You lose sense of “who” you are, “what” you are, “how” you feel, and what “you” want. You get a feeling like you can’t control yourself, as if there’s suddenly another personality inside your mind dictating all your thoughts and actions. You’re in the middle of two realities and can’t quite get your footing in either. You have an old system of dealing with thoughts and feelings and are learning a new system. But it feels like neither are working because they’re getting jumbled together.
The first time I sat down and tried to meditate I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I kind of felt like it was probably bullshit before I even began. I had a very smart, very logical thinking friend who really surprised me when he shared he had been meditating. He talked about it with high regard and was very serious. It stuck with me for a few months, I’m very slow at getting around to new things, and it slowly worked its way from the back to the front of my mind.
One day I finally decided to give it a shot. I tried to sit in a lotus position, which was difficult to even figure out, and quickly realized I could not. So I crossed my legs and got comfortable. I rested my hands on my knees and I started breathing slowly in and out. This was quite a few years ago now, so the details elude me. I don’t remember how long I tried, or how “loud” my mind was. I probably sat there for five or ten minutes, but felt like it was an hour. What I do remember was just how happy and relaxed I felt after. There was some kind of massive weight I had been carrying, and I had carried it so long I didn’t even realize it until it was lifted a little bit. I had a giant smile on my face and felt blown away. I experienced a massive relief, but I didn’t understand from what.
I was going to be doing this all the time for sure! The very next day I did it again. This time wasn’t exactly like the first but it felt nice nevertheless. I kept trying, and would set a timer for 15 minutes now and meditate that length every time. I was doing it once a day and finding it difficult to really attain that feeling I found on my first session. I was reaching for something so hard, not even realizing that the effort I was expending was snuffing out what I was seeking.
Eventually I was meditating only a couple times a week. I did feel like it was having a positive effect in my life but it felt very diluted compared to the gushing experience I had at the start. After that first time I had an intense feeling of my life being changed permanently, as if I had found a secret solution to everything. Upon further meditations I felt a little more clear headed, like I had gotten extra rest for my mind, but that first experience was no longer what I was having. I viewed it like some kind of medicine I could just take whenever I felt like I “needed” some. If I was stressed out or getting irritated I would think to myself, I should meditate to chill out a little.
It felt less and less useful as time went on and it started to seem like meditating was a burden, as if it was something I “had” to get done so I could do things I wanted like play video games. Mostly I ended up thinking 15 minutes had to be about up, only to check the timer and see I had twelve left. Then I’d sit there thinking the timer is about to go off. I thought the only way to avoid that would be to check the time to satisfy my curiosity. But the reality was that my focus on the time wasn’t curiosity, it was avoidance, so that didn’t help. I got a little obsessed with trying to meditate for a certain length, which was an arbitrary decision. I started thinking I’m doing it wrong and would look up different methods to get the “right” way to do it. When none of that seemed to work I thought maybe I should find a Buddhist temple and they could help me. But I didn’t identify as Buddhist and I felt self conscious about meditating with other people around.
Eventually I stopped doing it altogether. Fell out of any kind of habit or practice entirely. Eight months went by and then I tried again. It felt like nothing, like I was sitting quietly and trying to breathe a particular way. I thought I’d lost some kind of spark since that first time and I must not remember how to do it “right”. Another month had passed and I decided I’d give it another shot, and got the same “results”. About a month after that I still couldn’t let go of that first time. I wasn’t thinking about it all the time, but it was just kind of “around” in my mind, like someone you happen to bump into every so often. I wasn’t writing it off, which is something I’m good at, it was sticking around in my mind for some reason I didn’t know or even try to figure out at the time. Thinking back just now, I’m starting to feel it was that voice in my head. The voice Socrates was so fond of listening to, except it was faint and very difficult for me to hear.
So I tried it yet again. I got two days of meditation in. Then other things occupied my mind and time. I did it every other day for about a week then. All of a sudden I got a session in for eight days out of ten. I had a little bit of consistency and it felt good. It felt like it mattered, rather than feeling like I was just sitting and relaxing, it seemed to affect my mood now. I felt like I was starting to understand things maybe. Then poof, there goes a whole month with no meditation.
