It’s still dark outside when your alarm goes off. You got 5 whole hours of sleep, but you’re more exhausted than when you went to bed. Your head hurts, your eyelids are heavier than a stack of physics textbooks, and you’ve somehow forgotten how to get your body from horizontal to vertical.
A small but persistent voice in your head is telling you to get up and starting dealing with the million things that you need to get done today, but all the other voices are telling it to shut up.
Sound familiar?
Ok, so maybe I’m being a bit dramatic. I’m not a zombie all the time. Probably not even most of the time. I go to uni, have lunch with friends, go to the gym, tutor, volunteer, hang out with my family. Sometimes I even write blog posts.
I do what needs to be done, with a little help from coffee, red bull and fanta. But if I have to think about it seriously (which I do, for this blog), the thing that sustains me - especially around exam time - is meditation.
There are 3 types that help me clear my mind of unhelpful thoughts, focus my energy and stay relaxed.
1. Mindfulness Meditation
I used to really struggle with ‘hectic head’, holding onto to so many thoughts that I’d end up thinking in circles, never resolving any one issue, getting frustrated and stressed. I decided to try Mindful in May, a daily meditation program which trained me to center myself on my breath, and smile when my mind wandered. Sounds weird, but I figured anything that made me smile every time I got ‘distracted’ was gonna make me smile a lot, so I stuck with it.
It’s October now, and although I don’t meditate every day, whenever I’ve had a particularly stressful day, and feel overwhelmed by all the things I have to do, I stop everything, lie on the floor, and breathe.
It’s 2 minutes. Watch it.
2. Philosophical Meditation
Critics of mindfulness meditation say that it encourages us to become blank slates. I don’t think that’s completely true, but I’ve wondered if ‘letting go’ of all my worries was a bit like burying my head in the sand.
A few months ago, my friend Zach introduced me to a radically different approach to meditation, called Philosophical Meditation (PM). PM means sorting out the clutter in your head by answering a series of targeted questions which aim to expose the root of your anxiety, frustration and fear. You have 20 minutes to answer, by the end of which you should have a clearer picture of your busy mind.
Creating a mental environment where I can tackle my issues head-on, instead of crossing to the other side of the street when I see them coming, removes most of the stress around confronting my problems (which are never as terrible as I’d assumed),
Philosophical Meditation isn’t the enemy of mindfulness, it’s a complementary technique. I find that mindfulness is better if practiced every few days, while PM can be used when you really need a full-on brain detox.
Check out this video for the perfect introduction to PM.
3. Conversation Meditation
The third type of meditation isn’t really considered meditation at all, but I’m going to convince you it is. It’s called conversation. All it requires is one other person. Advanced practitioners can attempt it with more than one co-meditator, but caution is advised.
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| From http://rabbiedwingoldberg.com/?p=117 |
Real conversation, where you’re totally absorbed, where you feel completely in sync with the other person and forget that the rest of the world exists, is the most powerful form of meditation. While mindfulness and PM focus inward, conversation lives in the space between people, bridging, connecting and energising.
Though unexpectedly simple, when done properly, conversation is profound and complex, magical even. There's no how-to guide, no right or wrong way of doing it, no timing recommendations, and no limit to how much you can gain from it.
The right words, at the right time, spoken by the right person, can sustain, motivate and inspire, or at least bring down your stress levels so you can start ticking things off your to-do list with a smile on your face.
