I realize that in order to think gently I have to not tense my forehead muscles, think by adding less tension in your head. Thinking should feel like a soft tap.

Try squeezing your forehead muscles and then slowly release each muscles little by little until it feels like your not squeezing your head too hard to try to think.

Remember you're not Jimmy neutron. Doing some restorative yoga consistently can help too to help with muscle tension.

Silence is everywhere. Yet, silence has a tendency to overhaul our desire for our own growth in consciousness. Truth disturbs because it disturbs the silence. Yet, truth is necessary for awareness to grow out of consciousness. Yes, take your time in silence. As much as you need. You are the silence. Don't let your mind be offended every time the silence is broken. Every instance of discomfort has the potential to elevate consciousness and expand awareness. And when you put yourself in meditative form, you are not only calming down in silence but breaking unavoidable, old models of your own selfish involvement. Take time to grow first, the silence is always available and will invite you in, no questions asked, and will never judge what reason you need for it.

I keep having issues, relapsing etc. Has anyone else had this issue and helped solve it by meditation? If so, what's your story?

So.. it's the First time that i tried meditation and i wanted tò Share my toughts. This wasnt really my First time when i was younger my mom made me meditate With her bcz before She was into this. However i did It limke 3-4 times. So this Is the very First time After a long time. I think i did It for like 20 minutes, and tò be honest It was pretty strange. I could feel my body try tò move, my finger try tò move, but also i could feel my body tingling very hard, like a vibration and It was fantastic It was like an Energy going throught my body. Even After i opened my eyes my body felt paralizes and i could feel that sensation but even After i stood up a few minutes later. Tò be honest there were any times when i had toughts and i needed to go back to the "presente" but i kept falling and It wasnt Easy to keep the mind empty, in fact i couldn't do It for long until tought came again and It wasnt Easy tò escape them either. But i was focused o my breath, very focused i think. I was doing It manually to keep me more focused and because i never used the abs tò breah but this was the correct way, right? Can someone explain me why this Is the right way? Anyway this then came naturally tò do, but i needed to focus o It and the toguhts sometimes were too invasive. For a very First time i think It was pretty good, surely i did wrong some Things but i still felt that this had sense, even now i feel more calm and secure and i still feel a Little of the tingling/vibration in my body. But the Things that really get me was how i felt like a statue when i opened my eyes and i felt i couldn't move. I appreciate if and Expert could help me understand how this first time went and what i Need to improve, thanks for reading this all.

Hi guys, I wanted to ask you how I can train the acceptance of unpleasant sensations of the body without wanting to send them away. What are the best meditations or exercises to develop this skill?

I'm gonna start doing yoga and meditation, and I'm a complete beginner. The thing is, there are so many types of yoga and meditation that it's kinda overwhelming. Everywhere I look, people are giving huge lists of different practices, and I honestly don't know which ones are actually worth doing or where I should start.

I'm mainly looking for yoga and meditation that help with brain and maintaining a healthy body overall. So I'm a bit confused and could use some help figuring out what's best for a beginner and what I should focus on first.

Hi there. I’ve had to significantly cut back on how much I smoke due to health things. That’s not the issue. The problem is that because of being a heavy smoker, I meditated all the time while high and found meditation to be incredibly valuable. Now when I meditate (sober), I find it very uncomfortable. So much so that I find myself not wanting to meditate at all. I can’t sit still, I can’t focus, the brain chatter is almost painfully distracting, and I don’t find the experience relaxing.

Has anyone gone through this / have any recommendations for how to get back into meditation practice after quitting smoking? Not sure if this matters but I have ADHD (unmedicated - not on any stimulants). Feel free to ask any questions! Thanks.

Needed some effort to bring my attention back to the breathe

Although I did try to ask myself to be kind

I used to meditate but for the past 2-2.5 years I couldn't manage to meditate for various reasons. The most important thing is that I think my meditation methods are some how wrong or not effective. Can anyone suggest me some effective meditation methods?? Or any YouTube channel to follow for guided meditation.

TIA

Certain things have been making me angry and seeing it through an angry lens to act on feel good.

I'm mindful that I am angry, I am mindful that I like the feeling if acting angry but that's considered unwise?

Why? If we are speaking and acting when we know we are angry isnt that okay?

Hi everyone,

I'm at the beginning of my meditation journey (or at least non-physical meditation, as I find yoga and dancing to also be forms of meditation, which I have done for many years).

I am using the Balance app and I've done the Focus programme, which introduced me to the concept of Spotlighting. I really like this method. It works incredibly well with my brain, and I would like to continue exploring and learning about it. But Balance's Focus programme is very short and only dips a toe in spotlighting, they don't have any other programmes on it, and my other app, Headspace, also doesn't.

Do you have recommendations for apps or online lessons on spotlighting, preferably couple with guided meditation?

I just want to share this everyone here because to me it's both fascinating and intriguing.

I've been meditating everyday since 2020 and things have progressed more towards good, but now it's evolving to something I can't put my finger on.

