How To Deal With Meditating As An Over-Thinker

Relatability 

You know when you’re aware that a certain habit is helpful to your life, but you look up one day and realize you just stopped doing that helpful thing? For me, that thing is meditation. Meditating is something I will fully indulge in when I’m actively practicing, but I do tend to fall off on my practice from time to time.

It’s interesting when you think about the things you know are good for you, but you miss one day and it snowballs into forgetting about something that does help you. When this happens I used to find myself thinking about what I’m not doing, rather than picking it back up and trying again. The nice thing about falling out of a good habit, is that you can always come back to it. 

Meditation is something I come back to when I notice I’m in need of the things it provides me. Typically, a lack of meditation for me, means an increase in overthinking. To me, meditation is something that really helps me guide my thoughts and is a foundation for me to come back into alignment with myself. 

Viewing meditation and habits that are good for you as practices, has helped me view it as just that, something to practice and not to perfect. When I practice meditation instead of thinking myself into the ground of being perfect, it gives me the relief I need to get the most out of meditating. 

Reflection 

When I reflect back on the times that I have been really consistent in meditating, I see so many positive outcomes of this practice. One thing I always go back to within myself, is wanting to be calm and wanting peace. But when you want something, you have to become it first. What I’ve found out with that, is when you want to be peaceful and calm it seems that you’re inadvertently put in situations to test that true desire of wanting to be peaceful. 

The true way you know that you embody something, is if you are that way in most (we are human and all have our days) scenarios. When I first started wanting more peace in my life, I was finding myself stuck in traffic or noticing more miscommunications around me and I was confused with that. Why was I noticing more un-peaceful scenarios when I am truly wanting peace? 

The answer to that question was that I didn’t truly embody inner peace if I was rattled by anything on the outside. This is when I knew I needed some guidance and became interested in learning to meditate. At first, I assumed meditation was sitting in silence and making all your thoughts go away, but I quickly realized I was wrong. From my understanding, meditation is more about noticing your thoughts, recognizing them, and letting them go while not becoming them. 

When I took this approach to meditation and actively practiced with guided meditations, I understood how powerful our thoughts are. As someone who was so affected by my own thoughts and the outside world, I took the practice of noticing and letting go of the things I not only thoughts but that happened around me very seriously. 

Meditating allowed me to see that it is much more than the practice itself. The practice itself allows me to use what I learn by meditating and carry that into my day to day life. This allows me to let myself be aligned and to not be shaken by everything I think and by the things around me. 

Reinvention 

The practice of meditation goes even deeper than the meditations itself. It’s really a tool to actively combat overthinking. It isn’t trying to get rid of or dismiss the thoughts themselves, but it is really is a way to notice them, not let the thoughts become you, and send them off out of your head. 

It is one of the best practices I have seen for helping my brain be a little more organized, kind, and manageable. I decided to take the way my brain is and work with it instead of trying to run from or avoid it. Because the truth is, your brain and mind aren’t going anywhere and even though it can seem like too much sometimes it can be figured out. 

Meditating is a great start to working with yourself. When you can hear yourself and aren’t clouded by ruminating thoughts, I believe that is when you can find out what being aligned and being peaceful feels like. And once you know what that peace feels like, you will know how to find it again. You will know when it is missing too, and when you need to realign with yourself. 

Meditation allows your mind, body, and soul to be a home you can hear, enjoy, and relax in.