I figured that skill in mindfulness meditation would help with sleep onset insomnia. Instead of getting frustrated at taking an hour or more to get sleep, you could just treat the time lying down as an extra meditation session. Hasn't really worked out with the sort of undisciplined and infrequent practice I've been doing yet. I still tend to get frustrated and go into a funk of discomfort after lying awake past forty or so minutes.
I wonder if the idea is worth pursuing anyway. Focusing seems more difficult when lying down, and might be bad enough that there just isn't much skill progress to be developed that way, but on the other hand there is twenty to ninety or more minutes of utterly unoccupied uninterrupted time there for every night when going to bed early.
Some nights I have sleep onset problems that can take well over an hour. I will usually either notice that I have excited thoughts or anxiety/tension while I am lying in bed. In this condition, l have found that doing a sitting meditation is better for clearing my head than continuing to lie down. I try to sleep again after I'm calmed down.
I'm a beginning meditator and can't address MinibearRex's concern about an experienced meditator possibly being too alert. If I was concerned about this, I'd just set a timer to schedule when I'd resume attempting sleep.
Hi everybody,
There's been a bit of talk of Mindfulness meditation around. I am curious about this, because it looks like it might be practical advice backed by a deep theory.
Unfortunately, all the tutorials on mindfulness meditation seem to be semi-practical advice backed by totally bogus theories (focus your energies, blah blah). I've been able to extract some useful stuff from such articles, but I don't know what I can trust, and I still don't fully understand how it's even supposed to work.
My current understanding is that you are supposed to pay attention to something and then pay attention to your attention, notice when you go off track, not judge yourself, and focus your attention back on the thing you were paying attention to. Or something.
I'd like to understand the technique at least well enough to judge success. When I'm doing chin-ups, it's easy to see if I did a chin-up or not, and how many, but I don't even know what this mindfulness stuff is supposed to look like.
If anyone knows more about what it's supposed to feel like, what the steps are an so on, I would really appreciate if you posted your knowledge here.