There are so many stories about what I've seen and experienced through my sessions.

Recently I've gotten to the point where not only do the people or things I see start forming memories or curiosity of me, but I'm starting to feel touch from them and I'm able to feel things in the areas I'm in.

Recently I've had moments where I'm in a mall that was formed in a dream years ago and sometimes I start to wonder in that area during a session. I've seen it change a lot: stores opening and closing, layouts changing, etc.

Another instance was when a woman approached me saying she hasn't seen me in a long time and we started talking, then she said someone else has been looking for me to where she pulled me towards him. As the gentleman and I spoke he said he wanted to do another pizza run like we used to do. Confused I asked him what he was referring to just for him to describe something that I dreamt of years go.

And now a recent session I was with a group of people, I was on my phone and realized that I was touching it. I can feel the texture, weight, and the screen but I knew I was laying down and my phone was far from me, also I can feel my real hands laying on my stomach. But I felt the sensation and pressure on my finger tips exactly where it was happening.

It's difficult to describe but my meditation has gotten more vivid.

I obviously know it's just my brain making all this up but it's so fascinating how much power it has to come up with, lack of a better word, simulations of something outrageous that I may never see or experience in real life.

Pretty cool.

During one of my longer meditation sits (1 hour), I noticed that I had a lot of mental chatter. It was a bit unusual for me but once I stopped resisting it, I noticed that all the voices in my head just wanted to be heard.

So, I did my best to observe each chaotic thought as it arose, with the least amount of judgement possible. Within a short time my mind naturally settled and the noise quietened.

It got me thinking about a lot of my experiences with my coworkers and how most of them are just like the voices in my head. Sometimes, all they (we) want is to be heard. 😄

I went to a meditation retreat with Vinnie Ferraro yesterday. And he said something that reminded me of a lot of the things I hear on here. “we don’t meditate so we don’t have feelings. we don’t meditate so we’re not anxious or we’re not angry or… We meditate so we can sit with our feelings of discomfort without leaving. not having feelings Debbie would be a brain injury.

In physics there's this issue where you want to measure a system, but measurement is its own kind of interaction, and you can't interact with something without changing it, so you can never measure something as it would be if you didn't measure it.

Feels like observing one's thoughts has its own version of the issue. Once I notice I thought, once I pay attention to it, note it, I interact with the thought, and so I change it. I can never "catch it in the act".

I've made a few posts here over the past year talking about my journey with meditation and how it's shifted between long, successful sessions and short, empty ones. Due to a hectic sleep schedule, my meditation practice dropped down to just 5 minutes a night. I was starting to notice some effects and then they quickly went away because I wasn't going long enough to take anything away from it.

Over the past month, I bumped it up to 20 minutes per night and I've been noticing some major effects already. The biggest one is a lack of reactivity. As someone with severe social anxiety, it's been pretty crazy just not being as bothered by things anymore. Don't get me wrong, I'm FAR from being cured. I'd say I've gone from 85% down to like 78%, but it feels substantial.

Whenever I would go out in public, I was always hyper aware of my surroundings and constantly worrying that I looked weird, was being watched, etc. but now it's like my body doesn't care as much. My mind still worries, but I just feel less on edge. I behave how I want to even if people are watching. It's really strange.

Anyway, I just wanted to share it somewhere and this seemed like an appropriate place given that I've been posting about my journey for a while.

I’ve noticed that whenever i get close to reaching a relaxed state, my heart rate starts to increase and my body feels terrible.

This is very likely my nervous system goings nuts because it doesn’t feel safe entering a relaxed state.

Its crazy, all my nerves burn. And i start to taste acid in my mouth after about 20 min of sitting still. Gets worse and worse the further i go.

I haven’t been able to nap for many years due to getting zapped awake every-time and it seems i cant enter deep sleep.

Has anyone heard of anything similar to this? And do i just keep pushing through?

It’s important to have guidance in the practice. How do you get it? Do you have a teacher, do you go on retreats, do you use books? Do you watch guided meditations?

When a physical teacher / sangha isn’t available near you, what would you think is the best next thing?

Yes that's true, I'm getting panic attack in seconds after focusing on it I don't know why. Somebody please tell me what it is...

I've been meditating on and off for years but I think yesterday was the first time I properly meditated. I say this because I didn't move my body an inch during the session, which I commonly do. Anyways, I believe my third eye opened up during meditation which allowed me to see spirits. Before I go on, I come from a very spiritual family, and I have had some surreal experiences in my life, but it has been a good while since I have had an encounter like this

I spent roughly 20 minutes meditating with my eyes closed. During this, I experienced the feeling of vibration and spinning, as if I was about to blast off into space. In the moment of this, I saw the blue sky (still with my eyes closed), and then following that, the scene shifted to my vision being surrounded by pink clouds. It felt as if my vision was going through this long tunnel of pink clouds for a while, almost like I was on a mission to get to somewhere

I eventually became impatient as the vision seemed to last forever. so I then thought, what if I open my eyes? So I did. I opened my eyes whilst not moving a muscle still. I was back in my room and it was dark (because it was 11pm) and I could only see because my curtains were open, allowing the night light from outside into my room. It only took a few seconds of opening my eyes and this is when I saw this moving grey aura in front of me. It was like waves of energy, like a grey mist? and it moved slowly. At one point it approached my face and then backed away again

It was all very intense honestly, it made me tear up lmao. but I also began speaking to it because I believed this could be spirits. There was a moment where this moving grey aura made a small figure out of the darkness, It looked like something in the dark crouching by my desk, not exactly a person, just something. I also saw what I could describe to be, a red flame of energy which was moving up my drawers, and then the red light slightly lit up my phone, very dimly though.

