My Meditation Practice

I got recommended meditation by my therapist to help with my anxiety during covid. Did it help? Hard to say, I’d say the therapy and drugs did most of the heavy lifting, but the meditation certainly did not hurt. And now it’s become a practice I enjoy doing every morning.

My first venture into meditation was with Kabat-Zinn’s, “Full Catastrophe Living.” It teaches the clinically proven mindfulness based stress relief (mbsr). The main practices are focusing on breathe, body scans and walking meditations. Meditation is a paradox in that you shouldn’t go into it with goals, but people look to it for goals. Especially for mbsr, the goal is literally in the name. But the idea is with practice, that is the side benefit.

With practice, you can look at your thoughts without judgement. And can zoom out and notice your thoughts and be able to let them go. Kabat-Zinn’s analogy is that most of the time you’re stuck in a cloud of thought. With a mindfulness practice, you can zoom out of the cloud and see the sky. Which is filled with other thoughts/sensations.

Sam Harris’ analogy is that each thought is a wave. Some are big waves that can overpower you. But you can notice them and be aware that it’s a wave and weather it through. His app is what I use now as my daily practice. He has daily guided meditations that are 10 or 20 mins and has a lot of other good lectures/meditations. I highly recommend it: https://www.wakingup.com/

His meditations go more into the exploration of consciousness. He questions if there’s any difference between seeing/hearing something and thinking something. He believes that they are all non-different and just cognition events. Just like the feeling of self. Which leads into the buddhist principle of non-self. He further theorizes that the feeling of free will is also an illusion.

You don’t have to believe any of those things to get the benefit of the app. The idea is to explore for yourself and see if those meditations resonate with you.