Getting Started With Meditation For Tinnitus

In this talk, I explain why I think meditation belongs in a tinnitus toolkit: it gives us a way to work with the body's stress response and with our thoughts about the sound. I compare building a practice to building a habit like running or lifting weights, teach a simple four-step breath meditation, and lead a short practice. I then describe four skills that meditation develops: concentration, observation, relaxation, and equanimity, and share ideas for making meditation a regular habit by starting small and linking it to something you already do. This content is educational and is not a substitute for one-on-one professional care. Please do not listen while driving.

Transcript

I want to talk today about developing a meditation practice if you have tinnitus. And there are a couple of good reasons that meditation should be a part of your tinnitus toolkit, To use the language we all use. First, Tinnitus allows us to calm the body, Work with the body. We need to relax the body if we have tinnitus because the body is in essentially fight or flight for much of the time. And we need to work with our thoughts. Again, Our thoughts are the cause of much of our tinnitus distress, Our thoughts about our condition. Really, Tinnitus distress, When it comes down to it, Consists of these two things, How our body responds to tinnitus and how our mind works with tinnitus. And with meditation, We can work with these two aspects of tinnitus distress. One way to think about developing a practice of meditation is to think about it like you would developing A, Um. . . Habit of weightlifting to practice a weightlifting or a habit of running And those provide good models because in both of those situations you're working with a particular faculty and you take time out of your normal routine to engage in specific exercises, And that's really what You know meditation works like so with respect to weightlifting you know you want to be working with the muscles and you want to increase their mass and Strength, I guess I wouldn't know, I don't weight lift. So you go to the gym, Take time out of your day and lift weights to develop muscles. Running, I do run. Again, You're developing your aerobic capacity and you take time out of your day to engage in a specific exercise, Running. So with meditation, What we're doing is working with the faculty of attention. And our attention is always somewhere and with meditation we work with Placing it in the present moment and what's going on at the present and placing it there in a particular Attitude and we'll get to that later so we work with that faculty of attention and we take time out of our day and we Meditate we engage in an activity. So what is meditation? There are a lot of different versions of meditation we going into here engage in the one of the most basic. And also the most widespread one is Vipassana meditation. You don't need to know the name. It's a simple practice. It consists of four steps. We begin by placing our attention on some object of present moment sense experience. The object that we usually begin with in meditation is the breath. Place our attention on the breath where we feel it in the body. And we try to hold our attention there. What happens invariably is our attention wanders off. That's just what our attention, Or at least our untrained attention does, It wanders off. Perhaps somewhere to the stream of thought, Maybe you start thinking about your tinnitus or hearing your tinnitus. Or something else. And then the third step is you notice it's wandered off. There's a world of difference between having your attention wander off and noticing that it's wandered off. So that third step of noticing it wandered off is you just. . . Attention that it's wandered off and then you gently bring the attention back to the breath. That's basically it. We say simple but not easy because as you will find out The attention has this tendency to wander off at will, And we notice it and bring it back. But that's really the practice. The practice is noticing when it wanders off and bringing it back, Bringing that attention back to the present moment. It's not a defect. It's the essence, It's a feature of meditation that our attention wanders off to. And over time we get control of it. So we're gonna do just a really brief practice. And I wanna just say a couple of things. First is that if you're working with this with tinnitus, I do recommend at the start you work with sound in the background, Whatever noise or sound that you're comfortable in working with, Maskers, White noise, Nature noise, Something to place the attention. I recommend you do that. So if you need to stop and grab something, You can do that. Otherwise, We'll talk a little bit about posture, And then we're going to just do a brief practice. So you can do this sitting in a chair. Straight back chair is best with your back straight or more traditionally we sit on the floor in a cushion meditation cushion You don't need to do that at the start, But I actually would recommend thinking about it as you get further along in your practice so we're going to begin by settling in and I'll assume you are sitting in a chair and Feel the weight of your feet on the floor. Feel the weight of your seat. On the chair. Or cushion if you're on one. Noticing the weight of your hands either folded in your lap or resting on your thighs. We want our back straight if that's possible, Erect but not rigid. Say, Noble posture. It also makes it easier to breathe. In a