Hi, Sotce, lately it's been hard for me to focus and drop into meditation fully. My thoughts come so fast and it's hard to ground them and find myself spiraling through the day with daydreams and unwanted thoughts. What do you think I should do?
I think if that is where your mind is going, to whirly places, maybe you should trust its process and follow it there. Surrender to the spiral, discover what it wants to show you. There isn’t one way to experience meditation and while grounded states are beneficial for certain things, heady states can also be beneficial. I think above all we need to pay homage to our own minds and the mystery they offer us.
Sotce, can I meditate lying down? It feels like cheating. I also don’t know if my back is straight when I'm lying down.
You can meditate lying down or falling asleep or taking a walk or in the bath. These are all times when I do it. I recommend a sitting meditation because it’s important for training— it’s where you connect best and it’s what all the masters recommend. But get your peace when u can.
Sotce, What's the longest you've gone without meditating since you began to practice? Sometimes I go weeks without but it feels like an anchor I go back to.
I can’t say exactly because I always have moments of stillness. But in terms of formal practice, months have gone by without me. When I was younger, 19 or 20, the days would come with such drama and urgency and I didn’t see how it all fit together. I would hop right out of sleep world into phone world or school world. A teacher of mine says I should be meditating at least three times a day and I almost never do that ever. I think he might be mad at me.
I’m bad I think, even in retreats sometimes I’ll start drawing or playing on my phone.
I’m still chipping away at marble. This is all part of the journey. I am always with the practice, always praying listening to mantra reading reflecting but I have a lot to experience and establish before monk mode. For now I focus on thirty minutes per day, an hour if I’m fantastic, and I do miss the mark on that too. For example I’m sharing a bed right now with my friend in New York and when we wake up we want coffee.
Sotce, advice on lacking self discipline? I know if I do these certain things it will benefit me in the future me, but I can't force myself to do them. I don't understand why.
I think separating from your need to be comfortable will help. It is very normal and probably biologically beneficial to see your needs as directly related to what makes you feel good. Whereas leaving your comfort zone to do something that you don’t already sink into habitually will not feel good because it is new and uncertain.
When you do that activity, and that part of your brain says “this doesn’t make me feel good, I don’t want to do it,” you can tell that part of your brain that you don’t need to be reliant on feeling good.
I also know that the more times you repeat an action, the deeper the neural pathways that support it grow, and the easier and more comfortable the activity becomes.
The perfection of patience is the perfection of fear.
Hope this helps?
Hi Sotce. Can you explain what my brain should be doing when trying to meditate? Should I be able to eventually get to a point where there are no thoughts flowing? Sometimes I see things and places when I meditate, so I always have thoughts coming and going, like memories. I love that you started this. I'm happy to be here.
I think the secret is that there’s no idea or concept or focus that you need to absorb. The practice is creating space within, gently and slowly. There needs to be space for truth to come into.
Breathe in, breathe out. Slow and gentle, calm inhale, warm exhale.
Sotce, I did the guided meditation to release stuck emotions last night and I ended up crying on my floor for an hour. I feel lighter, thank you.
I’m so glad it helped, I didn’t feel very confident in my delivery and I'll be making more of its nature soon, hopefully tomorrow if my neighbors aren’t too loud.
Hello Sotce. Do you have any tips on how I can learn to listen better to my intuition. It's very hard for me to discern what is my intuition and what is just a random impulse and also its hard to know when a feeling is anxiety and when it is just a gut feeling of "this is wrong".
I think it’s important, in beginning conversations with yourself, to place yourself in environments of peace and ease, where there isn’t any urgency for an action or a response. It takes time and energy to create the right space for a little earnest voice to speak, and to know when it wants to speak. The world is demanding by definition. when many things are calling for our attention and pulling at our strings, it’s harder to reach the soft inner pearly core. I know this part of me does not respond well to any kind of force or desperation. It must feel soft and safe to make itself known.
I first made contact with my own voice in deep meditation, but it wasn’t something I could access freely and that was frustrating. Where are you when I need you??? I would search for the answers in tarot and divination practices. I would count to ten and flip a coin. It still gets like this sometimes. Your true intuition, your lucid all knowing nature is not something you can force out or consume whenever you want it.
With practice I’ve learned to channel the truth, to coax it out through practices of drawing and writing without persisting with any sort of direct consciousness or agency over my drawings, my words, my expression. Just sort of releasing whatever is trapped within me and marinating in that space.
Another thing that I like to do is rest in puppy or butterfly pose for ten or fifteen minutes, allowing my body to relax into my breath and giving my hips room to open. Just getting very loose and comfortable and releasing any defensive worldly stiffness. And there comes a time after a lot of this where I feel very at ease about everything, the world seems malleable like soft clay. In this space I can ask any question and find the answer fluttering inside me.
Then there are other times still when I just know. I am still getting used to this; trusting in it and speaking it physically. This is usually regarding situations that I am detached from, situations that involve people outside of my life. I can look into their world from the outside and just hold a sense of certainty. I can tell when a couple will break up, or what someone is thinking about, or where their interest lies, or where my mom parked her car.
This part of me feels very luminous and ancient and it has a hum that is familiar to the divine. I believe it exists within us all but it is not something that can be called upon or controlled. It does not follow our rules or our right brained sense of will. it needs to come and go as it please.
you give me hope sotce
sotce, this was so helpful, thank u