That month was blowing by and I was starting to feel off. I felt as if I were out of control somehow. I’ve always felt like I had my mental and emotional states completely mastered. I was a calm stoic person and was cool under pressure. My lack of stress was something others would comment on, I didn’t let things worry me or bother me at all. But now there was this odd sense that I was somehow losing my grip on something, but I didn’t even know what. All of this was happening internally, I wasn’t blowing up at people or melting down in front of anyone. I just had some odd sense I’d never felt before and could only relate it to the feeling of losing control of something, except I didn’t understand what it was that I was losing my grip on.
I thought I should start trying to meditate consistently, maybe that would set me right. In about two weeks I only missed or skipped a few days. I’m lazy and habits are hard to form. Then I missed about two weeks. At this point I was irritated with myself for not being consistent and I decided I wanted to try having an actual daily meditation practice. I really wanted to see what this was about when taken seriously and done consistently. I felt the need to understand it. I had to know how I could sit there breathing for a few minutes one day and come away with a feeling of absolute completeness, only to sit there breathing on other days and feel as though I’m wasting my time. So I started using a habit tracking app and decided I was going to meditate daily for at least a month and see if it was something I wanted to stick with, if it was going to help me in any way.
I stuck to it and started meditating daily. I was still setting timers but I was having less issues keeping the thoughts of the time from overflowing in my mind. I was feeling good about my new habit, it was the feeling of accomplishment. As I started thinking about mindfulness and reading about meditating and being mindful and trying out Buddhism books, I started trying to be mindful in normal everyday situations. I started to pay attention to my thoughts, emotions, and reactions more than I would have ever thought possible. I focused on my breath while at work and noticed how frequently I would just stop breathing, anytime I tried to focus or had a feeling there was confrontation I noticed I wasn’t breathing. I noticed the change in pace of my breath depending on the type of mood I was displaying. I used all these moments to try and come back to what I considered my base breathing pace, the pace I breathe at when meditating. These moments were a good reminder to come back to the present moment. When my breathing had changed, it usually coincided with my mind wandering to the past or future. Bringing my attention back to my breath and focusing on that was keeping me in the here and now, keeping me mindful. But it wasn’t easy, it was a never ending war waged inside my own mind, “I” was under constant attack from “my” own mind.
I started to feel like my mind wouldn’t shut up, so I tried to make it shut up. I tried to stop it from thinking weird long strings of thoughts about what I considered nothing, irrelevant, and extremely unlikely to happen. I tried to bend it to my will, to only what I thought I wanted to think. But if MY mind was thinking thoughts that I didn’t want to think when I was trying to only think thoughts that I wanted to think, then what was actually going on? Because it wouldn’t stop, and if MY mind seemingly had a mind of ITS own then who was thinking. Who was I? Were there different parts of me at war? Was I schizophrenic? There seemed to be what I couldn’t help but feel was some sort of multiple personality disorder happening. I started to get concerned about my state of mind.
Suddenly there was no unison within. Out of nowhere it felt like there was another part of me, or at least that’s all the vocabulary I could muster to explain it in my head, up there saying things that I didn’t want it to say. It wasn’t a feeling of hearing voices, it was the same as thinking thoughts, but it felt like the thoughts were out of my control and from somewhere or something separate from “me”. It was because I was trying so hard to control them that they were relentless. It’s because I was trying at all to control which ones to allow and which ones “shall not pass” that I felt out of control of my own thoughts to begin with. The more I resisted specific ideas or strings of thinking the stronger they felt within me. Everything was fine before I started trying to be mindful. Thoughts would come and I would believe they were mine and intentional. I would ignore the useless ones and the ones that didn’t align with my idea of myself in a sort of autopilot mode with such autonomy I didn’t even realize I had had them.
