Try Meditating, Dickhead.
Bare with me here.
Meditation, mindfulness, no-eyed-breathy-breathy - whatever you want to call it - gets a bad name.
Mainly, because it’s the fave conversation starter for a greater-spotted category of nob. The type who have forever recently backpacked India, only so they can somehow corner you in a right-angle-scarce festival field. Then bore you to death, or whichever alt-spiritual plane they claim to have flirted with. You know the one. A guy in a pair of gran’s-rug-patterned parachute pants. Parachute pants that should probably undergo stringent testing for drag and wind resistance, while they’re wearing them.
Meditation doesn’t have to be a megaphoned quest for enlightenment. Don’t let the loudmouth many spoil something great, like Ibiza or that band.
Listen here, this mindfulness racket is just a soothing intermission from your own head. Time off from the relentlessness of being you, and the thankless duty of manning your own shitty brain.
The consciousness is just a leaky tap of thoughts. Seemingly pressing issues drip and dribble right into the control centre of our being. Then all this unvetted babble bounces around our skulls. We take our mind’s word for it. When that little voice narrating our day-to-day can really be a bit of a vindictive prick, at times.
Our mind is a nonsense-turbine and it calls the shots. When do we truly get to switch off our jabbering brain? Our minds can fill up and froth over with all this adverse drivel. We take it as gospel, purely because we done thunked it.
Whatever it is that’s inwardly grating and denying you peace of mind. Maybe, you have a distinguished inner critic. Is your frontal lobe a world authority in the study of regret in advance? Or is it the umpteenth reliving of a decade-old cringe-tremor? Or stewing a hypothetical to boiling point? Life can become a factory line of petty worries. As soon as you deconstruct one, the next shifts into view.
For the computer processing our every move, that ol’ bundle o’ lobes can be pretty unsupportive. If a friend ever spoke to me, how I speak to myself - I’d distance their self from mine, sharpish. Having a go at yourself is about as productive as punching a fart.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
Meditation can easily and markedly reduce all this mental blather. Regardless of how it sounds, it is exactly as good as it is true. The lasting positive effects are vast and far-reaching.
When you semi-regularly give your mind a breather the results are obvious. Self-criticism comes piggybacked with a kinder perspective. Doubt is served up with a hearty pinch of reason. A coldcocked negative bitchslap, followed up with a helping hand. Decisions feel more reachable. Generally, all the bollocks clouding your brain gravy seems that bit sillier.
Well worth feeling a bit of a twat for, ‘ey? If you are umming and aahing about the omming and aahing, why not just give it a go? If your brain is a fortress of calm, surrounded by a moat filled with way-chill, breaching dolphins then you probably haven’t read this far.
Meditation
Requirements: a base of 0 chakras, a bog-standard chair, more on the uncomfortable side. Or a chair-standard bog, will do. Quiet is important.
Ok, sit down. Back straight. Head straight ahead. Ease out your trusty gut. Upright, but relaxed posture. As if you are visiting your decorated military grandfather, but it’s Christmas, after all.
Now: close your eyes, and breathe. Concentrate only on your breath, in and out. Try and breathe as you would normally, were you not fixating all your worldly focus on your breath. At first, it’s almost certain you’ll feel a bit daft.
Bare with yourself, you are not the main man Buddha, star of such faiths as Buddhism. Resolutely uninvited thoughts will gatecrash your jam. Every time, some cerebral dross nags into view, return focus to your breathing. The aim is not to smash your last PB - SBP/M (serene breaths per/minute). Go easy.
Remember, it’s not a point-based showdown to score how dominatingly mindful you can be. Taking part is really all that matters. When accosted by a snappy wrap-up of this morning’s worries, returning to the breath is the only challenge. The amount of stray thoughts that blindside you doesn’t affect the positive outcome. Sure, huffing ‘n’ puffing serenely into the zone becomes easier, but that’s not really the point.
With practice, for 11 sweet seconds or 5 minutes, you can completely lose track of who you are. Let alone a whirring recounting of a social gaffe from Feb ’09. That negative Nancy is totally tongue-tied, and your brain is taking care of precisely fuck-all. Next second, the brain is congratulating itself for achieving the total tranquillity of nothingness, and then realising it’s thinking again – shit. Now, back to the breath.
Set a gentle alarm. Try 2 minutes. 5 minutes. See how you go. Work up to 13. That’s as much as anyone can bear.
Afterwards, your brain feels gratefully emptied. Almost like it couldn’t think of anything if it tried. The afterglow is the closest a human state can be to warranting a use of dated pratmanteau “chillaxed.”
When managing to get down to the chill-coal face regularly. Problems feel compartmentalized, sticky-labelled and a bit more faceable. Sort of like how in an exam, you skip past the tricky questions, and your brain processes them in the background and they make sense later.
Generally, you feel more relaxed, more energetic, happier, less stressed and less anxious. It’s fucking mental. Of course, this is all based purely on my personal experience, eavesdropped hearsay and medically proven science. Yes, even 13 minutes a day is quack-confirmed to restructure your brain, for the better, in a fortnight.
Meditation is a free, wholesome, long-lasting, mild high. Basically, anti-coke. If this was a totally side-effect-free pill, the world would be hammering it back - with Whiskey, probably. The psychological upkeep is well worth trying. Honestly, after a few weeks I thought – where the fuck have they been keeping this shit?
Practicing the practice is normally an obligation. The more you need it (the more mental you are), the more difficult it is to get down to.
All that said, after consistently meditating for 7 years, I’ve fallen off for the last 3 months - which, coincidentally, has correlated with me going quietly mad. So this friendly advice is for me as much as anyone.
Try meditating, dickhead.
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The privatization of stress, is what corporations have achieved. Yet very interesting story about the real benefits of meditation, especially for a society engaged in the economy of attention (scarcity).
How on earth does one go quietly mad? I have never managed to do it without making an absolute racket. You must be talented. And your explanation of the meditating process is clear and concise... I am slightly worried about the bog-standard-chair... or vice versa...