Can't Stop Thinking While Meditating Try These Techniques

This is a course on how to help still the mind while meditating and also how to be comfortable while meditating. Intended for those who can't stop the flow of thoughts and for those who need a break from the mind. so grab a drink and listen to these words that might be exactly what you need.

Transcript

The Power of the Heart Loads of people have come to me and said that they cannot silence the mind.

That there is constant chatter going on.

Almost to the point of insanity,

Their minds are driving them crazy.

Today I'd like to address that and hopefully give you a couple techniques to help overcome this insanity,

This constant chattering that seems to never go away.

Many of you have tried meditation and failed at it because this chatter that keeps going on and you can't sit still and just be.

It's a hard thing to do at first.

But with a few words of advice,

A few techniques to try,

Then we might be able to change all that.

We might be able to take you away from that insanity.

Because it seems like every day you may be drawing closer and closer to going out of your mind.

And there is going out of the mind that is a good thing and there's a going out of your mind that's a bad thing.

Below the level of normalcy is the bad part,

Is the schizophrenic or just this madness that just continues on and on and on and on.

So my best advice is you can't stop the mind from thinking.

The more you try,

The more energy you're giving the mind.

So it's like the Alan Watts lecture where he says that if you're going to try to out trick the devil,

Don't let him know that you're going to out trick him.

You don't give him advance warnings that,

Hey,

I'm going to trick you.

So with that in mind,

With your mind is kind of the same thing.

It's like instead of trying to force a stillness,

Which is almost impossible to do,

You can chant things like the word Om repeated over and over helps to reduce the chatter in the mind.

And it narrows it down to like a singular point.

So that's one technique,

Chanting Om or Om Madhi Padme Hum is one of the Buddhist chants.

It means the lotus and the jewel of the lotus,

Basically.

And chanting has a hypnotic effect to it.

It helps you to calm down and be centered more and more.

In fact,

They say the word Om is the sound that God made when he created the universe.

And if you listen carefully in meditation and go into a deep meditation,

You can almost hear that background Om going on.

But still what happens though is that you're left with Om and you have to ditch the Om eventually,

Too.

You have to become completely silent and completely still inside.

You have to ditch the Om,

Too.

And to do that,

We call this technique witnessing.

Basically,

You become the watcher on the hill.

And these are words from Osho and words from Alan Watts.

You become a watcher and you sit there and just be a witness to your mind's thoughts.

And you'll find that if you just sit there and watch them,

Then slowly,

It may start off like a highway congested with six lanes of cars going 100 miles an hour.

And it looks like there's no way you could stop it.

But rush hour passes and if you just sit there and watch it,

And watch and watch and just spend your energy into being this observer,

Then you'll notice that the thoughts slow down.

And they keep getting slower and they keep getting slower.

And then you can go beyond the Om and pass up the Om.

Use the Om for a few minutes if it helps.

And it helps many,

It helps many,

Many people to do so.

But use the Om for three,

Four,

Five minutes,

But then stop the Om and just watch.

Stop the Om and just watch and watch.

And you'll see that within two or three weeks of doing this,

And at maybe 15 minutes of meditation each time,

You'll notice that you'll find you'll have gaps of silence.

And these gaps of silence are so beautiful and so blissful.

But if you're one of these persons who has tried this Om technique and it hasn't worked for you,

You still got all this chatter going on,

You need to release.

You need to have a catharticism.

And that's one good thing about the Catholic religion is that they brought to this world is when you go to a priest and you tell them your sins,

You're releasing attention out of your body,

You're out of your soul.

You're releasing it to another being.

It doesn't,

You could be catharting to a rock,

It doesn't matter.

As long as you're releasing and letting it out.

So we have a little steam valve built into all of us and our consciousness controls it.

So what you can do if that's the case is you can get into a room by yourself where you think nobody else can hear you,

Grab a pillow and just sit there and wail on the pillow or beat on the pillow and scream really loudly,

Cuss,

Scream,

Yell,

Sing,

Dance,

Whatever you think is stopping you from getting into this meditation,

Let it out.

