Meditate: Bringing the Mind into the Mix
If you don’t already have a meditation practice, this chapter is an important one for you! You need to first learn to meditate on your own before adding cannabis to the mix. This chapter will teach you the basics of meditation.
What Is Meditation?
Generally speaking, meditation is the practice, skill, and art of shutting all thoughts out of your mind other than those you wish to concentrate on.
It can be soaring through a cloudless sky, swimming in a crystal blue pool, walking through a lush green forest, or going places you’ve never been. It can help organize the thoughts in your mind. It can help you heal yourself emotionally, mentally, and physically, along with helping you de-stress after a hectic day. It is intentional mindfulness and awareness. It is expanding your conscious to meet your subconscious and communicating with the divine.
Meditation can be different things for different people; it all depends on the purpose behind your meditation. Some people will meditate for only one reason, while others meditate for many different reasons. What meditation is to you is for you to decide.
The tools and skills you learn to use here will help you begin a lifetime practice of meditation.
Tools for Meditation
When we talk about tools used for meditations, we are talking about actual physical items that will help you relax and perform your meditations. Skills are the mental and emotional “tools” you will learn to help you on this journey.
We will be working with visualization and guided meditations throughout this book. When you are first learning a guided meditation, you obviously won’t have memorized the words to it, and trying to read while performing a meditation is counterproductive. Memorization also may throw you off, as you will be trying too hard to remember the exact words, so your focus will be on the wrong thing. Here you will learn how to get around those problems.
First you will need to find music that helps you relax—something calming and soothing, and preferably without any lyrics. When you have lyrics, you may tend to start singing along instead of focusing on the meditation at hand. When first starting out, you will want to give yourself more time to relax and get into the right frame of mind. Your “pre-meditation” music should last about two to five minutes. Don’t go too long either, or you may end up boring yourself and giving your mind too much time to wander. You will need to experiment to find what works best for you.
Next you will also want “background” music to go along with your meditation. This may be the same music you used for your pre-meditation, repeated a few times, or it may be something else entirely.
Finally, you will need to record yourself reading the meditation out loud. Once you have your pre-meditation music recorded, turn your background music on and record yourself reading the meditation script as the music plays. Be sure to read through the script several times first to familiarize yourself with not only the words themselves, but with the timing and feeling of the meditation. Do not speak too fast. Take your time. Leave pauses when you feel they will be necessary. Once you finish recording the script, allow the music to play a little bit longer to give yourself time to slowly come out of the meditation.
As you become more skilled in focusing your mind, you may want to eliminate some of the pre-meditation music. After performing the same meditation several times, you may feel you don’t need to be guided anymore and simply use the background music alone instead.
Invest in some decent headphones to help block out any other sounds. Even if you are performing a meditation indoors, you may want to use headphones. These will block out ringing phones and barking dogs.
You can also use your partner in this respect too, by having them read and guide you through the meditation. While a partner isn’t 100 percent necessary to start your meditation practice, you can begin your journey together through these beginning sessions if you wish. If you want to be able to cover more ground without having to worry about scheduling sessions with each other, know that this part is something you can do on your own by using a simple recording device as described above.
Once again, you will be using your journal to help you focus your actions, thoughts, and intentions first on paper, then you’ll transition this focus over to your mind.
Getting things sorted out on paper, where you can physically see it, makes it much easier to be able to see those same things in the mind’s eye instead. You will also record your meditation observations in your journal after each of your sessions.
Skills for Meditation
As I stated earlier, many people do not believe they have the skills necessary to meditate. We all have the skills, we just need to practice using them. I do believe it is probably more difficult for people to meditate today than it would have been thirty or more years ago. Our world has changed so much through little shifts over the past thirty years with the electronics and smartphone age. Thirty years ago, to be online required a lot of heavy computer equipment, a landline, and some decent computer knowledge. In other words, our electronic distractions have sped life up in a way that has made us constantly “busy” without being busy. We experience constant, almost nonstop stimulation. We do not relax in the same ways we used to. This can make it seem very difficult to focus on one thing, but what this really means is that it can seem very difficult to focus on certain things when we tend to hyper-focus on several things at once, like TV, video games, social media, and cell phones.
We need to reclaim our skills of relaxation, focus, and intention to be able to put forth our best meditations.
