Managing a Restless Mind

restless mind, meditation, Swami Saradananda,

Many emotions and repressed feelings tend to surface when you begin to meditate. A restless mind can usually be dealt with in much the same way as you would deal with physical distractions once you have located where in your physical body you can feel the emotion. For example, do you experience your boredom/frustration/anger in your chest, your shoulders, your neck…? Once you’ve tuned into and located the feeling, you can observe it, breathe into it, visualize the release of a bit of the feeling with each out-breath, and then just gently return your mind to your original point of focus.

Below are some of the most common mental distractions that meditators tend to experience, including suggestions of how to manage a restless mind:

• Replaying Thoughts: Unfortunately, certain thoughts can be like tunes that continue to replay in your mind, so if you aren’t vigilant when such thoughts pop into your mind during meditation, you may find yourself pursuing them and their associations. Whenever you realize that you’ve got sidetracked in this way, just gently bring your mind back to your point of meditation focus.

• Cravings and Desires: Your unconscious mind contains numerous desires that tend to come to the surface when you sit for meditation, which can, if you’re not careful, spawn endless chains of thought that you risk getting caught up in. The best course of action is to neither try to actively suppress desires or cravings, nor allow yourself to engage fully with them. The best way to starve them of attention is by keeping your mind anchored on your chosen meditation focus, and gently bringing your awareness back to this focus if ever it drifts.

• Ceaseless Wandering of the Mind: In the absence of external distractions, your mind is likely to amplify its attempts to entertain itself by “wandering” off and thinking of other things. Just gently return your focus to its original point each time you notice it straying. With practice, your mind will wander less, until eventually it enables you to achieve deeper levels of insight.

A SENSE OF BOREDOM

Throughout your waking day you probably spend most of your time in a state of “doing”, with your mind making sure that you’re busy all the time, in a constant state of stimulation. During meditation, when you are in a state of “being”, your mind may therefore perceive sitting quietly and focusing on just one thing as “boring” or  disengaging – and choose to rebel against it to try to get attention.


It’s important to realize, however, that any sense of “boredom” is just a trick of the mind that occurs when the subject at hand is being skimmed over rather than focused on, as a truly concentrated mind is never bored. So if you do experience a sense of boredom while meditating, ask yourself whether you are actually bored with your practice – or maybe with something else? For example, perhaps you are bored with your job or with the current pattern of your life in general? With regular practice, meditation can help to relieve such boredom.

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As the tendency of the mind is to identify with thoughts, feelings and emotions, the longer you allow yourself to think, “I am bored”, the longer this feeling will hang around. It’s therefore best to try to just witness the feeling and detach from it, rather than giving it more fuel! You might want to focus on the breath – “breathing out” the boredom and “breathing in” a sense of curiosity. If, however, after some period you find that a particular meditation technique, or focus, isn’t working for you, try another technique. Just don’t switch too often!

A POSITIVE TAKE ON DISTRACTION DURING MEDITATION

  • The moment you change from being distracted to noticing that you are distracted is an important shift of awareness, as it represents a transformation from unconscious behaviour to mindful action.
  • Treating distractions as learning experiences allows you to objectively observe how your mind works in moments of distraction. And this might even give you useful insight into how you live your life in general.

Swami Saradananda is an internationally renowned yoga and meditation teacher who has inspired thousands of people to practise. Her new book, Sitting Comfortably, Preparing the Mind for Peaceful Meditation is out on June 8th. She has been teaching for over 40 years, and is the author of six other books, including The Power of Breath and Mudras for Modern Life. Swami worked with Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres for 26 years and directed centres in New York, Toronto, London, New Delhi and the Himalayas. Swami Saradananda holds an MA from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London.

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