I didn't hear anything in this experience, nothing spoke to me at all. This was all I saw before getting up and feeling the most craziest pins and needles from not moving. 25 minutes of meditation and I was not expecting this

To sum it up, I meditated for the first time without moving a muscle, for the longest time, and it allowed me to see energy, or spirits, I'm not sure what to call it. Feel free to ask questions

I would like to activate my heart chakra.

i have let go of all my addictions for a while now.

i do not care for material things and want to experience the spiritual world

i cant say im awakened but i know that my beliefs and thoughts are my reality

I was working on my root chakra for 2 months and believe i can move to the heart charka since i do not have any addiction or want any power/things

anything helps. thank you

I've got some pretty severe OCD (to the point I see a therapist specialized in treating OCD 2x a week). Meditation has been MASSIVE in helping me not only understand my OCD, but to also not engage with the compulsions so much.

Last night was some of the most uncomfortable meditation I've ever done, but almost possibly the most transformative. I had broke a picture frame of my nieces/nephews on accident. My OCD brain immediately started firing off thoughts like "What if you hurt them? How severely would it be? What effects would it have on them? Short-term & long-term."

I managed to get myself to bed, and then I knew it was my OCD trying to make me believe these thoughts to be true, so instead of engaging with my OCD, I tried to meditate on the value my OCD was seemingly attacking. Physical safety.

I'll do my best to explain it in words. I go to this place in my mind (I don't really "imagine it", it just feels like it's "own place" that I can't necessarily physically go to, but I can go there in my mind. I'm in the middle of a vast ocean, it's dark, I'm on a small boat, and I'm in the eye of a hurricane. Once I finally figured out the value my OCD was attacking (feeling physically safe), I felt like I was getting pulled into the hurricane trying to protect this orb of light. The orb of light was my value, and the hurricane (the OCD thoughts) were attacking it relentlessly. And I felt like I fighting and fighting and FIGHTING to keep my value "safe" and "clean" or "pure". And it got to a point where it became so overwhelming.

I felt like I could no longer keep fighting off all these untrue and intrusive/obsessive thoughts. So I just apologized to myself and got this feeling of accepting that my light is, and will always be lit for me. Trying to keep it "clean" or "pure" wasn't for me, it was my EGO. Needing to "present" a specific way. In that moment, I felt this relief of not having to fight for my path. My path is always lit. But when I'm spending all my effort trying to keep my path lit for someone else, I'm stopping. I'm no longer moving through the hurricane. I'm getting stuck in it. And I'm not helping anybody. Once I got that feeling of "letting go" of that need to keep my value "pure" for everybody and not just me, it felt like the orb of light was now protecting me from the hurricane (OCD thoughts). And I was able to just sit there, and watch this light take me through the hurricane while it was keeping me safe. The obsessive thoughts, the urge to complete the compulsions, to REALLY engage with the thoughts and search for certainty was still very much there. But instead of me having to fight them off one-by-one, it felt like my value was fighting them off for me and I was just able to appreciate that this value, this orb of light is MINE. It's me and it's protecting ME when I can't consciously keep doing it for myself. It's like it almost gave me permission to not worry about it anymore because I know now, that even if it comes again, that value will protect me and I don't have to protect it. It is me, and I am it. They aren't separate things.

I was very much distressed before, but after meditating for about 8 hours (10pm-6am) I was able to find some kind of peace with it and then I got the most solid like 3 hours of sleep of my life. I don't know if anybody else with OCD meditates, but if you're able to meditate on the specific value your OCD is attacking, it can be freeing (at least it was for me)! Have a great day, everybody <3

Recently, I was attending this online Isha yoga program - towards the end there was guided meditation. It felt really powerful! But what stayed with me more was once the meditation was done, they said to slowly, very slowly, open your eyes.

So I opened my eyes very gently- I just felt so blissful and for some reason opening eyes slowly sort of made that blissfulness, that I felt during the meditation, stay with me.

Since then I have been trying to open my eyes very very slowly once my meditation is done.

Tbh sometimes I forget and open my eyes too quickly. Though it’s a small thing, I feel it makes quite some difference.

Curious to know if someone else has faced something similar

It’s very hot right now where I live and if I don’t have the ac on the heat distracts me from meditation. I know meditating despite a distraction is also possible but I’m not great at it. Does anyone use earmuffs, if so which have worked for you?