Blog 256 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 2 – 19
May 2025
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My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope.
Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands. |
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Blog 255 finished
with these words.
|
Meditation
meant I was able to keep driving Margaret to her appointments and medical
treatments; it helped me be firm enough to insist that she had to be seen in
A & E departments even though the staff kept insisting they were
full. Meditation gave me the courage
to visit Margaret every day when she was in hospital. Meditation
enabled me to accept that although her death was unstoppable, I could shower
her with love and care during every moment we had before her body was
conquered. |
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Photo of me at the
top of Mount Brown on 25 March 2005. At 964
metres, Mount Brown is the highest mountain in South Australia.
****
****
This is the view from the top of
Mount Brown on 22 March 2005. It was a hard
climb getting there, but it was worth the effort. I was lucky enough to get phone reception at the top and was able to
ring Margaret and boast about how clever I had been in getting there.
****
You are probably
sick of hearing me say this, but I really am proud of you and I hope you
realise how important you are. You have
the strength to leave the Pit. Give
meditation a try. It is a useful tool. It helped me a lot at a time when no other help was ever going to come.
****
I promised to tell
you about the practical tools I discovered to make my meditation effective.
I will start with a
tool that I tried to use and failed miserably with.
When I started teaching
myself how to meditate, I started using guided meditations. Surely at least some of the people putting
out guided meditations knew what they were doing; even if most of the guided
meditation teachers were useless, surely some of them would work.
I found not one of
the guided meditations I tried was of any help to me at all. I eventually worked out that this was because
of a quirk of my brain that most people do not have – a quirk that I did not
realise existed.
Every guided
meditation that I have tried told me to visualise or imagine a
scene in my head. Until I started
learning to meditate, whenever I was asked to imagine or visualise something, I
thought that everyone in the world did what I did. If the guided meditation told me to visualise
I was in a forest for example, I NEVER saw a picture of a forest in my
head. I got (at best) the image of the
word “Forest” – just as I have typed it here.
So when I was asked to visualise a forest, with a path leading down to
the shore of a lake where fishes were jumping and the sun was shining over
the water with a wise man or woman sitting in a chair, I got a long and
confusing string of words jumping around in my head.
I wondered how a long
string of words jumping around in my head was supposed to help me, so I asked
Margaret what happened in her head when she was asked to visualise something
such as a forest path. I was shocked
when she told me that she actually saw a picture in her head of a forest path. Until then, it had never
occurred to me that when people were asked to “visualise” most people actually
saw pictures of the things they were visualising.
Once I knew I was
wired differently from most other people – at least in relation to visualising –
I did a google search and found there is a label for people like me – “Aphantasia”
is the label. Wiki says “Aphantasia is
the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images.”
So because I cannot
visualise, using guided meditation was of no use to me in learning how to
meditate.
If you are like me
and cannot visualise, you will probably find guided meditations are not helpful.
****
Because I have loved
music all my life, I decided to try music.
Although listening
calming music certainly helped slow down the great river of chaotic
thoughts in my brain, this did not enable me to get rid of the chaos in the river of thoughts. The river of chaos
was just too strong.
The first tool I
tried that actually helped me really slow down the chaos, was something
called binaural beats. Binaural beats are when two different tones are played in each ear. Binaural tones only work if you use
headphones. For some reason, I found
that if I listened to binaural tones, this genuinely disrupted the waves of
chaotic thoughts in my head. Once the
waves had been disrupted, I was much more successful in learning how to really get rid of the chaos.
I no longer use
binaural beats because I don’t need them.
When you start meditating, you may find them useful, but don’t get
sucked in by the sales pitch. One binaural beat sounds just like every other
binaural beat and there is no musical quality to them that I can detect. Binaural beats are strictly a tool
that helped me disrupt my thoughts enough so that I was able to learn how to meditate.
Some of the binaural
beats I used most often when I started learning to meditate were these.
·
Jurgen Ziewe created two binaural beats albums that he gave away for free from his website https://www.multidimensionalman.com They helped me
· Two young men from Adelaide published some useful binaural beats under the name Sacred Resonance – https://www.sacredresonance.com.au They also helped me.
In a practical
sense, the binaural beats are all the same and once you have one or two,
getting more is unlikely to be any more helpful than using the ones you already
have. Some websites charge far too much
for what is a fairly uncomplicated product, so you can afford to be choosy.
****
Tomorrow I will tell you more about the practical tools I discovered to make my meditation effective.
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