objects like this mental images drill, as long you don’t actually give thoughts to those many objects.
Edit: I do think it is true that the words are correlated somehow, but I also think it is true our thoughts about the nature of that correlation are likely to be pareidolia. In this lecture by Sam Harris, around the 22:00 mark, he talks about how many studies have given us evidence that our stories about why we think what we think or why we did what we did are NOT correct—they are post hoc fabrications of the left hemisphere of the brain trying to make sense of things it doesn’t understand (ie the subconscious).
I grew up a practicing Quaker. While some Friends “pray” during Meeting (what we call church), others practice mindful meditation. So while I regularly practice what I believe qualifies as mindful meditation, I haven’t been formerly trained. And also, what has worked for me in helping me learn how to focus, might not work for you; it has, however, worked for some of my friends, so it could at least help someone who reads this. In addition to daily meditation attempts, which are important even they are only for 5 minutes, it might be easier if you try some other ways to learn how gain focus.
So, lets say someone you dislike does something that annoys/angers you (jerk coworker, rude driver) or your are upset by a situation (quitting smoking). Most people, when angered, spend a good deal of mental energy dreaming up the perfect witty comeback, how horrible the other person is, or how they could “punish” the offender. They will do this for many hours throughout the day/week/month without even realizing they are doing it. They have a hard time stopping because they don’t think about their thinking. So for this drill, make a conscious decision that whenever your thoughts start to stray in that direction of thinking about that offending person/situation, you are going to stop those thoughts, acknowledge that you broke your promise to yourself by thinking them, and move on to a different, unrelated thought.
The first, uh, 50 times you do this, you will realize that you had been thinking about the triggering person or event for a few minutes—possibly more—before you noticed you were doing it. You will keep doing this. And then one time, it will click after only a minute or so. And then 40 seconds. And so on. Until you realize as you start the thought that you are breaking your personal promise. You have begun to think about thinking it while you are thinking it.
That drill will help you understand what it feels like to notice, acknowledge, and redirect your thoughts during meditation. It’s the same skill, except meditation tends to be a bit harder because it’s not just one kind of thought you are blocking, it’s all but one. So if you successfully meditating for 5 minutes, you wouldn’t have had to notice, acknowledge, or redirect your thoughts about anything—you would have just held on to that original thought for the 5 minutes. But its going to be really hard to notice if this is happening or not if you don’t know what it feels like to interrupt those unwanted thoughts. Because if you haven’t learned how to interrupt unwanted thoughts, you really haven’t learned how to identify that you are having unwanted thoughts.
Another drill which I have told people—which may or may not help as I use it mainly for falling asleep, not meditating, but it still focuses the mind—is to attempt to think random” images instead of thoughts. Obviously this is not possible, but that is the best I can do at putting words on the process. When you think of an object, it is easy to quickly move from that object into some sort of story surrounding the object.
Ex. I think of my dad, and then I think of the phone call we had today, and then i think how my dad mentioned this one thing, which I forgot to do, but that’s ok I’ll do it during my lunch break tomorrow, and oh, wouldn’t a PBJ be delicious for lunch tomorrow...and on and on.
Instead, try NOT connecting the story. Think of a thought, make that thought an image, and the second you think of something slightly else, make that thought an image but don’t think about the connection between the two. Just try to force yourself to make the thought jump without a connector. It makes it easier if you try to visualize an image of the word. If you think “gorilla,” you need to mentally see that gorilla. If you think of a word that has no direct image, like “happy,” just see the word written out in your mind.
So instead of the above mental conversation, you will visualize “dad...gorilla...banana..stem...seaweed..rainbow… telephone..cord...hair..dance..peculiar...baseball..” and on and on. The words must have a correlation somewhere in my mind or I wouldn’t have thought them in that order, but I refused to let my mind try to draw the connection while I thought them. I just accept them as random (even if this is incorrect) and force myself to make the thought jump to the next image. The second your mind starts to stray and think “oh a telephone uses a cord,” (which I realized as I type this, not while I was thinking it) and you notice yourself straying (like in the first example), correct yourself and try to start making “random” image jumps again. Try to jump from image to image as fast as possible; if you stay too long on one image, it’s easy for your mind to form related thoughts.
This drill also makes it easy for you to notice when your thought process strays, and self-correct. Honestly, I don’t think it matters if your thoughts during mindful meditation are on one object (saying “ohmmm,” staring at the flame of a candle, and so on) or on many objects like this mental images drill, as long you don’t actually give thoughts to those many objects.
I have a strong suspicion that is not so—that the brain just chatters to itself, it’s pareidolia operating on static hiss on the neurons.
Edit: I do think it is true that the words are correlated somehow, but I also think it is true our thoughts about the nature of that correlation are likely to be pareidolia. In this lecture by Sam Harris, around the 22:00 mark, he talks about how many studies have given us evidence that our stories about why we think what we think or why we did what we did are NOT correct—they are post hoc fabrications of the left hemisphere of the brain trying to make sense of things it doesn’t understand (ie the subconscious).