Meditation as a Tool to Combat Depression/Anxiety
My mind/thought process is naturally set to “Google” search. Or to put it another way, I can spend much of my free” thought” time ruminating about things that have not happened yet and usually never happened.
About eight years ago, my doctor suggested a way to combat future depressive/anxiety episodes and to stay in the present was through meditation. So I took a meditation course. Initially, I thought I would never be able to quiet my mind even for a short time. Mediating is difficult. During the actual classroom mediation, I could do a body scan meditation. A body scan involves going through each part of your body and paying attention to your breath while you are doing it. However, I tried doing it at home, and I had a hard time clearing the ruminating thoughts from my head.
I took the meditation course again and came up with some ways to quiet my thought so that I could mediate. Gradually, when I started to meditate, I would imagine my brain as a computer and then I would push the off button. But most of the time, I would have to go a step further and launch the computer into space . . . imagining that I was cutting the cord to my thought process. Over time, I added the mantra “MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT MY FRIENDS”.
I wanted to meditate in order to quiet my brain, and because there is data that suggests that meditation actually affects the depressive brain function in a positive way. So I try to meditate (usually doing the body scan) right after I wake up in the morning. It is a good time for me, because my depressive/anxiety thoughts have not gone into full throttle yet. I use a tape to keep focused. It takes about a half hour.
After doing this for eight years, I now have more control over my thoughts. When I start ruminating about the future, or holding conversations with other people in my imagination, I usually can catch myself. Regarding such thoughts, I repeat the mantra ‘MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT MY FRIENDS”. When I start one-sided conversations, I say to myself that the person I am having the conversation with is not present.
Meditation is a tool to get through the day with a minimum of depressive/anxiety driven thoughts. While meditation takes both time and a lot of effort, it does work.