SGM Sept 2016 Weekly Message Three: “How to Cure Boredom, Restlessness, Impatience, & Negative Thinking During Meditation”
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Welcome back to the September 2016 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. It’s great to have you with us here at SGM!
Do you ever get bored, restless, or impatient when you’re meditating? Do you ever find yourself replaying negative thoughts over and over again? When you’re not meditating, does this happen to you periodically throughout the course of the day? Do you find yourself stressfully pushing through life rather than peacefully, joyfully, and lovingly engaging with it?
This month, we’re exploring common challenges in meditation practice and how to overcome them. Handling these challenges during meditation is a powerful practice for handling them well in life.
This week, we investigate Boredom, Restlessness, Impatience and Negative Thinking. You’ll learn how these relate to each other, how to recognize them in action, and a simple process to move through them, so you can go deeper in meditation and move forward in life.
We live in a culture that thrives on constant productivity and stimulation. In the face of that momentum, the idea of taking time away from productive work or entertainment to meditate can seem like a real waste of time. It’s natural to get bored, restless, or impatient with what might seem on the surface to be “doing nothing.”
Yet what if boredom, restlessness, and impatience cover over something deeper, something important to acknowledge and deal with? What if, instead of being prompted to rush off to more external stimulation, we used them as signals to dig deeper?
What if boredom, restlessness, and impatience come up when we brush against uncomfortable subconscious material, such as feelings of vulnerability? What if these are defenses that protect us from experiencing those feelings? They make us want to get up and do something rather than dig deeper inside.
Last week, we explored emotional repression. How we repress that which makes us feel uncomfortable and how that leads to feeling tired, lacking motivation, and losing our vitality. We talked about how to overcome emotional repression by checking in with your Emotional Centerline, the feelings in your Core, from your throat, through the center of your chest, to your solar plexus and lower abdomen.
I hope you’ve taken the opportunity to try that this past week.
An interesting thing can happen when you attempt to dig under boredom, restlessness, and impatience and focus into your Emotional Centerline. Instead of arriving at underlying vulnerable feelings such as sadness, fear, or not being enough, you might find a whole host of mental chatter.
In fact, this is often what happens as we begin meditation—a flood of thoughts parade through our minds. These could be thoughts about things we need to do, thoughts that replay things we’ve already done, or repeating negative thoughts telling us how what we have to do is too hard, or what we wish we could do is not possible.
Do you ever have such thoughts? How strongly do they grab hold of you?
Does that ever happen to you in meditation? Are they sometimes tough to shake off? Do they have a magnetic pull that seems to suck you into their vortex?
Shortly, I’ll guide you through three simple steps to get free from the grasp of persistent, strong, negative thoughts. Let’s work our way there with a seemingly more benign example. In it, we’ll discover the first antidote to boredom, restlessness, impatience, and negative thinking.
This story comes from “Meditation: An In-Depth Guide” by Ian Gawler and Paul Bedson. They describe a meditation student John, who had restless legs and equally restless thoughts. (p.114, MAIG)
John was a very active guy, who loved sports and being in the gym. He had a “go get ‘um” mentality and came to an 8-week meditation class ready to “master meditation.” “However, he found it very difficult to even sit still; he had a nervous habit of constantly jiggling his legs up and down, a common form of restlessness. The movement of his thoughts matched his restless legs.
After two sessions John came to Paul and told him he wanted to drop out of the class, saying, ‘I just can’t do it—it’s impossible for me to sit still!’” (p.114, MAIG)
Paul advised John to see if he could just notice the restless feelings with a gentle curiosity. Instead of seeing them as a problem, was it possible to just pay attention to them in a non-judgmental way? Could he refrain from self-criticism, from thinking he was failing at meditation, and just witness what was arising in his mind, without buying into it?
Would it be possible to be present with the thoughts “I can’t do this, it’s too hard” and “This is stupid and I’m not getting anywhere!” and “If only these thoughts would go away, then I could meditate!” (p.115, MAIG) without taking them seriously and without believing them?
For John, who was a proactive, take care of things, make things happen type of guy, this was a novel strategy—yet it worked! In just a few more sessions, he was able to just “sit with his feelings” and he became much more at ease with himself. As a result, he began to experience more of the inner peace he was looking for.
Sometimes that’s all it takes to tame our restless mind—a little self-observation followed by a little self-acceptance—then the thoughts settle down. Most of the time, this is how we want to deal with thoughts in meditation. Recognize them, Release them, and Return to our meditative focus.
I call this the 3Rs of meditation. Simply repeat the 3Rs until your mind quiets down. It’s an effective technique that releases boredom, restlessness, and impatience—and the overactive mental chatter that accompanies these feelings.
Yet, what about those times when this strategy just doesn’t work? What about thoughts that cycle stronger and suck you in deeper? Thoughts associated with deeper wounds can be tied into strong defenses that won’t let down so easily.
