Meditation

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Have you ever tried meditation? What kind of meditation have you tried, and how is your experience with it?

When I was a teenager I used to go to a mindfulness meditation group every other week, with my aunt. It was lead by a Tibetan monk, so we recited Buddhist prayers at the beginning and lit incense, but the focus was on the meditation itself and it was otherwise non-denominational.

I'm not "good at" meditating, but I can feel how it benefits me. I get discouraged because observing my mind gives me anxiety, and I have trouble focussing. All the more reason to meditate regularly though, because those are things that can improve with more practice.

Edit:
I guess this isn't technically autism related, but I put it here because I'm specifically curious about how other autistic people have fared with it. I've heard that adhd, for example, can effect how people meditate

Hi,
There are a lot of options for meditation that have varying degrees of use, ASD or not. I've definitely got ADHD, so meditation is both challenging and probably of more benefit to me than the average.

I personally have a singing bowl, which is kind of nice as it's something that I can do regardless of how I'm feeling. I can just drag the bangy thing around the edge of the bowl and try to get a comfortable and consistent tone out of it. Or, I can bang it and listen for that moment where I go from hearing it to not hearing it.

I also learned some hand position based meditations that do help with some things, but I'm usually too tired or stressed to even try.

I practice Tibetan Buddhism. The two goals I find are shamata, just watching the mind, and tonglen, a method to cultivate compassion. Shamata aims at just watching afflictive emotions as just that, emotions. When I learned to fully watch an emotion with no aversion to it, with a simple view of its nature, it changes. These afflictive emotions have causes. Sometimes even an aversion to it is one of the main causes. Stop the cause, cultivate compassion, results in a more pleasant mindset.
Tonglen means taking and giving. When a bigger emotion such as anger or depression arises I cultivate compassion. To practice tonglen you imagine someone you care about imagine breathing in their pain and unhappiness through the left nostril in the form of black smoke. You then breath out the causes of happiness such as compassion and equanimity in the form of white smoke out of your right nostril. Repeat with a person you feel neutral about, then someone you have an aversion or anger towards. When feeling anger I use this at the target of my anger to replace it with compassion for their unhappiness. This helps me cultivate a desire for them to be happy, even if it means walking away.

There's a Sufi meditation where you concentrate on nothing but the air going in and out of the tip of your nose as you breathe. That's the only meditation I've been able to do anything like well. I don't know whether or not it ever did me any good. There was a warning in the instructions not to try it while lying down because it might send you to sleep, and I've done that as a sleeping aid, but it's only marginally effective.

I've often suspected that meditation does nothing and is ultimately impossible. I guess it boils down to the question, does the normal state of the waking mind, i.e. constantly thinking, really do any harm?

I tried transcendental meditation for a while because so many of the artists I admire are into it.

If you don't know, TM is a bit suspect because you're supposed to pay for a bit of tuition and to get a personalised mantra from a qualified teacher. Which absolutely makes it sound like a scam.

But yeah, lots of artists I know and admire are 100% into it, so I'm curious.

Anyway, I didn't pay. I looked up how they give you mantras online and found some tables and just picked the one it seemed I'd most likely be given.

So in TM you repeat a meaningless mantra in your head over and over as you 'descend' into your subconscious. It's actually quite hard to stop your brain wandering off, I'm quite capable of 'multi-threading' so I can have my mantra going and then I'll realise that I've also been thinking about toast or something for a few minutes.

It had some value, I think. Just sitting quietly for 20 minutes is good practice if you've got a noisy brain. But I never knew if I was doing it right because I never took lessons. I don't think it had much effect on my creativity which is what I was most interested in at the time.

I remain intrigued though. I think meditation would probably be good for me.

I got inconsistent results.
And I don't know what type of meditation I'm doing except just focus on breathing and/or hearing.

From falling asleep, to being very overwhelmed and frustrated, to basically feeling "nothing" - timeless, spaceless, reality break from the physical, to temporarily suddenly achieving a form of ego loss and temporary became an empath.

Nowadays, I don't feel like meditating.

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I can't do meditation with my adhd but I can fall asleep in the bath and that's quite nice.