Rodland wrote:
I concentrate on following my breathing and I try not to think any other thoughts, just enjoying pacifying "nothingness". I may also have a kind of vision that I was sleeping in somebody's arms or laying in the soft grass on a sunny day. Maybe you can have this sort of "background scheme" if you think it feels good.
Of course, other thoughts are not necessarily so easy to block. So one should not try this so hard. But try to concentrate on your breathing and let other thoughts flow through your mind. Try to avoid paying much attention to them. Do not panic if you fail. Try to keep a peaceful mood, concentrating in your breathing.
This sort of meditation seems to work sometimes, sometimes not. When it works, it helps to stop the endless flow of random thoughts.
(Breathing can probably be replaced with other monotonous thing, like concentrating on listening to background noise etc.)
Sounds very similar to my technique, which I gather is of Sufi origin. It's very simple - I just get physically comfortable and then focus on the air coming into and going out of my nostrils as I breathe. The aim is to think of nothing else at all, though it's really not important to achieve that, which is just as well because it's virtually impossible to get it perfect. All that matters is to apply very gentle pressure in that general direction. If I can inhale or exhale once without doing much in the way of thinking, it's beginning to work. Of course when I get to the end of a "successful" inhalation or exhalation I tend to think "good, I got that pretty much right," but that doesn't matter. It's a matter of being very gentle on myself and accepting that even the tiniest step towards achieving the goal is perfectly adequate, and to keep calmly putting myself back on the road (because I go off the road many times). Before I know it, I'm falling asleep.
The only times it doesn't work is when my brain is too active (often because of preoccupation with unresolved worries or intriguing problems). If that's the case, I often just give in and get up. If I really can't sleep, then trying to just makes me feel worse.
I also find it helpful to spend half an hour or so on artistic, relaxing activities before bedtime, to get the "thinking hard" part of my brain used to the idea of slowing down. Physical exercise and a few simple Yoga stretches also help. And a nice relaxing bath.
I think there's a lot of truth in the idea that anxiety is often a thing we do to ourselves (and can therefore learn to stop doing), though I also think that if we're truly in appreciable danger of nasty things happening, we have little choice but to feel rather wired until we've at least found a strategy for escaping the bad thing.
16 Aug 2015, 9:23 am
