Meditation (2024-02-05)

In this blog post, I would like to write about meditation.

I have been trying meditation on and off since ca. 2011, when I first read a book by
Thich Nhat Than. However, despite having a few meditation experiences, I never stuck
with it – also because I had trouble with headaches, which were due to bad technique.

Only last year, in 2023, I finally made the effort to start meditating daily on
a consistent basis. It was not easy finding time for it, because I can practice only
when my girlfriend is asleep or away. I started with 5 minutes per day and increased
the duration up to about 20 minutes.

When I reached that timeframe, suddenly some old repressed memories surfaced,
causing a very strong emotional response. It was not even something very traumatic,
just a situation where I misbeheaved as a teenager in front of the parents of one
of my youth female friends, and felt sorry and ashamed after that.
Somehow, during meditation this memory came back and caused an emotional experience
as if I were there back then, right at this moment.

The incident is so minor that I am sure everyone else has already forgotton about it,
but then so did I until now. This experience caused me to stop meditating entirely,
fearing of what else might turn up.

However, I now had time to read about this and it seems that this is a more-or-less
normal phenomenon; apparently (to my amateurish understanding) meditation tends to
bring up memories of old situations that we did not have dealt with properly;
things we forgot or repressed. According to online information, the best way to
deal with this is to "go through with it", i.e. be prepared that this might happen,
let the memories arise and then try to accept it and distance oneself from it,
like one is doing anyway during meditation.

On a sidenote: This is one thing that I feel is conveyed incorrectly about meditating.
Many people seem to be under the impression that you should "think about nothing",
but this is not the case. The point is to "distance yourself from your own thoughts",
that is, observe what random thoughts come into your head, and then, instead of
following them (like we all usually do), just acknowledge them and go back to your
focus point, which is usually your breath.

So after thinking about this for several months, I decided to go back to meditation,
again starting at 5 minutes per day. This time I will be prepared for old memories
resurfacing and I will try to acknowledges my mistakes from the past, learning from
the experiences and move on.

tags: mediation, self-improvement, example