It was as if I had fractured my mind into different pieces and those pieces were fighting to be heard. Fighting to be called “me”, “I”, and “myself”. They were fighting to survive. Then whatever parts of me I did see as “myself” were trying to understand where the hell these other pieces came from. Nothing had changed within me. I thought, felt, and operated the same. The difference was that I was observing everything that’s included in my “self” in detail for the first time in my life. I was seeing how the sausage was made, and it was disgusting. I started to notice my, now seemingly insane, tendency to be combative. I would hear someone say something I took as an insult or attack and my mind would instantly rev up the verbal combat engine hitting the button labeled “destroy opposition”. I was ready to completely go to a war of words with this person. But then they would expand on their initial wording, showing me they weren’t angry at me or arguing with me or whatever it was my mind had thought made them “opposition” to the “collective us”. There were so many opposing thoughts running through my head at all times now, it felt impossible to get my footing and understand what I thought, let alone what I felt. It’s like taking a multiple choice quiz and answering a,b,c, and d to every question, except the multiple choices in this quiz included the entire alphabet, in every language.
My entire sense of “self” had been completely jumbled up. It was something I had never even had to contemplate or consider before in my life. I “knew” who I was before this, I “knew” I felt this or wanted that. I “knew” the way I thought made the most sense. Now I couldn’t even be sure of how I actually thought. Was I breaking down? Or had I always been crazy and not noticed? I felt like that crazy homeless person you see walking down the street talking rapidly to themselves with an agitated expression, only for now it was only happening on the inside.
Then one day something happened. Someone did something seemingly passive-aggressive towards me, something that in the past would bring out my aggressive argumentative side, and one of the 9 million thoughts that flew through my brain said something along the line of, “maybe you’re seeing the intention wrong, or maybe they’re having a really awful day and didn’t even realize how they’re effecting you. You’ve accidentally angered people in the past with no intention before, only to feel awful about it when you realized”. I heard that thought along with the other millions of thoughts and it struck me, it is multiple choice! I don’t have to be angry right now, or possibly ever, I can choose my reaction intentionally. I can optimize how others affect me, and how I can affect them. I went about responding to this person, who was often confrontational with me, with openness and curiosity instead of the typical defensive hostility. It took them by surprise and completely changed the dynamic of our interactions that day.
As I continued down this new road of deciding which path of thought to travel, most of the confrontational or frustrating relationships I had with others started to improve over time. That’s not to say I was the sole cause of any of these problems, but that I was making them worse than they needed to be. As I started practicing mindful interaction I became more skillful in dealing with people I viewed as difficult. It also helped improve relationships with people I already got along with. My mood got better and better over time as well.
After a while these feelings of “am I insane now” went away. I still meditate daily and still try to be mindful the best I can. It was more like a sensory overload of paying absolute attention to what was in my mind. Not only am I better at understanding it now, and realizing thoughts are thoughts and they just happen, but the real power is in choosing which thoughts you would like to continue to expand on and put into action. There were weaknesses in my choices surrounding the thoughts that swirled through my head. There was a leaning towards ease, complaints, and being angry that took little skill to indulge or enact. Now that I’ve worked out my thought selector and improved my skills in life, I can think and behave in a way that my best moralistic ideals aspire to. I can be a person that the judgy side of me has nothing to complain about.
I don’t feel insane anymore, and it was only a weird intense feeling for around a week then maybe a light lingering “I wonder” kind of feeling a few weeks beyond that. After a while I got a feel for it. In observing others now, I can see a lot of the same problems in them, making mountains out of molehills, freaking out about another person’s behavior thinking it was directed at them when it didn’t even bother to consider them in reality.
Now I’ve been meditating daily and practicing mindfulness for years. I have found how easy it is to be at peace in life, to enjoy it instead of fight it. How simple it is to enjoy everyday, how there’s nothing that can rob me of the experience I am having. How we’re all truly the same. At this point in my life I find it hard to think of situations where I’d be unable to find happiness or joy. All I had to do was lose my mind.
