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Meditation has been my go to in order to help regulate my nervous system and calm my overactive, neurodivergent mind. I’m not talking about spending hours sitting in lotus pose or repeating a mantra, but rather a tool that I can return to maybe for fifteen minutes at most, to bring me back to center and to soothe my anxious thoughts.
Many people think that meditation means keeping the mind completely quiet, and that’s just one type of meditation. Instead, I hear a lot of my neurodivergent community talk about how they can’t quiet their mind, that they have to keep bringing it back to the focus, whether that’s on the breath or just stillness. They think they’re doing meditation wrong, when they couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you’re bringing your mind back to your practice, then not only are you doing meditation correctly, but it’s working! If you’re noticing when your mind wanders (I like to think of it as a dog off sniffing something when you’re trying to go for a walk), then bringing it back is exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. A gentle, let’s return to the practice, getting back on track, and if you need to do that a hundred times, then you have correctly practiced meditation a hundred times.
In Patanjali’s 8 limbs of yoga, dharana (concentration) comes before dhyana (meditation). The returning your mind to its task is simply preparation for resuming your concentration and meditating.
My preferred forms of meditation are a focus on the breath, even if sometimes that means thinking to myself “I am breathing in” followed by “I am breathing out”. I’ll often pair this with the reiki precepts, which begin “Just for today I will not worry”, which is usually where I focus. While yoga nidra isn’t specifically meditation per se, it is a form of it, and I’ll often bring my mind back when I’m going through the sense rotation (focusing on various body parts) because I’ll finish my arm, get to my shoulder, and then whoops, off goes the mind.
I encourage you to explore various ways of meditating and to think about the different ways and how they work with your mind. It’s not about being quiet or silencing the thoughts. It’s about finding a focus and concentrating on it, even if that’s just for a minute or five.
I’d love to talk meditation. If you have a way that works for you or problems you’ve experienced, let me know in the comments or reach out!
