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Somebody with a lot of meditation experience should chime in here. Sitting alone with your thoughts, and practicing "mindfulness' is not easy. I've done it for 5 minutes, even that can bring on impatience for it to end.
I don't know about drug users or alcoholics, I'd be curious to know though if they felt that way.
Being alone with my thoughts is actually one of my favorite things in the world. I get so much inner work accomplished. I can literally stare at a wall for hours, just thinking, and building...
As an old saying goes "It's hard to improve on silence".
Somebody with a lot of meditation experience should chime in here. Sitting alone with your thoughts, and practicing "mindfulness' is not easy. I've done it for 5 minutes, even that can bring on impatience for it to end.
I don't know about drug users or alcoholics, I'd be curious to know though if they felt that way.
I’m the same way with meditation. I try to do it but I only set the timer for 6 minutes. If I try to make it for longer than that, I won’t do it at all and I figure some is better than none.
I don’t drink but I have done my share of recreational drugs. Not because I don’t wanna be alone with my thoughts, it’s actually the opposite I’m usually in my head all the time even as a child that was true. Even when I’m around a room full of people, I’m off and in my head. It’s mostly due to a myriad of mild neurological and psychological issues, such as ADHD, OCD (mild) and anxiety. In my experience, most people who have issues like this and are unmedicated, tend to subconsciously medicate themselves in an attempt to feel “normal” through various means, whether drugs or even substances such as caffeine and cigarettes.
Somebody with a lot of meditation experience should chime in here. Sitting alone with your thoughts, and practicing "mindfulness' is not easy. I've done it for 5 minutes, even that can bring on impatience for it to end.
I don't know about drug users or alcoholics, I'd be curious to know though if they felt that way.
A recovering alcoholic was my yoga and meditation mentor. I wish that I could remember what he told me about mindfulness. It helped. I could do it.
I can no longer manage to do that because it's very easy for me to visualize things which have happened in the past and that gets in the way. The cat that we had when I was five years old walks in. I loved that cat.
"Mindfulness" meditation is really focused on the "here and now" experience, and how our senses interpret our surroundings. Hearing, vision, smell, touch, etc. It's a method to avoid always being focused on the future or the past, a way to appreciate the people around you at the moment, the small things that you probably overlook in your busy life, a way to get away from preoccupation with obsessional thinking. It's not a new technique, it's been around for decades, "take time to smell the roses" is a perfect metaphor.
Meditation involved with sitting quietly, eyes closed, and focusing on one specific thing is another way to quiet the mind and is not really involved with your own thoughts. It's a form of "sensate focus". Your own thoughts are typically the problem when you turn to meditation. Obsessive thinking, predicting failure, misinterpretation of your surroundings that causes anxiety and depression, ruminating worry about real stressors and sometimes, overblown perceived stressors and the list goes on. Focusing on one specific thing can involve thought or vision.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is another way to step back and analyze your thought process and learn to identify maladaptive thinking that causes stress. You learn to recognize "OK I'm doing it again, I'm predicting that I'm going to fail, this is a bad habit of mine and not based in reality." And you start competing with those thoughts with healthier thoughts. Another example could be "OK, my boss didn't say hello to me in the hall, I did something wrong, he/she doesn't like me, oh no." An alternative reaction can be "this is a bad habit of mine and I need to consider my boss is having a bad day, is preoccupied, and that it has nothing to do with me."
These are just a few examples of how to get away from your inner thoughts. Sitting quietly and dwelling on your own thoughts is probably wasted energy. That's not to say you shouldn't spend time thinking things through, pondering decisions, doing your pro and con list, basically doing your homework, you should. But to "meditate" with the purpose of sitting with your own thoughts is not the typical approach to meditation.
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