It's an artificial means of letting it out,

But it's a control valve.

You control the insanity that you let out.

But if you can scream and cuss and let it out for five minutes,

Ten minutes maybe,

Ten would be great.

Ten would be great.

And then focus on your breathing.

After you let all that cathartic energy out and you get it out of you,

Then you focus on your breathing with your eyes closed and you just feel the breath coming in and watch the breath going out.

Feel it coming in again and watch it go out and just sit there and watch it and become the watcher again and see what,

Watch what happens to the mind now.

You'll find that all that superhighway stuff has gone away and now it's much easier to get into a deeper meditation where you have these moments of bliss.

And at first it feels like you're holding your breath.

At least it did for me when I began meditating.

It was like when I could be completely still for up to a minute sometimes or maybe a couple minutes,

It just,

I don't know what exactly,

You can't explain the feeling to others,

But it's just something you have to experience yourself.

And you can get there and you can get to this point.

Through all the madness,

Through all the insanity that's going on around you in life,

Everything could be going chaotic and seem like it's going to hell.

But if you practice your meditation and you give yourselves a few minutes,

I like to do it around seven o'clock in the evening.

It just seems like to be like the magical hour for me.

And the closer I can stay to that seven o'clock,

Maybe I've just trained my consciousness to relax and take everything in.

But the deeper you go into this gap,

These gaps of meditation and these gaps of silence,

The deeper you go into and the wider the gaps get,

You'll go from one minute to two minutes,

Maybe from two minutes to three minutes.

And maybe from three minutes you take a leap up to five minutes.

Eventually,

If you keep at it and you keep practicing these things,

Like I said,

Don't be embarrassed or shy about letting out your catharticism,

About letting out your anger,

Letting out your rage or whatever sadness is in you.

Just let it out and get rid of it.

So then you can sit down and give yourselves the dignity of a few minutes of meditation.

And I know some of you have families and children and it's kind of hard,

But you can work around your children.

I know some meditators who actually let their children just sit around them while they meditate.

And a part of their consciousness is there with the child,

But you're still able to go in to instill the mind.

I've meditated with my dogs in my lap and I just find it so peaceful.

And the dogs will just sit there.

When you go into deep meditation,

Your animals will just sit there and purr or just hum.

But what I'm saying is,

I know it's hard to find 15,

20 minutes to meditate,

But you owe yourself that dignity in life.

You owe that to yourself to help your spirit to grow and to have this new spiritual centering that I've talked about in several of my audio tracks.

So a lot of people also have problems with being comfortable.

And comfortability is very important to going into deep meditation.

You can have shallow meditations and be uncomfortable.

Now,

This is a weird subject because in the Western world,

We didn't grow up sitting in a lotus posture,

Or a saeiza as the Japanese call it.

A sitting posture where after an hour or two,

Your legs fall asleep and become numb.

In the East,

They're used to it,

So they can sit there and meditate very easily because it's not uncomfortable to them.

But to those of us in the West,

This is foreign ground.

And to be comfortable in the West,

You have to be comfortable in the West.

To be comfortable is very important.

Now,

You don't want to be too comfortable to the point where you're falling asleep.

If you don't have sleep problems,

Then getting too comfortable will take you out of your meditation and put you into sleep.

And that's not a bad thing either.

Going to sleep meditating is not a bad thing.

For a lot of you adults,

Or maybe even young adults that are too busy with schoolwork or too busy with work and family and things and can't find time to meditate,

Then to lie down in your bed,

Put on some chanting music,

Some Tibetan bells or some gongs or stuff like that as background noise to help you drift off into sleep.

And practice your meditation techniques as you're drifting off to sleep.

Just make sure that you're completely comfortable,

Completely relaxed.

There are other little tricks and things you can do.

You can close circuits in your body.

There are a lot of techniques in Buddhism to close off circuits in your body.

And you want to close off circuits because energy leaks out of you.

