My mind races constantly. It almost never stops, never shuts down. Sometimes I feel trapped by the endless looping of thoughts.
Some people believe that meditation is supposed to stop the thoughts.
I’ve been practicing meditation daily for almost four years, and so far meditation has not proven to silence thoughts. Many people find that complete silence only makes the inner voices louder.
Maybe I’ll get to that place after years of practice, although I’ve been told that this remains difficult.
The mind is designed to think thoughts. That inner narrator is a feature of the human system, not a bug.
If complete silence amplifies your inner voices, you may want to try a sound meditation, or sound healing.
In a sound healing, you generally lay on a mat in a resting pose while a sound healer plays any number of ancient instruments, including crystal singing bowls, chimes, and gongs.
The meditation typically starts with a body scan and some focused breathing, and then you drift into that semiconscious state between sleeping and awake as your receive the sounds in your body.
I particularly love the sounds of crystal bowls, how they can drone loud or soft, how they linger in the air and slowly drift off.
When my mind is racing, sometimes the only way to drown out the noise is through the sound of the crystal bowl.
Every time I start to drift into my thoughts, the droning sound of the crystal bowl swirls through my ears, as if to say: not now.
The sound reverberates in my cells, piercing through my ears and entering me in every open pore. It rinses the thoughts out of my mind like a big hose of water that you’d use to power wash a vessel, clearing them out of my mind, leaving me in stillness and silence.
It’s a funny thing how the body works, how healing works.
I am constantly on the move, yet it is only when I come to stillness that I can feel energy move through me. And often the inner silence comes only when I immerse myself in sound.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...