“Meditation beginner here not knowing if I’m even doing it correctly.
For now, I’ve just been doing 10 minutes a day of trying to focus on only my breath and ignoring any thoughts that come into my mind.
It’s been around 2 weeks that I’ve kept it up but I still find it pretty difficult.
I have an overactive mind and was aiming to use meditation as a way to calm myself better and have a more realistic outlook on my own thoughts.
Do you have any advice or should I just continue as I am doing the 10 minutes per day of trying to focus on my breathing?”
Great that you have been meditating every day, keep going!
Let’s look at what you are trying to achieve:
“overactive mind“
“calm myself better and have a more realistic outlook on my own thoughts“
If you ignore your thoughts and only focus on breathing when you meditate you aren’t addressing the root cause of your overactive mind.
Your mind is overactive because it doesn’t have the time and space to process all the information that it takes in.
This means whenever you have a bit of free time your mind franticly attempts to process the information which feels like an overactive mind.
You can resolve this by making small changes in your life and with meditation.
Reduce the information your mind has to process.
This means if you are constantly busy juggling a million things all day every day, is this really necessary?
How can you simplify your life and reduce the number of things that you deal with every day?
Give your mind the time and space it needs to process information.
This means that currently your mind probably has a backlog of information to process, these are your thoughts.
Allow your thoughts to flow when meditating.
Focus on the important thoughts, allow the unimportant to flow away.
Address your important thoughts and find answers to them.
For the first few weeks, or even months, your meditation may feel busy as your mind works through the backlog of thoughts and information that need to be processed.
If you reduce the quantity of information that is going into your mind and give your mind the time and space to process the important information you will find the calm and self-awareness that you are looking for.
Edwin Leo 