Guided Meditation Instructions
Before meditating, try to notice any contractions in your body and posture and relax them.
Then follow the breath with continuity so you can catch those gaps in mindfulness where the mind throws up some feeding suggestions.
Try to catch any labels and notice any addictive feelings associated with them. Most of the time they are things you have fed on many times in the past.
This is where people can get locked in with shame, and recrimination. This leads to that lower part of the mind to give up looking for new objects and to pursue the same old ones.
Alan Watts – Accepting your Dark Side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqUt0BvgpQc
Instead keep feeding on the breath and it’s delicious freshness. Really treat it like savouring food, while maintaining your continuity of the breath.
Now keep feeding until you feel satiated. You may notice that when you stop, the mind wants to go back and feed on those same old things again. Just accept how the mind is habituated, and continue feeding on the breath.
Try to keep feeding long enough so that the mind starts to let go of those thought labels. It may take some time, depending on how strong the craving is. This is especially true if you are daydreaming with relish on those old images. The intention is encouraged with elaborating on those old thoughts, and the intention then gets fixed in place with neurotransmitters, and it becomes harder to let go. You have to go back to the breath and stay there with continuity for a long-time. This is why catching intentions earlier makes it easier to meditate.
Now, unless you want to be a monk, you may want to feed on objects that are just fine in your environment. Many people are secular meditators, and want to enjoy worldly pleasures in moderation. There are other options.
When the mind brings up an old label to chew on, stay with the pleasure of the breath as a bridge, but now introduce labels with the negative aspects of those desires the habitual label is associated with. Think of how the body will be affected by feeding on that object, person, or situation. Then think of a better object, person, or situation.
As you bring up the better object there will be some resistance, and the old labels get thrown up again to the forefront. This is why enjoying the breath with the same attitude as when you anticipate eating a good, healthy meal is important. Think of freshness! Especially when you think of going out of your comfort zone. This new object is your new meditation object.
Put your mind on the fresh delicious aspects of this healthier image, and use the breath when you fall off the image. You can put this method on good or bad people, good or bad objects, and good or bad situations. A form of meditative self-regulation and imagery practice. Let the natural interest motivate you to take action.
Epilogue
Here’s a quote from Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi:
“Time is what one must find in order to develop interest and curiosity to enjoy life for its own sake. The other equally important resource is the ability to control psychic energy. Instead of waiting for an external stimulus or challenge to grab our attention, we must learn to concentrate it more or less at will. This ability is related to interest by a feedback loop of mutual causation and reinforcement. If you are interested in something you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them. Until one starts to collect them, insects and minerals are not very appealing. Nor are most people until we find out about their lives and thoughts. Running marathons or climbing mountains, the game of bridge or Racine’s dramas are rather boring except to those who have invested enough attention to realize their intricate complexity. As one focuses on any segment of reality, a potentially infinite range of opportunities for action – physical, mental, or emotional – is revealed for our skills to engage with. There is never a good excuse for being bored. To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life. Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience of them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, than on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, of a monetary loss, of a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it, how much room we allow for it in consciousness. The more psychic energy we invest in a painful event, the more real it becomes, and the more entropy it introduces in consciousness. To deny, repress, or misinterpret such events is no solution either, because the information will keep smoldering in the recesses of the mind, draining away psychic energy to keep it from spreading. It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.”
“These examples suggest that one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics, martial arts for those who prefer concentrating on physical skills. Any specialization or expertise that one finds enjoyable and where one can improve one’s knowledge over time. The important thing, however, is the attitude toward these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention. Normally, attention is directed by genetic instructions, social conventions, and habits we learned as children. Therefore it is not we who decide what to become aware of, what information will reach consciousness. As a result, our lives are not ours in any meaningful sense; most of what we experience will have been programmed for us. We learn what is supposed to be worth seeing, what is not; what to remember and what to forget; what to feel when we see a bat, a flag, or a person who worships God by different rites; we learn what is supposed to be worth living and dying for. Through the years, our experience will follow the script written by biology and culture. The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.” Because every time you’ve controlled your consciousness, you’ve achieved your goal. It’s a feedback loop you control, so it’s less stressful than trying to control outcomes that involve causes and effects that you don’t control. It facilitates what in psychology is called Mastery or Learning Orientation. Your goal is to learn, not to control everything.
Dwelling with concentration on negative self-measurements, and the envy to “be somebody”, and “right now” is the main obstacle to stable concentration and Flow. It can lead to feeding on pride with small attainments in your concentration before you’ve stayed with the breath long enough to gain more relief and pleasure. It comes from the internal commentator that will interrupt your meditation and feed too quickly. [See: The Commentator: https://youtu.be/auejzRGMa9s] You’re getting feedback from the breath by every successful awareness of the in and out breath, so if you feed too quickly, just come back to the breath or the object, and enjoy the details and opportunities as you engage with them, restarting the feedback loop. Â Csikszentmihalyi asks, “how engaged are you?” The answer is interacting with the breath in concentration, or interacting with your goal and chosen activity. It’s the interaction, not the commentary where the magic is. Any time your brain stops and says, “what now?” The answer is interacting with the breath and or some resolution you made in the past. You can always bring it back to consciousness and start again.
Finding Flow – Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780061339202/
Abuhamdeh, S., Csikszentmihalyi, M., (2012). Attentional involvement and intrinsic motivation.
Motivation and Emotion, Volume 36, Issue 3, pp. 257-267.
Guided Meditations: https://psychreviews.org/category/guidedmeditations/