“Stay in the present moment. The practice of staying present will heal you. Obsessing about how the future will create anxiety. Reliving broken scenes from the past can lead to anger and sadness. Stay here, in the present moment. ~ Sylvester McNutt
For two years I studied and practiced meditation. I listened to podcasts every morning, chanted mantras, sat quietly to explore my default mode network, and journeyed through Eastern mysticism with the guidance of a licensed clinical psychologist who taught me how to use deep diaphragmatic breathing to stimulate me of the vagus nerve and lowers my resting heart rate. This helped me recover from the panic attacks I started having due to existential fear.
After experiencing a series of nights with intrusive thoughts about death and dying, as well as painful memories related to my childhood, I decided to learn how to meditate so that my thoughts wouldn’t bother me as much.
It is important to examine our feelings and emotions to determine how to deal with them. During meditation, when you observe your thoughts without judgment, the goal is to let the thoughts pass and then use the mantra to return to the present moment. However, after the meditation, if a certain thought or memory keeps coming up, it is also important to categorize for yourself what feelings or emotions may have come up from that experience so that you know what to do in your personal development.
Speaking for myself, I find that many of the childhood memories that keep coming back to me during meditation are related to my mother. Not surprisingly, much of my early writing as a poet contained themes and ideas related to my mother and other family issues. It wasn’t until I started actually processing these memories that I realized they were connected to painful emotions directly related to my childhood.
Once I gave myself enough space to examine my memories and see them as artifacts of my life—things that needed to be accepted, rather than things that I wanted to empower—I was able to move past them and move on from Come out the other side.
To do this, I started journaling, talked more about my experiences with trusted advisors and my creative work, and kept up a meditation practice, where I wisely meditated for three to four hours every morning. practise.
Before I solved it, a childhood memory once bothered me. It was when I was seven or eight years old. I remember it vividly because the memory resurfaces every day.
A friend of mine and I were sitting on the bedroom floor talking when my mother walked into the room. She made a stern comment that my clothes hadn’t been put away because she told me that having my friends over at the house depended on that.
Then, without saying a word, she picked up each piece of clothing and threw them at me as I lay on the floor. My friends and I were speechless. Later, when my mother left the room, my friend helped me pick them up.
By accepting my memory without judgment, I realized that this experience had become a traumatic point for me that stayed with me into my adult life until I began to process the ingrained feelings in my brain associated with the event. emotions.
It was only when I started meditating and kept seeing this memory come up again and again—thereby noticing that I even had the memory and emotion in the first place—that I was able to process the fact that this example made me feel Grieved because of how unfair it is. I feel humiliated. I feel ashamed. I thought to myself, how could she do such a thing?
However, as I began to name my feelings one by one, I found that the physical sensations and emotional experiences surrounding the memory began to disappear. I even had the courage to talk to my mother about my childhood using the nonviolent communication strategies discussed in the book nonviolent communicationwritten by Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg, with a foreword by Deepak Chopra.
The most basic form of nonviolent communication is communicating conflict by saying, “When I hear you say Please accept your communication below.
I have found great success with this approach, and although my mother and I are not close by any means, this method of communication has strengthened our relationship and my relationship with myself. Now most, if not all, of my painful childhood memories are no longer traumatic for me, including those about my clothes.
Now, many years later, this memory and the emotions attached to it are actually no longer a problem for me. However, the most important form of communication I have discovered for myself is communication with myself, all brought about by a healthy meditation regimen.
So how can a person meditate to observe their thoughts without judgment, let go of them, and return to the present moment to successfully process painful childhood memories and gain more overall self-awareness?
The technique my psychologist taught me is that while taking deep diaphragmatic breathing to stimulate the vagus nerve and promote inner calm (eight seconds, pause, then eight seconds), it’s best to remember an intention that you can chant in your head as your inner dialogue.
He also recommends taking a hearing test for better results, or putting mantras to music in your head, which I find is more intellectually stimulating and leads to clearer thinking.
The idea is to try to clear your mind of all thoughts Apart from A mantra you keep repeating. I chose the mantra “Hamsa” for each breath, which means “I am who I will become” and represents personal development.
When I was chanting “Hamsa” and my mind wandered, soon When I notice this happening, I acknowledge the stray thought, allow it to exist in a non-judgmental environment, and then consciously turn my attention back to my mantra while letting the thought go.
every time I went back to the original mantra and I was using intentional focused mental muscles to do it and this got stronger Every time, like a muscle.
Ultimately, by using this technique of observing thoughts without judgment, letting them go, and returning to the present moment, you will begin to gain better control over your thoughts as you strengthen your ability to think. self-awareness of these thoughts first.
Meditating in this way can bring you greater mental and emotional clarity, thereby increasing self-awareness, helping you get in touch with upsetting narratives and emotions, and giving you new paths forward to revitalize those things that can work in a way that works for you. Experience that dissolves or renews.
In other words, when you allow yourself to be within yourself, notice your own existence Uncritically processing painful memories and feelings, even the act of noticing your own thought patterns, can increase self-awareness in all areas of your life. This can help you shift to a better way of thinking and being – a key component of personal development. You can then begin to notice painful or traumatic memories in order to face them head-on, process them, and then let them go.
I found that when I was able to successfully fully process these childhood memories, I became healthier, stronger, and stronger as an adult. I understand myself better and why I am the way I am. I have since become more refined, with greater inner clarity, and able to process worse memories and trauma points. I was able to use nonviolent communication techniques to have difficult discussions with many people that I never imagined possible, which led me to develop a stable sense of self and personal discovery.
If you notice uncomfortable thoughts and memories while meditating and practicing deep breathing, it’s likely that these thoughts represent something from your past that is worth working on so that you can process your life and let it go. When you shed these burdens, you open your mind to more enjoyable thoughts about better things on the other side of the mountain.
About Rebecca O’Byrne
Rebecca O’Bern is an award-winning author and educator with 10 years of experience. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Connecticut State University and has published numerous poems in literary journals, e.g. Notre Dame Cathedral Review, Commentary on Buddhist Poemsand Whale Road Reviewand received honors from Arts Café Mystic and UCONN. Learn more about her and view her work at rebeccaobern.com and follow her on Twitter @rebeccaobern.