healthy, Complete manner. But if that's not comfortable for you or it's painful, Please feel free to lean against a chair or put something back there for support. We're breathing in through the nose and out through the nose at a normal pace. And if it's comfortable for you, Closing your eyes. Or you may want to keep them gently open on the ground in front of you. Having some uninteresting spot to place your attention. Whichever one of those seems to work, And then we begin by finding where in the body we feel the breath the strongest. And that might be in the rising and falling of the belly. It might be in the chest as it expands and contracts. Or in the air as it goes into and out of the nostrils. Or you may feel it in some other place or combination, Just placing your attention. On where you feel the breath in the body and attempting to hold your attention there. Hold it gently as if you're watching waves coming in on the shore and going out again. Breathing. And at some point you will notice the attention wander off, Usually to somewhere in the stream of thought. That's not unusual. That's a natural feature of our untrained attention. When that happens, We simply notice. Notice the attention has wandered off and bring the attention back to the breath. Breathing in, Know that you're breathing in. Breathing out, Know that you're breathing out. Really trying to hold the attention on the entirety of the breath. Noticing not just the rise of the belly on the inhale but the pause at the top of the inhale. As well as the pause at the end of the exhale. And noticing when the attention wanders off. And bringing the attention gently back to the breath. So we'll sit like this for a few moments. Placing attention on the breath, Noticing when it wanders off, And bringing the attention back to the breath. And when you're ready, Open your eyes and reconnecting with the room. So I want to talk a little about the practice and maybe what you notice or what you should be noticing as you practice. I like to talk about it in terms of four skills. I call these the core skills, C-O-R-E, Concentration, Observation, Relaxation, And equanimity. So concentration. Is that focus on the breath. Those moments when you have that focus like a laser-like beam on the breath. And those are rare and intermittent. I think one report talked about for most meditators, Concentrating for three full in-breaths and out-breaths is quite a feat. What you develop is this capacity to concentrate. And how that works with tinnitus is when you have that complete focus, On what you're doing. And even if it's just breathing, There's really no room for distressing thoughts to come in. I think like to think about it as a shield that you have for any thoughts about tinnitus can to distract you, To trouble you. And it isn't just in meditation this happens. If you think about being really concentrated in some activity and those times that we notice that or we don't notice our tinnitus, It's oftentimes when we're just concentrated in an activity and lost in an activity. In this level of concentration, Even when we don't have the tinnitus disappear, In those moments we really can't plan out, They seem just to happen. But that concentration does allow you to work with thoughts so they don't trouble you and you can focus with whatever activity you're working on. Skill of concentration through meditation practice. Observation is what happens when we notice our thoughts. Think about all of the trouble that our thoughts inflict upon us. In Buddhism, They talk about thoughts as a second arrow. So someone is shot with an arrow and that's painful, But then they start thinking about, Oh my god, It's in the leg, Will I ever be able to walk again? In my military career, What about these pants? What's my wife gonna say? I shouldn't have been out playing arrows. So we end up bringing a lot of distress to ourself through our thoughts. They say pain is inevitable, Suffering is optional. A lot of suffering comes through the thoughts we inflict upon ourselves. And what we work with in this level of observation of our thoughts, And this again develops more as we work with meditation, Is the ability to watch our thoughts and not get pulled in by them. We learn to observe the thoughts, Just like we observe it as we meditate. A thought, Our attention goes to a thought, We notice it, And we come back to the present moment. We don't get caught in the thought. That capacity to watch thoughts and not get hooked by them is a vital one in working with tinnitus distress. The R is relaxation. One thing I hopefully you noticed, And if not, You will, Because it's very reliable. Scientifically demonstrated for more than 44 decades now the ability of meditation to induce relaxation to Get rid of all the stress markers on the body There was a book in the 70s by a dr. Herbert Benson who did really the first studies of the impact of meditation on our stress levels power of meditation in Relaxing the body again is now demonstrated through four decades of research into What's known as mindfulness based stress reduction among other research? So important for tinnitus because with tinnitus as I said our body is in fight-or-flight this advanced state we we are feel threatened and Meditation can help relax us from that state the E is Equanimity and really I see equanimity as actually an advanced skill a kind of a combination of thought and realization Relaxation it's the ability to be calm under any circumstances. I like to think of the line from the That poem if if you know