Alone in my mind

Last week's homework for the Dedicant Path was to begin a program of mental training. I, er, have not been particularly rigorous about this.

I started meditating regularly - which, for purposes of this discussion, means at least once a week - a few months ago, when I started going to therapy. My depression seems to be at its worst in the summer, for some reason, and I was trying to head things off at the pass. "At this point I would suggest meditation, except everyone always tells me they're doing it wrong," my therapist said more than once. "They're not. That's how it works." I don't know if she was using reverse psychology on me or what, but I finally threw up my hands and decided to start meditating.

I've never been very good at seated meditation. I get self-conscious and begin to be convinced that I'm breathing wrong. But walking meditation hasn't worked well for me either, so I scrounged around for an app that might work. I settled on Stop, Breathe, and Think, an app that has a soothing, friendly-sounding narrator and enough guided meditations that I haven't gotten bored yet. Between this and The Mindful Way Through Depression, the book that finally convinced me that I wasn't meditating wrong after all, my mental health has improved drastically.

So I kept up my meditations last week, but I'm not quite sure this is the thing I want to be doing for my religion. The guided meditations in Stop, Breathe, and Think are very Buddhist, and I still don't do terribly well with un-guided sitting meditation. But it can't hurt for going on with, and perhaps with luck I'll stumble upon a good alternative soon. It's much easier to stumble upon these things when you're looking for them.