Growing a Mind Garden How to Meditate Through the Negative Set your space: Always set up a meditatio

Growing a Mind Garden How to Meditate Through the Negative Set your space: Always set up a meditation space where you know you can be safe, quiet, and uninterrupted. Turn off your phone. Let your SO know not to disturb you. Unplug your doorbell. Consider putting in ear plugs (I tend to easily reach auditory overload, so true quiet is a must) or wearing an eye mask if you need it. Have water available and be comfortable. Some people like to sit in traditional poses, I like to lie down; do whatever allows you to be totally focused. If you’re uncomfortable you will be too distracted to find the headspace needed for a good meditation session. Preface: I am an excellent visualizer. If you struggle with bringing strong images to mind, practice that first before you try and use this system for mental and emotional yoga. You must have confidence and control in your ability to see with your mind’s eye. Visualizations are very personal, and so I suggest you find a visualization subject/technique that you are naturally drawn to. I will give a short explanation of mine to help get you started: In my mental universe, I have learned that evolution and biology are what I always come back to and what bring me solace and stability. Everything in my mind’s eye has this same pattern of behavior: it is an eternal spiral of life and death, yin and yang, to be and not to be; it all springs from the cornucopia that is the foundation of how I think. However I choose to imagine it, it brings everything into sense and unity when I get my mental zoom just right (from the atomic to the astronomic). Recently, while meditating during emotional crisis (set into motion due to physical ailment) I found I was treading some very deep and very dark water. I kept ending up in the same negative headspace. It was desperate and terrible and I always felt lost. I forgot why I was in those places or how I got there: which meant I had no goals and no escape. I was truly lost in my own mind, like a miserable prison of my own design. So this time, I went back to this negative headspace on purpose. I remembered to grab ahold of what was important there. If I’m going into these dark and hopeless places, there must be a reason. Why am I here? I let myself drift into the inky void of meditation, but this time, as soon as I found myself sinking into the depths, I let go of my flotation device and instead of being pulled down, I dove in with intention. I wasn’t reckless; I had a goal and a plan. This was NOT a suicide mission, it was a rescue mission. (This is IMPORTANT. If you don’t set yourself up for success, don’t be surprised when you fail. Don’t dive deeper than you are able; that’s what therapists are for. I believe I have practiced deep meditation for long enough and am chemically stable enough to be a self-rescuing princess… and if I’m ever not, I am in tune with myself well enough to know when outside help is needed. There is NO SHAME in seeking help.) I dove down, found the place where my negative thoughts live, and searched it. What are these recurring thoughts? They’re just intangible thoughts, but they live in my head and they’re starting to have real world consequences; time to actually investigate. (Side note: I don’t banish bad thoughts and neither should you; you can’t just make them magically disappear. You can hide them from yourself for a time, but all they will do is fester and become more difficult to reach, slowly eating away at the inside of the vault you tried to lock them in. They will come back, and they will be worse than you remembered.) I dealt with one thought at a time. What is it and why am I here? Inside every single negative thought I adventured to, I found a different scenario with the same story: it was me in the scenario. It was always me. How many times have I abandoned myself inside my own head because I was too lost in self-loathing? Not this time. The “me” in my mind, in my memory, in my negative thought… she/I was there for a reason. Maybe the situation was shitty, maybe *I* was shitty, but this time I didn’t abandon myself. I often found that when I ended up inside my negative thoughts, I tried to drown them out and all that did was make it worse. That negative thought is ME. It’s a tiny little piece of me and I deserve better than how I was treating myself. So this time, I held my hand and I paid attention to the situation. This time I was armed… with questions: -What is wrong? -How is it wrong? -Why is it important? -How can I make it better? And so I asked these questions of myself every time I was in darkness and choking on my inner turmoil. Then I found something amazing: I grew from it. If the situation was beyond my control and I felt like I was helpless, I offered myself the best possible scenario for growth: when life gives you shit: plant something beautiful in it. I found that with each of these scenarios, I imagined myself *doing* better and *being* better… and at the end of these visualizations, I watched myself sprout from a seed in the dark. I was creating a Mind Garden. For every single thought that I explore, I now plant a seed… and that seed is my past self being given the environment she needs to grow. For the situations where *I* was the shit, well, we can’t turn everything into roses. Sometimes, shit is shit and you just have to admit it. For those realizations my visual was of rebirth from the outside: I was the soil. You have to be okay with that. You have to be able to look at yourself objectively and honestly. You have to be able to recognize your own failings so that you can use them to grow. Look at every one of these thoughts as in depth as possible, whether the scenario is real or imagined. Hold your own hand and use your now-self to help your past-self. Show yourself what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown. Never forget why you’re there. Make friends with your past-self who lives inside those negative thoughts. When you really need a friend who understands your deepest self, be your own best friend. Treat the “you” inside that darkness like the greatest treasure in the universe instead of just abandoning your past-self to confused misery. Remember, though, that you can plant a seed in GOOD thoughts too. All my meditation thoughts now result in a new flower for my Mind Garden. When I feel that I have learned or grown from a thought, no matter how it got there, I leave the thought through my seed. Sometimes, once I got inside a thought, I would forget why I was there. I apologized to myself and promised to return when my attention was better. A Mind Garden isn’t grown in a day, you know! Take your time, each one of these dives takes a lot of energy. If you find yourself becoming lost and confused again, take note! And you shouldn’t spend your entire meditation looking for things about yourself and your past that make you uncomfortable. If that is where you drift, now you have a way of approaching it, but you don’t have to go looking for trouble if you don’t want to or aren’t ready to. I went from being locked inside a Mind Prison to growing myself into a bright and beautiful Mind Garden. It’s often all about the approach. -- source link

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