Be Still My
Beating Mind By Kari Kingsley, MSN, CRNP
T
he roots of my struggle with meditation run deep. Every time I attempted to meditate, the stillness and calm was bombarded by the never-ending adulting To-Do list on autorepeat in my mind. My type A, getit-right-the-first-time personality wanted not only to learn how to meditate, but to master it. I wanted to be the World Champion Meditator. (Because that’s a thing…) The funny thing about meditation is, the harder you try to do it perfectly, the harder it is. Meditation can especially be a white whale for control freaks like me. I developed a sort-of meditation stage-fright. Telling my mind to be still felt like trying to hush a room full of Kindergarteners hyped up on Mountain Dew. I have this major affliction that if I can’t do something well, I’d rather not do it. Each time I sat down to meditate, I failed. Thoughts screamed in my brain and the last thing I felt was inner peace. I stopped wanting to try. Meditation has been around for centuries. You can take classes on meditation, read books, listen to podcasts, and, yes, there’s an app for that. Oxford defines meditation as “the practice of focusing your mind in silence, especially for religious reasons
38
Inside Medicine |
or in order to make your mind calm.” Simple enough, right? But how? You are what you think. Negative subconscious thoughts or paradigms give way to negative attitudes and those negative attitudes get married and have little baby negative attitudes. Meditation is a wonderful way to reset your daily intentions and turn that brain frown upside down. (Subtract 2 points from article quality for cheesiness). Meditation also has positive physiologic effects including anxiety reduction, lowered blood pressure, and improved sleep quality. Mental health providers encourage meditation to help treat PTSD, depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. Scientists suggest it improves brain plasticity. It literally rewires your brain circuits to improve your physical and mental health. Cool. It’s like a facelift for your gray matter. In my research, I kept coming across the term “mindfulness.” Mind-full-ness. I think they meant mind-empty-ness. My brain was anything but empty. Things changed when a friend suggested listening to a guided imagery meditation. For the first time I felt my brain relax and let go. As the soothing voice of the narrator guided my thoughts through
Vo l u m e 3 I s s u e 1 7
a forest and down a gentle stream, I could feel my brain emptying of the constant background noise. The peace I felt afterwards was indescribable. Days later, I tried again, only to fail (or so I thought). I then set out on a journey to learn how to meditate. I had to break down the failure. Who was judging this as a fail? I was. Who was I trying to impress with my outstanding meditation skills? Me. Who would be missing out if I never learned to meditate? I would. I put a gag on the internal judge and decided to be kinder to myself. Instead of saying that failure is not an option, I took failure off the table. Learning what I want and need from the practice led me to the biggest breakthrough in my meditation journey. The opposite of a cracked-out hamster doing an Iron Man on his tiny wheel after slamming a case of Red Bull. I began to realize the encouraging fact that I had been meditating all my life. One familiar example is the twilight between wakefulness and sleep. Those sacred few moments lying in bed when the brain begins to let go of the day’s events and becomes still. As meditation became less unknown, I recognized it all over the place. Each time I closed my eyes and opened my mind to my senses
