So this meditation is designed to help you find more peace and ease with some of the symptoms of ADHD.
Those symptoms may include distractibility,
Inability to concentrate,
Focus.
You may feel like your mind is just all over the place and that it's very hard to corral your attention and put it where you want to.
That is the main feature of attention deficit disorder.
It is not about not having attention.
We have plenty of attention.
But for people who have difficulty with executive functioning skills,
It can be hard to put that attention where we want it,
When we want it.
And we use these terms,
Distractible,
Lack of focus,
Can't concentrate,
And they all have a fairly negative connotation.
So in this meditation,
We're going to relate to these characteristics in a different way.
Because when our ADHD meets our anxiety about ADHD,
Things can get really difficult.
So it's important that we try to manage how we are reacting to responding to relating to our executive functioning skills.
So just getting comfortable,
Letting the eyes close.
We'll just take a couple of deep inhales,
Let the breath out.
Do that twice more until you feel a nice relaxation.
In this exercise,
What we're going to do is to practice returning our attention to the breath.
But in maybe a slightly different way than you've experienced before.
The classic meditation instruction is to keep an attention on the breath,
Knowing that your mind is going to go off into some other direction down some rabbit hole.
And you just gently with compassion return the attention to the breath.
If you find your attention wandering to sounds,
Noises,
Thoughts,
Emotions that might come up,
Doubts about what we're doing,
Body aches and pains,
That's okay.
You'll just keep inviting that attention back to the breath.
Like a parent invites a child to come and look at something.
Not with a oh,
You shouldn't be doing that.
That's wrong.
Oh,
You can never pay attention.
You have no focus here,
Come and concentrate.
No,
That's not how we're going to talk to our ADHD parts.
The parts that go wandering off when they become curious about something else.
We're just going to invite it to return to the breath non judgmentally.
And if it happens 100 times in a session,
That's okay.
That's all right.
We just notice where our monkey mind as we sometimes refer to it.
Our attention has wandered off to just like a bored child looking for something to spark its curiosity,
Its interest.
It's so important with ADHD to know that we often seek a very high level of interest in order to start and complete tasks.
So just noting where your mind goes to when it wanders off.
Oh,
Yeah.
Thinking,
Thinking,
And letting that go and coming back to the breath.
Come on back,
Back to the breath with a lot of love.
Understanding that there's nothing wrong with the mind wandering.
That's what it does.
A car passing.
I'm listening to sounds.
Letting that go,
Coming back to the breath.
Just observing how our mind really kind of does its own thing a lot of the time.
And that we're not our mind.
We're not our executive functioning skills.
We're much bigger than either of those things.
And we can develop a relationship with our various parts that is healthy and nurturing and accepting.
And it gives us some peace from anxiety,
Striving,
Wanting to change something about ourselves,
Our experience.
And as this meditation comes to an end,
Take a nice big inhale and let it out.
Thanking your attention for showing up today.
Thanking the mind,
Including the executive functioning part of the mind for doing what it does for us.
And thanking ourselves too for showing up today to do this work.
A bell will signal the end of this meditation.
