taming my monkey mind

Yes, I did take a little time to meditate today. Not a long time, just a little time, which is one of the many excellent lessons I learned from Donna Thomson last week. Although meditation purists might disagree, Donna advocates “weaving” meditation moments throughout the day if you can’t sit for long periods of time.

I can do that. And it will help me build my meditation muscle to work up to longer stretches.

Donna has done the whole strict Zen thing, but what she teaches is something looser and more adaptable to the less disciplined among us and that’s what made the meditation lesson so insightful for me.

Donna understood my anxiety over trying to tame my monkey mind and helped me accept that trying to force it into meditative silence is like trying to get a rambunctious toddler to sit quietly through a symphony. This is why whenever I try to meditate, I end up fleeing myself, feeling annoyed, discouraged and hopeless.

Quickly realizing how visual I am, Donna suggested visualizations to help me find a quiet center within myself even as my monkey mind swings from trees. For example, she suggested imagining myself sitting on a park bench watching children running wild in a playground. Or imagining myself in a TV engineer’s seat in front of a bank of televisions, sitting quietly while all those monkey mind thoughts flicker on the sets in front of me.

Yes, yes I can do that, too. And every time my mind starts spinning off into too much thinking, I just bring my focus back to myself on a park bench or I let those thoughts fade to flickering TV sets. The thoughts are still running around in the background, but my focus is on my quiet center.

It works for me. My bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzy mind needs something concrete to rein it in, and the visualizations help immeasurably. This is similar to the technique of using a mantra, giving the mind something to focus on. Real mantras are assigned by a guru but I am waiting until a personal mantra, something that resonates, occurs to me and then I will use that.

We also did some visualizations with color, imagining breathing in each color of the rainbow. This has already become my favorite meditation. Sometimes I inhale and exhale in one color at a time in rainbow order, sometimes I breathe in the whole rainbow. Different colors have different effects on me. Orange feels warm and rich, purple feels sensual and yellow is electric with nervous energy. I am not comfortable with yellow. Maybe that will change with time. I suspect it will.

Donna also suggested that someone who puts out as much energy as I do might need to discharge some before I start meditating, by jumping around or twitching or dancing or screaming—anything to get some of the fidgets out. And she stresses a moment of transition before closing your eyes to meditate—a moment of just sitting quietly, eyes open but switching gears.

Donna gave me a copy of her book The Vibrant Life: Simple Meditations to Use Your Energy Effectively and I have continued learning from that.

I think … I can’t swear to it, but I think…that what I learned last week at Sunrise Springs is enough to alter the way I approach the world and my place in it. How cool is that?