starting meditation

I decided to start exploring meditation. I've experimented a bit with it in the past, though I haven't gotten very far. For that matter, I've experimented a bit with self hypnosis as well, and haven't gotten that to work either. Though, I'm not sure how to know for sure whether either of these is "working".

In any case, today I decided to meditate for 5 minutes, trying to clear my mind. I read somewhere that the point of meditation is to clear the mind -- I'm not sure if that's true, but it's a place to start.

So I sat in my living room floor, in my best approximation of a "lotus" position, and tried to concentrate on my breathing. My mind quickly shot around to other things, and was a bit restless and bored. I kept trying to actively release control of my mind, letting it go where it would, but this did not seem to counteract the restlessness. I gave up and looked at my clock: I had only 2 more minutes to go.

So, I tried again, resetting the timer for 5 minutes. This time I decided to keep my focus on my breath. I felt my breath in, and I felt my breath out, and I would sortof imagine some imagery to go along with this -- I didn't decide to imagine imagery to go along with it, that's just how my brain interpreted the idea of "concentrating on my breath".

After a bit, I had a pretty disturbing thought. I spike was coming toward me, and piercing through my head. I kept concentrating on my breath. I wasn't afraid of the thought. It was a bit disgusting, and I assume whoever reads this will interpret it as such, but for me it was sortof like seeing a disturbing video but not paying attention to it. I had the thought at the time "this is a test my mind is playing on me, to try and direct my attention away from my breath." Anyway, the spike then started slicing down my body, and eventually the thought went away.

Then a thought came, "I should write my experience down! And what better place than the metameaninglessness blog?" This thought was very exciting, because I thought it would be a good way to keep up the practice of meditating, since I would sortof have a "checkbox" for when I did it, and I could see how it went and reflect on it.. which all seemed good.

Of course, then I thought: this is distracting me from thinking about breathing, so I decided I would probably remember to write about my experience, so I needn't worry about that, and I should continue concentrating on my breath.

A bit later, my breathing got slower, and I noticed a longer pause between breaths. This pause was a bit difficult because I wasn't sure what to do with my mind during the pause. I kept just waiting for the next breath to start.

Soon after this, the 5 minute timer went off, and I got up and wrote this post.