Relax now.
Vipassana or Insight Meditation
Insight Meditation focuses attention and awareness on thoughts, feelings, urges, emotions, and sensations, without attachment and without judging. You look at your thoughts, feelings, urges, and emotions without getting caught up in them.
You can practice Insight Meditation while cooking, washing dishes, cleaning the house, or with much care, driving a car. Insight Meditation, aka Mindful Meditation, has been around for 2,500 years as a part of Buddhism.
Let It Be
Any thought, feeling, urge, sensation, and emotion, negative, positive, even violent is okay. In the words of the 1970 Beetle’s song, “Let It Be.”
Step back from dialogue, deliberation, and concern with past and future events. Move from narrow, straight-jacket focus to open-mode acceptance of self and the world as is, and with vast potential for growth.
Equanimity
Allow everything to pass through the mind like images from a movie. Clinging freezes the frame. You want to allow the frames to flow.
Rather than attempting to control thoughts, emotions, and feelings, try not to cling and react to them. When you do cling, react, or judge, try not to react to your reactions.
Framing
Whether we think and act rationally or irrationally is often related to the way we frame our perceptions. Insight Meditation helps perceiving without the narrow narrative stricture of limiting frames. Narrowly framed perceptions box us in .
Focus on Breathing
Each time you catch yourself clinging to a thought, emotion, or feeling, focus on your breathing. The mind wants to reach out and grasp what it perceives. Let go and come back to your breathing again and again.
Metacognition
Unlike other animals, we are gifted with a higher level metacognition. Metacognition offers the power of healing our mind. We step back in our mind and view the patterns of our thinking. This Buddhist concept is basically what Metacognitive Therapy is about.
Step back from reacting and judging what your brain is thinking about for the ten thousandth time. Take the Point of View (POV) of an observer. What are the patterns of your thinking? Are you going over and over the same thoughts? Are you focusing on each discomforting sensation. Think and feel without reacting or judging. Step back in your mind and allow thoughts, emotions, and sensations to come and go without clinging.
Over time, Insight Meditation strengthens presence and equanimity. It is an internal program of daily exercise. Like physical exercise, progress is slow and incremental. You rarely notice changes short time. After practicing Insight Meditation for several years, you will see tremendous growth.
All About Breathing
If you have a thought, say thought, and come back to focus on breathing. If you have a feeling, say feeling, and come back to focus on breathing. If you an have emotion, say emotion, and come back to focus on breathing. If you have an urge, say urge, and come back to focus on breathing.
But you will judge, cling to thoughts, feelings, emotions and urges, and forget to return your focus on breathing. Whenever you realize you are clinging and judging, return to your focus on breathing.
It is both simple, easy, and extraordinarily difficult.
Just another paradox.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
It seems to be another good example of an open monitoring meditation style. An Open Monitoring (OM) suggests remaining only in the monitoring state, attentive moment by moment to any experience than occurs without focusing on any explicit object. You can find more examples here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2693206 (including Mindfulness).
Being a huge believer in Open Focus approach to attention training I believe there is still a gap in the common understanding of attention. It is beacuse, cannot find any literature describing the diffused attention style (unless I am missing something). You can find more about what I mean by diffusing attention here http://www.openfocusattentiontraining.com/2015/09/04/diffuse-your-attention/
Open Monitoring is very useful and it does bring a significant difference in everyday life. The problem is that most people understand it as being continuously watchful/alert of what is happening around them. They know that once they let go they will end up daydreaming again.
I think that once people are explained that they can diffuse their attention they can understand how they should practice better and progress a lot faster. Say for example, they could stay aware of they breathing while walking/driving or they could be aware of sounds around them while working in the garden. It is still Open Monitoring but with a slight twist 🙂
The advantage of this approach is that the diffused attention immediately quiets down internal chatter what brings very noticeable change to they way we attend. People can notice quickly that something real is happening. It also allows practicing attending in less rigid/tense way because one practice attending ‘just a little’ (say continuous awareness of breathing but on a very soft level) while doing something else.
In Open Focus the goal is to mix narrow and diffuse attention at the same time which has many useful applications, see this for example http://www.openfocusattentiontraining.com/2015/02/02/flexible-attention-and-non-verbal-communication-2/
Again, I am sorry for links to my blog but I think it makes my claims more solid 🙂
I agree.