Ever wonder which one it's supposed to be?

I recently picked meditation back up to thwart my insomnia episodes of laying in bed, playing on my phone until 4 am. Unlike most who do this while sitting up for a predetermined time in the middle of the day for 20 minutes to an hour, I lay down and meditate for as long as it takes for me to fall asleep most nights. There are a bunch of strange phases I go through, so today I will start with what methods I follow when I begin my meditation routine!

Feel free to try them out if you are new to meditation,
or want to spice things up a bit in your own routine!

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You Can't Force Yourself to Not Think

This screwed with me hard when I first took up this hobby. Everywhere online you read that you must clear your thoughts, and simply exist. Excuse me, if I could shut my brain off at will, we wouldn't be in this predicament. This seems to be the main goal of meditation however, to unclutter all unwanted thoughts. It's often said that the more we try to ignore something, through acknowledgement alone—we make those nasty thoughts stronger.

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Choose Your Starting Focus

Thinking of nothing is literally to think of the concept "nothing" as the only thing. The goal here is to redirect your thoughts and laser focus them on one thing, melting away any and all distractions. The two methods that I alternate between here are;

• Focusing on Breathing
• Focusing on My Body

The more common one is to focus on your breath, with the ideal outcome of observing your own breathing without affecting it, becoming an unattached true observer. The first thing I start with when using this method is to become aware of my breathing and how it is a subconscious and autonomous body function.

Obviously, when I do this I start breathing extra deeply and begin struggling between trying to keep my focus on watching my trying not to control it. There is a special kind of mental conflict that comes into play here.

Do I breathe through my nose, and out my mouth?

                                                                                                                            How deep is a healthy person supposed to be breathing? 

Let me save you the struggle
that slowed my progress in meditating for a long time.

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Breathe like how you would if it didn't matter. There is no right and wrong way to breathe and when you realize this, you will lose strain—being more comfortable and relaxed. Don't all in your focus on watching yourself breathe off the bat, but be aware and check up on it some. It's important to notice how you breathe already without forcing anything.

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Sensory Visualization

The second but more entertaining method in my opinion is to use sensory visualization to relax your body. It's strange, when you think of visualization, we naturally gravitate towards the idea of using our eyes to see. What if I told you that you can also see with your body.

I was laying in bed one night and my feet and back were hurting. I got the idea for this method from Lingchi, better known as 1000 cuts. A slow and painful death by torture! The reasoning behind it was to keep the victim alive while experiencing the most painfully slow death possible—with the last cut happening at the heart. If people can be harmed this way, can a spin on this method be used to heal instead?

A contrast to this method is to consciously tense up a part of your body followed by releasing. I didn't like the classic method as systematically tensing then and releasing my body would require too much thinking when it shouldn't be the case.

I lay quiet and begin to notice different areas of my body that feel uncomfortable or in some type of benign pain (enough to complain, but not enough to go to the hospital). Using a visualization/sensory trigger, I imagine that part of my body being penetrated deep-tissue style by raw energy hitting the isolated areas. Sometimes I imagine a concentrated ribbon of wind, and other times a literal knife of energy slicing through my pain. These triggers are also known as mental constructs.

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Creating a Mental Construct for Self Healing

The key to creating an effective construct is to assign it properties and attributes to its behavior. Being healed by energy is too vague in thinking and not having a clear idea doesn't lead to clear results. Things that I ask when creating a construct are:

• What is my construct's purpose/ what is it supposed to do?
• What color is it?
• What is it's density/ consistency like?
• Is it hot, cold... warm?

By assigning the construct properties I can better use it to achieve the triggers to relax my body in a consistent manner. I have a ribbon of wind that's a deep blue for intense relaxation, or yellow for broader healing. It's warm and has the strength of water while maintaining the thickness of air. The wind's direction is controlled by my thoughts and moves through my body from my skin's surface into my muscles and through my bones. Wherever I feel discomfort I have the wind weave and cycle through the isolated area it until it's fully relaxed.

I don't ever see the wind, nor picture it moving through my body with my eyes/ mental screen. I feel it. Since all of my attention is focused on making my construct real, it becomes increasingly difficult to waver my attention to distractions.

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How to Pin Down Focus With Affirmations

Depending on how restless I may be feeling that night, both starting methods can sometimes be difficult to start up. When this happens I recite a short mantra to myself;

"I am my body..."

It sounds counter-intuitive, but this is what I repeat in my head to myself. When I realize that my breathing and relaxation is part of my body and it comes naturally, my mind veers away from trying to control it. I would imagine that you can find a mantra that works for you when all hope seems lost. The goal is to hold a single thought and allow for everything to fade away.

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Happy Meditating!