And it can leak out of you when you're meditating.

So if you sit in the Lotus posture,

You'll actually close off the energy from leaking out of your body in your lower extremities.

But sitting on the Lotus posture on a pillow in close contact with the ground actually helps you ground you,

Stabilize you,

And that helps you to raise your energy and get into deeper states of meditation.

These deeper states of meditation are sometimes called samadhi.

And samadhi is so beautiful because when you enter samadhi,

You basically dissolve your essence into the universe.

And while that's happening to you,

The universe is also like switching places with you.

When I say universe,

You could call it God too.

It's godliness.

I say that this godliness is everywhere and it's all around you.

And when you make a space for it to come into you and fill your inner world,

Then you experience this samadhi.

And the only way you know you've experienced it is when you come out of it,

You're soaked with bliss.

And also,

There's no sense of time when you go into the state of samadhi.

You might be meditating for 30 minutes to an hour and it may have only felt like 10 or 15 minutes and you're sitting there going,

Wow,

That really flew by.

Because time kind of stands still when you're in samadhi.

The time doesn't pull on it.

In fact,

It's raising your energy up through your higher chakras the more time you spend in samadhi.

But back to getting comfortable again and finding,

If you can sit on a pillow,

Get a nice thick pillow,

That's good for you to sit in the lotus posture with your back straight and your hands in your lap.

Some people close their three fingers together,

The thumb and the index,

And you make a closed circuit in your hands.

And then there's also a closed circuit in your mouth too.

You can put your hands in the air and you can sit on a pillow.

You can put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and just place it there and hold it there.

Even when you're chanting om,

Om,

Try to hold the tongue up there and close the circuit.

But these are just techniques that help you get into a deeper state of meditation and experience this thing we call samadhi and these moments of bliss that can really help and change your lives.

They can get rid of all that stress.

They get rid of all that anxiety.

They get rid of all the anger and sadness and all the other things that are going on in your life.

Meditation is such a rewarding thing.

And you can't look for these things too.

That's another thing I have to help you to become aware of is that these moments of bliss you have to just allow them to happen.

You can't look for them.

And the more you look for them,

The more they will stay away and avoid and evade you.

So you kind of have to learn a trick to basically keep letting yourself dissolve and never try to look for the same experience twice.

It's always a new experience.

It's always something different and something beautiful that's going to happen to you.

And then once you learn this trick of just allowing this stuff to happen to you,

Then the bliss happens on its own.

And as long as you don't start looking.

When I meditate,

I take gaps between my meditations.

So I don't want to sit there and lie down into a meditation and be looking for the bliss the whole time because then nothing happens and even I miss.

So I meditate when I feel my soul needs a recharge.

Those of us that have been meditating for many,

Many years,

We really don't have to meditate at all,

Really.

But it just has this nice feeling of taking a bath,

Like you're giving your soul a bath.

Because we all get dirty.

Even Buddhas get dirty and they have to wash their feet.

So we can wash our feet,

We can wash our souls and feel the embask in this godly essence that we call Nirvana or Samadhi.

But anyway,

I guess that's about good for today.

I hope this was an insightful talk and helps all of you to get to a certain point where you're creating space.

And the more you do it,

The more often you do it.

It sounds like a discipline,

But really what it is,

Is the more you do it,

The more bliss comes.

And then you start getting soaked in this bliss.

And some people call it divine wine.

I call it divine wine.

So it's like I'm a drunkard all the time because I can fill myself up with this wine over and over and over.

And there's no side effects.

I guess the only side effect is that you're creating a new space,

A new space within you for God to exist and to vibrate through you and help you to live a centered life,

Centered on spirituality,

Centered on love and compassion and all the beautiful things in life.

All right,

Folks,

Thanks again for joining me.

My name is Douglas Gromins.

I hope you enjoyed this talk.

And we'll get together sometime soon and talk again about something beautiful.

Take care now.

Aloha and namaste to all my beautiful friends.

Bye bye.