When Guided Meditation Becomes a Distraction
Here’s the latest from Practicing Mental Illness:
I come from a long line of seekers, my mother’s side of the family known for trying on various spiritual traditions in a search for truth. I used to follow Grandma around to various churches, temples, mosques and living rooms witnessing everything from people speaking in tongues to, for a 12 year-old kid, terrifying occult practices. I participated in an exchange program between my Catholic catechism class and the Hebrew school across the street. Every Sunday I was back at Mass chanting the Apostles Creed, making it a meditation like the many I practiced during my spiritual explorations.
My mother herself has experimented with meditation and has tried several forms of guided meditation. The one that she was most excited about was Oprah Winfrey's and Deepak Chopra’s 21-day meditation challenge, an app-based series of guided meditation that no longer exists.
One time she wanted to share with me a meditation she found beneficial. It was a busy day at her house, with much of the family in and out, so we escaped to her office to follow the guided instructions. While I am glad so many people are following such programs and finding relaxation in meditation, I found it too distracting to be truly mindful.
I find the same with most meditation apps.
The meditation played over a picture of flowers on the phone. Difficulty in streaming made us hesitate and start and stop in fits. While the picture could have served as an adequate focus of attention, Dr. Chopra added new age music, birdsongs, and a mantra to his narration. The periods of silence were anything but. I found the whole experience too full of noise to be an exercise in mindfulness. When I should have been simply aware of the present moment, I was distracted by the soundtrack playing through the earbuds. Distracted by the technology itself.
While distractions are normal in meditation, and dealing with distractions may be the point of meditation, a guided meditation shouldn’t be the source of distraction that keeps you from truly sensing the feelings in your body and from noticing the thoughts that tumble through your mind and defeat your focus.
Evidence of our unhealthy distraction came when my daughter entered the room with my wife. She had fallen and hit her head and wanted Daddy. Lost in the barrage of attempted meditative bliss, my mother and I shooed them out of the room to return to the birds and the music and the comforting voice. If I had been truly mindful, I would have dropped everything and attended to my upset daughter. Instead of making me more self-aware, more noticing of the things within and around me, this meditation had made me more self-absorbed.
A teacher one can depend on is invaluable, and guided meditation can be very beneficial. Yet mindfulness meditation remains a simple practice. A dignified position and a focus on the breath is all that is necessary to release thoughts, feel the body and remain present. But done without the right intention, discipline, and patience, it can be very boring.
Many practitioners turn to apps to help focus their attention. While they can be helpful, they risk contributing to the noise that distracts us from our true self, and from our quest to be present. Mood regulation, self-discovery, and empathy are all found silently within each of us. Music, images, and ambient noise can result in a great relaxation or positive imaging exercise, but mindfulness is not about relaxation and imaging. It is about falling awake and realizing the possibility and fullness of the moment. Yes, relaxation can be a result, but so can the awareness of difficulty. It takes silence or a very skillful guide to deal with that.
What results from mindfulness as I practice and teach it is the ability to realize, in the words of John Peacock, where you are right now and where you don’t have to be. I believe that to achieve this, one needs significant periods of silence. Too much added chatter just distracts from the work. This said, when I teach I do include some guided meditations. I just need to keep in mind that they must include guidance toward silence, and should never be construed as replacement for the hard work of just sitting, focusing on the breath.
The entire point of my teaching is to help people notice changes in their body and mind that signal that an episode of anxiety, depression or mania is upon them, giving them time to respond and predict, prevent or manage such an episode successfully and pivot to return to health and their full potential. Noticing anything take focus, and focus doesn’t benefit from someone talking in your ear telling you how peaceful the world around you is when your own experience tells you it’s not.
Meditation
Those sojurns with Grandma and years of study have given me an appreciation of ancient spiritual texts. While silence makes up most of the time I spend meditating, I often turn to the roots of wisdom traditions to carefully read scripture and contemplate the message. This can inspire deep understanding of things occurring in the world and in my life through discoveries that lurk in the poetry that is the foundation of so many cultures. I do this with the Psalms of the Old Testament and write about it at The Psalms Meditations Project. This week, contemplation on Psalm 8 took me to some surprising thoughts on climate change. It might be profound; it might be pompous; I may have missed the whole point. But it moved me. You can read it here.
Happy Holidays
It doesn’t sanitize the season to say, “Happy Holidays.” In fact, in December there are 14 religious holidays across several faith traditions. What does bother me is the disregard of all religion. In the Philadelphia School District that my daughter attends Christmas break became holiday break, but now things are so politically correct that this pause is merely called the winter break and teachers get end of year gifts. This is too bad, as faith plays such a key role in so many people’s lives and is often called on to help those with mental illness and those in recovery from substance abuse. To counter this denial of the spirit of the season I present “O Holy Night.” Close your eyes and fully experience the beauty and joy of the music. Despite how you feel about God or belief, such a period of contemplation can be transcendent. The word sublime is overused, but not here. So Happy Holidays.