Meditation with ADD

[Gem]

It's possible that there's an over-estimation of the duration that most meditators can sustain a completely undistracted focus, and in my experience among meditators, it's most often that is maintained for a minute or two, with five minutes being a 'long time'. It would be likely that one diagnosed with ADD might assume that their own one minute focus period is very short due to ADD, but a minute of undivided attention is more than adequate, and most meditators tend to drift within a minute or two.

The key is not to be concerned if after 20 or 30 seconds the mind wanders off, becuase it doesn't matter... it simply occurs to the meditator that they've forgotten their intended focus, upon which their intention is remembered... and the mind will automatically return to the focal point.

[sarek]

I too have trouble sitting still to meditate. I am aware that deep level meditation is necessary for many things that one might want to achieve but as far as improving self awareness is the objective there is a simpler method.

Instead of taking time out to sit and meditate, life itself can be your teacher. You can attempt to achieve self awareness as you go about my daily life.

To be self aware is to take a step back. Instead of living life, you look at yourself while living life. As often and as deeply as you can, you observe yourself.

What can you observe? Well, the mind does three things we can look at.

1. It functions and moves and does stuff. This is the moving function
2. It displays emotions and judges between good and bad. That is the heart function.
3. It produces assorted intellectual gibberish aka 'logic'. That is the mind function.

Its a bit more complicated than outlined above, I hope I have not over simplified but we can work with this.

Throughout your everyday life you can teach yourself to observe all these three systems in action. You can observe tension, stance, movement, mood, logical purity of thought.

For instance:

I found the body to be the easiest 'anchor' to help me focus. For the body you can:

- regularly check all the tensions in your muscles. -
- You can do a moving body scan switching attention between all the various parts of the body.
- You can review the way you walk and start to walk 'mindfully'
- You can chose an activity, any activity, and analyse it in slow motion. I used to be very loud and noisy with everything and self awareness has allowed me to be much more careful.
- You can do a complete body and mind freeze where for a short moment you stop all movement and thought
- You can pick up a sensation like a song on the radio or the rain on your skin, or a beautiful sunset and deliberately focus on it.
- You can do stationary or dynamic balancing exercises that require total concentration

As for the heart, you can try and listen to your feelings. Are you happy, are you sad? Are you angry? if you are any of these, can you find the deeper reason why this is so?
Listening to the heart is a powerful tool for emotional control. I have learned to refrain from expressing negative thoughts so other people around me no longer get infected with negativity. It also helps to preclude automatic negative thought patterns (known as ANTs in psychology) from running their course.

Thanks so much for the replies everyone, you are all amazing!

Sorry for my late reply, I've been struggling with uni for the past week
Gem the problem is I've only made it past 10 seconds or so a less than a handful of times

I'm going to try put these into practice and see what works for me. Definitely a lot of great advice!

Every particle is in motion in this place. Nothing is sitting still. Since a body is a particle one tends to include oneself in this motion operation.

One meditates to become not a particle in motion, but a seer of particles. It slows down complexity so one can see singularities. One can then figure things out.

A suggestion is to drop the idea you have any sort of disorder. Look at things as you choose and figure them out as you choose. By adding the idea you have some issue you create complexity. Just end that.

You will learn how YOU look at things, which is all that counts on the Big Board.

My experience.

[Gem]

Originally Posted by ADDlife

Thanks so much for the replies everyone, you are all amazing!

Sorry for my late reply, I've been struggling with uni for the past week
Gem the problem is I've only made it past 10 seconds or so a less than a handful of times

I'm going to try put these into practice and see what works for me. Definitely a lot of great advice!

Ok, after ten seconds... I agree, sometimes I can't maintain a focus for one second as the mind just insists on dwelling on thinking about some thing. At first I try for a while to see if it will settle in, but sometimes it doesn't, so I maintain my hour of sitting as is routine, and let the mind sort through its thoughts, as it is wont to do... after a time, which might just today, or it could persist for days on end, the mind eventually thinks the whole thing through, and then begins to lose interest in it... once it becomes less interested in the thoughts, it quiets down again.

[kapamati1]

Originally Posted by ADDlife

Hey everyone, any good tips for meditating for people with ADD?

For the last year and a half I've been trying to meditate and I've been doing about 15 minutes meditation almost every morning for the past 8 months. My thoughts just take over every time

I've been able to reach the quiet place three times but each time I got instantly bored and start doing energy work or something similar

The main types of meditation I've tried so far are
breath awareness
guided meditation
meditating with music

So yeah, any advice for meditating with ADD? Specifically quieting the mind and getting to the quiet/trance like state?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
It is nice to see so many offering help. When I started I was so lost. Not saying I'm found ...yet. LOL I had a hard time as well since I have ADD. While researching different types of meditation I found one that really seems to work for me. Open eye meditation. The only problem is...it only seems to work outside. The spring and fall months are wonderful. I can sit under my favorite tree and do my thing. But, when it's hot as heck or freezing cold...I don't do it. I know I suffer for it.

If you think this might help you please look it up. Just because some have ADD doesn't mean we all experience it the same way. Therefore, someone else's way of doing it may not work for the next person.

I know this is an old thread/posts. I hope the OP sees it.