the-rational-mystic:

I get it, focusing on nothing or on your breath for 20 minutes every day doesn’t seem that appealing. Whether you’ve tried meditation once or committed to it for a year, there will be a stage where your meditation practise becomes flat-out boring. We all know that meditation is renowned as one of the most important ways to spend your time as it has the potential to open up many profound benefits for an individual, arguably more-so than anything else you can do in your life – so of course, I want to suggest a few approaches to help you relieve your festering boredom and encourage you to continue mediating.

I used to come out of meditations feeling refreshed and awake. However, after months of meditating, it started to sap my happiness, an effect that was completely counterintuitive with what meditation was supposed to help me with. Every meditation I finished, I came out of it feeling more drained than before; it continuously failed to produce the same sense of peace I used to feel; it was an endless sensation of boredom I couldn’t overcome. Eventually this boredom created a downward spiral of doubt and negativity that couldn’t be escaped by simply focusing on the breath.

Many meditators have said that if you meditate long enough, that stage of boredom will surpass. Meditation is, after all, used to recognise that we must accept the present moment as it is. I was skeptical this ever was going to happen – I knew I had to take a different approach.

So, here are my top 4 suggested ways I found to combat meditation boredom:

1. Visualisation Meditation: Your Peaceful Place

Visualisation is a technique you can use while you meditate. Rather than focusing on the breath, you can engage in a world of pure imagination, all in your own control. This technique is much more active for the mind – it seems to boost my creativity and ease my mind so much more than a regular breath meditation. I am an artist and visualising seems to easily slip me into a familiar state of flow as if I would when I am drawing or painting. You may be aware of the flow state yourself: it is characterised as a trance-like state, where you are in complete absorption in what you are doing (often what you love to do), resulting in a loss of one’s sense of space and time, also known as being entirely immersed in the present moment. This meditative state is what we seek during meditation: it allows us to return to the source of our soul, or subconscious, just as a breath meditation would do.

My favourite way to visualise is to imagine the most peaceful place you can picture in your mind’s eye and try to imagine yourself exploring it in vivid detail. Personally, I like to play rain forest sounds aloud on my phone while I meditate and envision myself there using all five of my senses; hearing the birds chirping; feeling the moss in between my toes sinking in the ground; smelling the earthy humidity in the air; making out shapes and colours of the space around me in progressive detail as I peek here and there.

Over time, my personal space has grown in complexity: I have a small clearing where I go to connect back with my source. I have created a hot spring there with a waterfall, a small hut with pillows to get comfy in, a yoga mat to do yoga, an area for arts and crafts – I even imagine my favourite foods, or imaginary fruits that don’t exist to explore my sense of taste and smell. I bring what I love to life in this sacred space created in my mind and I encourage you to explore your own space with freedom and joy during your mediation, especially if you usually struggle to keep the mind focused on mundane tasks such as breathing.

If you are finding it hard to visualise, there are many guided meditations that describe a peaceful place for you, which is a good way to hone your skills in visualisation. Once you are a skilled visualiser, I strongly advise you to try this technique without guidance and find joy in creating exactly what you want to create to be the next focus of your meditation, have fun with it and explore! You start waking up wanting to meditate and wondering what wonderful sensation you can conjure up next – you truly start to surprise yourself.

2. Other Visualisations: Spirit Guides, Past Life Regression, etc…

There are many videos you can find, particularly on YouTube, that claim to help you perform a past life regression or assist you with meeting your spirit guide for example. These videos all come under the same umbrella: they are all guided visualisation meditations and all are technically classified as hypnosis, as you are allowing someone else to guide your subconscious. Hypnosis allows for a certain degree of control, as it is your mind that is imagining, not the hypnotists’. Self-hypnosis, on the other hand, allows for full control. Arguably, hypnosis and self-hypnosis both seem to induce the mediative state that is accessible using breath meditation. Although both methods allow for this state, I feel it is more effective when you perform the visualisation on yourself once you’ve become skilled at it because the sensations or descriptions that come up in your meditation session will seem a lot more personal to your own subconscious and hence bring you a greater sense of peace and connection. 

I often like to branch off into other ways of using visualisation once I’ve first arrived at my peaceful place during meditation. Other methods of visualising include past life regression which can help you learn more about the situations you faced in your past life memories and you can use for guidance by comparing it to you present life’s journey to help find the best solution. You can also do inner child work, where you visualise yourself comforting a younger version of yourself and bring up past memories to relive, in order to help shed yourself of the ego’s defence mechanisms, built up to defend subconscious emotional inner child wounds. 