How do you normally relax? Do you turn on the TV at night and veg out? Do you read a book? While these can both be relaxing to a point, they still require outward stimulation. Your body may be relaxing, but your mind is not. Society teaches us that we must be stimulated all the time, but that doesn’t give our minds much of a chance at conscious peace. Start spending some time in simple, quiet relaxation. Turn off the TV, put the book down. If you absolutely feel the need for sound, play soft instrumental music at a very low volume. Spend time with yourself, just being. Don’t think about what happened at work or school or the grocery store. Just breathe and allow your body and mind to take a break.
Focus is also a skill we must learn to adapt to the situation at hand. In this case we must learn to change our focus from outside stimulation to inside stimulation. We must focus internally to work through our first several meditations. I believe you will find that the way these meditations are designed, they will truly help you learn to focus inward when needed. We live in a society today that appears to be afraid of inner focus, and it hasn’t been helping us. We need to look inside to learn and fix what we can in order to make our world a better place.
Intention is one of the greatest aspects of magic, and cannabis use. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Our intention is our most powerful magic and it is our intention that gives cannabis its power. If we want to get high and be happy, cannabis obliges. If we want to be deep and introspective, cannabis obliges. Our will dictates where cannabis will guide us, but we must make the commitment to follow it.
Starting Your Practice
Time to stop talking about it and get started. When it comes to meditating, practice and experience will be your best teachers.
First go back to the area you chose to use to practice your dosing. Do you have everything you need to meditate comfortably? Your area should be set, but comfort is going to be even more important right now. Since you won’t be using cannabis just yet, you may need to make adjustments to provide the most relaxation and peacefulness you can obtain.
In your journal, write out what your intention is. In these first several sessions, we will be working with deep breathing and visualizations to aid in relaxation. Finding a relaxing peace is the goal.
Get yourself situated for deep belly breathing. Place your hand on your stomach and inhale deeply through your nose, allowing your belly to push your hand out. As you exhale, feel your hand slightly press on your belly, and allow the air to escape through your mouth with a “wooosh” sound. Let it all out. Do this a few times with your normal breathing pattern, and then slow it down a bit. Count to three as you inhale, hold for three, and then again count to three as you exhale. Focus on the air coming into and going out of your body. Visualize the air as a white light, a beam of energy that comes into your lungs and your belly, and branches off into veins with its brightness cleansing everything in its path. When you exhale, the dim, grayer “exhaust” is dispelled in the opposite motion, exiting through the mouth.
As you feel yourself calm and relax, go ahead and slow your breathing down even more by increasing your count to four. Give yourself several inhalations and exhalations at the four count, and then slow your breathing down a touch more by increasing the count to five. Continue to breathe at this pace for several minutes. If you have music playing, allow yourself a full song of this deep relaxation breathing, along with the visualization of the cleansing white light.
When you are done, take a moment to check in with your body and see how you feel.
Journal Exercises
1. How did your body and mind respond to this deep breathing exercise? Could you visualize the white light? Did your body feel more relaxed?
2. What issues did you have with breathing and relaxing, if any?
If you were not able to feel the difference, spend the next few days trying this exercise again. When you are able to feel your body relax and can visualize the light, spend the next several sessions repeating this exercise, but while increasing the breath counts. Do a few days to a count of six, then seven, then eight, and so on. Only go until your comfort zone is stretched, but not gone completely. You don’t want to be gasping for air, but you are training your lungs to breathe in a way that they are not used to. While I know plenty of people who can do this exercise at a ten count, I certainly have never been able to do it successfully. I also have asthma, so an eight count is where I am the most at ease. Again, this will take some experimentation to find out what works best for you. As you work on lengthening the count you use, also work on lengthening the amount of time you spend doing this breathing meditation. Add a little time each day until you are comfortable and capable of spending fifteen minutes doing this meditation. Set a timer or use music as your judge of time passing.
Always remember to use your journal beforehand to set your intention. After each session, write about how it felt. What do you notice about your body and mind while doing these exercises? What are you focusing on? Do you find your mind drifting off toward other things? It is important to document your thoughts and feelings on the exercises as they are performed now, so later you can look back and compare your reactions to doing the same exercises with the aid of cannabis. It also helps get you into the habit of using your journal, which helps focus your attention. When you go through the same steps each time you practice, you are creating your own ritual.
By the time you have found your comfort zone with your breathing count, you will have a bit of experience creating intention, focusing, and visualizing. Taking this slower, ritualistic approach to meditation by first learning to focus and meditate on your own breath may make it easier for you to overcome some of the hurdles you may believe you’ll have with meditating. Setting up this ritual trains both your mind and your body.