if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you Just as the ability to sit in peace regardless of what's going on, And I think it's a rather advanced state but it's also one we do get glimpses of and we get better at calming our our emotional context and what we know from a really work on the emotions with They don't happen to us and we have a lot more control over them when we think and that's really what? Equanimity is is this capacity over time? It's not a light switch over time to grab control of our emotions so concentration observation relaxation equanimity the practice over time will facilitate the development of those characteristics and Those are very useful as I said in working with tinnitus distress. So at the end here I want to talk a little bit about developing the habit of meditation because really you don't get the skills you don't get the results the rewards unless you meditate and Developing the have a habit is a and there's been a lot of interest in research on a habit development And I think it's good to use that in developing a habit of meditation, Because that's really what developing a practice is. It's more of a habit than a matter of willpower. And the meditation research shows willpower has almost nothing to do with the development of a habit. I like to use the work of James Clear in his book Atomic Habits. He talks about how there are four sort of keys to developing a habit and it is make it obvious, Make it easy, Make it enjoyable and make it satisfying. And let me talk briefly about each of these with respect to a meditation. Make it obvious means you should have some weight where you can't miss what you're doing. It becomes part of your life. So he says like if you want to work out on a bike, Put the bike in an obvious place where you have to see it every day. With meditation, I think you can put your meditation cushion in a place where you see it and are reminded of it. But even more importantly, In the make it obvious category, There is a thing he calls habit stacking, Which is if you wanna start one habit, Hook it to another habit you already have. And this is actually how I started meditating more than 30 plus years ago. I would have tea in the morning. I'd put a teapot on the stove and sat on my little cushion. And when the whistle blew, Got up and it wasn't very long, But it developed a habit. So find some habit you already have and hook meditation to it. Maybe it's brushing your teeth or taking a shower or when you get up, Make it be the first thing you do. So work with that habit stacking. In terms of making it easy, I think this is a really important aspect, And he has what he calls the two-minute rule, And that is starting really, Really small. There's another book, I haven't read it yet, I just saw an interview, Or heard an interview with the author called Tiny Habits, And it's about just start very, Very small, And he says, You know, If you wanna floss your teeth, Floss one tooth, And then reward yourself. He actually combines one of the steps that is a separate step for Atlas and I'll talk about that one, But starting small with the practice, You know a minute two minutes start small You know and something that you can work on a lot of the traditional training has you throws you into the deep end Which is not actually I think the the best way to develop the habit So start small a minute or two and build up from there and then this next part about making it rewarding or satisfying is rewarding yourself somehow with something after the event, So it becomes linked in a positive fashion. I do this when I do my weightlifting, My minimum weightlifting, And that is I will, I have it in my house, And I will, While I do my little weightlifting routine, I watch something on Netflix, Some trash stuff, That usually has no, It's just something I enjoy watching, And I can allow myself to watch while I lift weights. I give myself that reward of watching some, What I would normally call trash TV that I enjoy, A guilty pleasure TV. And so reward yourself somehow. I'm not sure how you could do that. I do think that you can trick yourself. One thing I had someone do is hold off your cup of coffee until you have your meditation and then give yourself that cup of coffee So you link them subconsciously. The hit you get from the coffee becomes linked to meditation. Some way to reward yourself. I also think inherently, Over time, The practice itself becomes rewarding. It's like, This is a time that nothing else in my life is gonna matter. I'm gonna drop everything else for this minute or two minutes, And it becomes an enjoyable outlet, An enjoyable separation from the world. Slowly over time, Learns to associate it, The meditation time, With just a kind of relaxation, Letting everything drop. And your body then begins, Almost like a Pavlov's dog sort of manner, To respond to sitting down. Another way to make it inherently enjoyable. Then make it satisfying. He talks about ways to track your meditation habits, Any habits. So get a sheet of paper, Write it down, Record it, So you have some record and you feel that you've accomplished something. I noticed Wordle does this, Is it tells you how many days your streak is. And it's doing something like that, Marking X's on a calendar, Again, Seems like little stuff, But it's actually, The research shows this really works. So try, And you might wanna pick up some of this research, Or just kind of cruise the internet right now and find enough stuff on habits. So that, Is an introduction to meditation. I hope you find it useful.