How breathing meditation changed my mood
As early as I remember I was an overthinking machine; my mind was the highway of thoughts coming and going constantly. Some of these thoughts were positive, some funny while others were negative and depressing. Sometimes I smiled secretly as a result of these thoughts. Some other times I scowled and got angry and became bad-tempered. Consequently, the quality of my life and the state of my mind were more or less defined by these random thoughts. If I was lucky, something good would pop up on my mind.
I don’t say I wasn’t successful in my life. Surprisingly, I have been 1st rank student of the school for most of my life. I got perfect scores, teachers liked me and we had great conversations. However, my mind didn’t let me be free even for a moment. I was like a CPU who was working at maximum capacity and its fan was always spinning. Only sleep could free my mind from the flood of thoughts that were surrounding me and torturing me.
I assumed that this is what the mind is; like it or not you should live with it. However, once randomly I came across Sam Harris’s talk about meditation. He exactly mentioned my problem in the talk and promised that meditation can significantly mitigate my misery. I honestly hated that religious superstitious non-sense stuff which hinders human’s intellect to grow, to see the world as it is, not as he/she prefers. But Sam was an atheist and sometimes even anti-theist. How someone with such a mindset can advertise religious doctrines. Moreover, he has got respectful academic credentials. Hence, there must be something there that I don’t know.
Thus, I started doing a little bit of research — as I am a Ph.D. student, I can do this to an extent — and found out that many researchers have done research on meditation and witnessed considerable results in the brain. These findings sucked me into meditation. What could go wrong? I am not going to die.
I started by breathing meditation. As you might know, it requires you to just focus on your breath without thinking and when you find yourself in the middle of a thought, you must go back to the breath again. This is how it goes. Adding a mental note to this practice has turned out to aid focusing. For example, while inhaling you say in your mind “in” and while exhaling, “out”.
When I was doing this practice, I noticed that every 2 seconds one thought obstacles this process. This indicates what traffic of thoughts my mind is digesting every day. Some of these thoughts were necessary to my life nevertheless most of (more than 95%) these though were inessential.
After a couple of weeks of practice, and I should say it was really frustrating since my mind didn’t allow me to concentrate on the breath and constantly attacked me with thoughts of any kind, I finally tasted the peace for some seconds. It was a mind without noise, a mind like space, a space empty of any garbage and interference, a quiet mind. You feel you’re alone in the middle of no-where. You just exist. However, this peaceful state does not last that long and again you see you are thinking and talking to yourself. But this time you’re saying how cool it is to meditate.
Long story short, I am meditating for six months and it immensely influenced my quality of life. When I feel attacked by thoughts I find a quiet place to meditate. I often cover my eyes by a sleep mask to block any light coming to my sight. Unlike others who meditate when they’re sitting, I found lying on the bed the best choice. After a couple of minutes, my mind gets rid of all thoughts and reboots.
