By Gabriel Zucker
The thought of sitting down, doing nothing, just breathing, sounds very pointless. This was my view of meditation for a long time. Why spend time getting my mind right when there is so much stuff to do right here and now? It made sense to me for a long time, but the more I avoided the deeper issues, the harder it became to function. Since I started my meditative journey, these issues have been more manageable and easier to process. The two forms of meditations that have had the most impact on me are mindfulness and somatic meditation. Both are different but help with different aspects of my day-to-day life.
A little background first – I am diagnosed with ADHD and have dealt with really bad anxiety most of my life. My mind moving a million miles a minute is something I deal with every day, but it can become overwhelming within a blink of an eye. Thankfully I have found different ways to deal with the chaos of my mind.
My first introduction to spirituality and meditation was mindfulness. This is a form of meditation focused on understanding what is going on in the mind. This is done through training your mind to process thoughts in the present moment through breathing exercises and mantras focused on love and acceptance.
My mantra is usually, “I breathe in, I am one. I breathe out, I am whole.” This keeps me grounded on my breathing instead of my mind wandering.
The hardest part for me was removing myself from the thoughts and emotions that came up during my meditation. What helped me the most was projecting these thoughts outward. I sit with the emotions as if they were a friend, instead of letting them run rampant throughout my mind. The biggest thing about mindfulness is staying in the moment. This was confusing for a little, but the best way I can explain it is understanding the difference between past, present and future. The moment is understanding that anxiety is coming from past trauma and an unknown future. Healing the past and preparing for the future is the best way to explain the moment.
Another form of meditation that has helped me a lot with past trauma is somatic meditation. This is something that I learned from therapy and has helped me process my past from a point of healing instead of acceptance. This is very different from mindfulness; instead of analyzing and processing the mind, it instead focuses on the body’s reaction to different emotions and situations. For instance, when an anxiety attack comes up, there usually isn’t one thing that activates it. My body becomes overstimulated, causing my mind to explode with every worst possible scenario no matter the situation. Mindfulness never helps me when this happens, controlling my mind is impossible in these moments. Focusing on the feelings, not thoughts, going through my body helps ground me back to reality. I am anchored back to what is real and what is made up in my mind. I used to always overanalyze this, putting words to feeling. My therapist helped me realize that I don’t have to think during this. Instead, focusing on my body, noticing where it tenses up, is a great step in calming down my whole body.
I am not saying this is a foolproof way to overcome mental health issues; I fall short every day. I forget to meditate, I deal with anxiety most days, but that is okay. If I have learned anything from meditation it is that I can’t be too hard on myself. Life is hard and that is okay. It is how we approach each moment, with understanding and love. That is how one can find their best self.