When simple observation, acceptance, letting go, and refocusing don’t free you from obsessive thinking, a second strategy might be called for. Your mind may be signaling you to become more conscious of a deeper pattern, so you can heal it.
So, if you are sitting in meditation and a persistent line of thinking is strongly pulling on your attention and the 3Rs just aren’t working, see if you can identify what’s underneath that.
Three steps can help: Label the thoughts, identify the beliefs behind them, and notice the consequences of that way of thinking. These three steps bring your defenses to light, dissolve their subconscious hold on your attention, and enable you to make new choices.
Step One: Label the type of thought
Thoughts can be categorized according to what they are doing. For example, you could be planning, worrying, lamenting, judging, criticizing, blaming, and so on. . .
In Step One, you simply name the type of thought you’re having by giving a one-word label to what that thought is doing.
Step Two: Identify the Belief behind the Thought
Beliefs are thoughts that you invest with deep meaning and emotional significance. They are thoughts you are strongly identified with. These are not just thoughts you think are true, they are thoughts you think are “you.” At some level, consciously or subconsciously, you are defining “who you are” by these beliefs. Therefore, these thoughts become identified with your very existence, safety, and well-being.
Behind repetitive thoughts that you can’t seem to shake are deeply ingrained beliefs that originate from experiences of deep hurt. You don’t want to experience those hurts again, so you learn thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that keep you from harm. These hurts and the accompanying beliefs are deeply defended in your consciousness.
Yet, these defensive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors also keep you from peace, joy, love and the experiences of vitality, growth, learning, and purpose that you long for as well. They keep your body in a defensive mode that limits you from doing what you truly desire and from connecting deeply with others. That’s why it’s important to consciously recognize and release them.
In Step Two, you see if you can identify the defensive belief that is behind the thoughts that are cycling through your mind.
You can recognize these defensive beliefs in a couple simple ways:
-They are strong judgments signaled by words such as “should, have to, ought to, can’t, must.”
-They tend to catastrophize, making everything seem bigger and more dangerous than it really is. They make everything feel huge and overwhelming and often come with the words “Always” or “Never.”
Putting these together you get beliefs such as “You should never rock the boat,” “I should always keep quiet,” “You just can’t do that, ever!” “I’m never going to make it,” “I’m never enough,” and so on. . . Defensive beliefs aren’t always phrased so strongly, but the underlying feeling about them is strong.
In Step Two, you seek the underlying belief that gives rise to the type of thinking you’re mind is engaging in. You can recognize these by the strong emotional charge behind these inner statements. You can get at these beliefs by asking:
What belief am I using to protect myself, to keep myself in a safe comfort zone?
Step Three: Notice the Consequences of those Beliefs
So, the original purpose of defensive beliefs is to keep you safe. They keep you in a “comfort zone.”
However, as life-long strategies defensive beliefs are severely limiting. Defensive beliefs have two primary consequences. They either make you “rigid” putting you in “fight mode,” or “collapse” putting you in “flight mode.” In other words, they put you in a state of stress.
In fact, defensive beliefs make your life into a series of stressful events. Life is always going to challenge your comfort zone. It’s always going to ask you to learn, heal, and grow. Defensive beliefs cause you to resist that growth, to guard against, to fight it—or to collapse in the face of the pressure.
You can identify the consequences of your beliefs by asking two questions:
What is this belief accomplishing? What is it preventing?
When you consciously and clearly see the consequences of maintaining defensive beliefs, you naturally want to be free from the stress they cause. You want to be free from that suffering. You also see how they are holding you back. With those twin insights, you may naturally become more willing to investigate other possibilities.
You become more open to doing something different. You become open to letting those thoughts go and returning to your meditation cues. You become more open to investing in why you are meditating in the first place—to become more peaceful, purposeful, intentional, joyful, loving, and free.
So, as you sit in meditation, and you notice thoughts that keep gnawing at your attention and drawing you away from your meditative focus. First, notice them with a gentle curiosity and accept them. See if you can let go of self-judgment. See if you can be at ease with whatever arises in your mind. And, then gently shift your attention back to your meditative focus. Practice the 3Rs—recognize, release, and return.
If thoughts persist, if they pull doggedly at your attention and just won’t let go—investigate them meditatively using three steps: Label the thoughts by noticing what they are doing—planning, worrying, lamenting, criticizing, blaming. . . Identify the beliefs that are prompting those thoughts by noticing how this pattern of thinking is protecting you. . .And, then notice the consequences of thinking this way. Notice what this way of thinking is accomplishing and what it is preventing.
Are you satisfied with living that way?
If not, you can consciously choose to let those thoughts go and return to your meditative cues. As your mind quiets, you’ll discover a deeper stillness, silence, and spaciousness underneath all that thinking. You’ll discover the deep peace, joy, and love at your Core.
In next week’s Meditation of the Month, we’ll use the technique of Mindfulness-Based Stillness Meditation to journey there together.
Until next time,
How can you relate to your thoughts more mindfully?
Kevin