Meeting your spirit guide is also a very useful visualisation, as you can ask your guide to come forward for comfort or advice when you find yourself to be troubled at any point in your daily life outside of meditation. I also enjoy meeting my spirit guide regularly to just chill together while I am in my mind’s peaceful place. Some say spirit guides are the mind’s visual representation of your intuition and others may tell you they are genuinely real spirits. Either way, experiment with the concept of having a spirit guide and see intuitively what works for you best.

(Art by Janie Olsen)

Many people put off these techniques because they believe it is all just imaginary, they see hypnosis or self-hypnosis as mutually exclusive to the meditative state or believe it can’t actually help as effectively as meditation where you focus purely on the breath. In my opinion, visualisation is just imagination, but people often underestimate the power imagination has – it is literally our ability to tap into the vast imagery hidden deep in the subconscious, timidly waiting to be experienced. Hypnosis or self-hypnosis are often portrayed in a bad light as well – they are seen as something completely separate to experiencing a mediative state. Contemporarily, there is not enough research to distinguish whether they are practically the same thing or not, but I believe they all come under the same umbrella. My advice would be to take what I say about the effectiveness of these techniques with a grain of salt and try to experiment with it yourself – all I know for certain is that it has had a very profound effect on my life, just as much as breath meditation used to have on me and perhaps even more so!

3. Open-eye Meditation

There are many ways to meditate through out your day. My favourite and most flexible technique I have learnt is to focus on the space between objects as you do you daily routine and to be aware of not only the space in front of you, but also the space behind you. By shifting your awareness to inhabit that space, you are moving out into something much bigger than the limits of your ego mind. The more you move your awareness outward and into the universe, the more you spend time noticing the subtle beauty in everything you see, unlocking your potential to be fully present and at your highest spiritual potential.

In the book, “The Open-Focus Brain” the authors engaged in conducting experiments on volunteers to test what relaxation method was most effective at producing the most phase-synchronous alpha and measured this by monitoring their EEG. Alpha waves are one type of brain wave that predominantly originate from the occipital lobe during wakeful relaxation with closed eyes. Some were asked to visualise a peaceful scene, look at colours, try different fragrances, etc. But none seemed to produce more than a mild alpha-enhancing effect.

As soon as they asked, “Can you visualise the space between your eyes?” A high amplitude of alpha was produced immediately. The same significant increase in alpha brain synchrony was monitored after asking similar “space”-related questions which described “objectless imagery” like “Can you imagine the space between you ears?” and so on. One Eastern mystic wrote that it was important to “attain a state of mind in which even though you are surrounded by crowds of people, it is as if you were alone in a field extending for tens of thousands of miles.” The Japanese have even coined a philosophy called ‘Ma’, which is the ability to see the space between objects as well as the objects themselves. Surprisingly, it’s one of the least known techniques, yet appears to be one of the most beneficial – more research is needed!

Shifting your awareness to the space between objects is one open-eye technique and very efficient for helping you with mindfulness. You can also eat mindfully, by first appreciating where the food came from, how it has been developed over time and what others had to go through to bring it to your plate, etc, before you start eating. Appreciate the smell, the detail on the food and the colour which will help immerse yourself in the present moment. Take smaller, slower bites where you actually take the time to appreciate the texture in your mouth and the taste. Practise mindfulness like this with all the sensations of all your five senses throughout your day, not just at meal time, and you will find your sensory world will strikingly come to life. If you have a constant awareness of your own thoughts and feelings developed through being present and mindful, you can easily decipher and notice which thinking patterns serve you and which ones need replacing.

4. Yoga

Yoga, Tai Chi or any exercise that operates through sequences of bodily movements that are interwoven in coordination with the patterns of the breath are forms of meditation. Yoga is mostly seen as a physical exercise across the Western world but in Indian traditions it is considered much more than physical exercise; it has a meditative and spiritual core. It can also make your meditation practise much easier if you do it directly after a physical practise, as it imposes your awareness to shift into the sensations felt in your muscles and breath rather than the ego mind, creating a much more comfortable starting point to meditate.

Incorporating all four or even a few of these different types of meditation into your day-to-day routine may be enough to completely replace breath meditation if you loathe it that badly. Personally, when I started using all four techniques, it made breath meditation a more approachable and a lot less of a boring practise for me and I began to find it as peaceful as I did back then once more!

Confused or have desperate questions about this blog post? Feel free to send a message and I will be happy to give advice or clarification as soon as possible.