A weird experience of meditating with dextrostat.

My morning meditation was a little weird today.

Okay, so, probably more than you want to know, but I have three or four different kinds of meditation that I do, not all of them on the same day, although if I do manage three out of four then it's a very good day as far as I'm concerned.

The longest one is a straight-up breath meditation as practiced by just about every spiritual tradition in the world. It's a self-discipline exercise, meant to strengthen the executive network (the part of your brain that helps you concentrate on a given task) and to reinforce the role of mindfulness and attention in your life. What you pay attention to is what gets done and what gets valued. Breath meditation trains you to pay attention to paying attention, which is actually a very useful skill. Various traditions build off that skill, but it's definitely the first skill, and everyone desires it.

Today, due to a scheduling issue, I took my ADHD medication just minutes before going into the breath meditation— and could tell exactly when the medication took hold.

So, my ADHD is the result of an overactive left temporal lobe of my brain. It puts out a lot of noise that constantly threatens to distract me. The noise is about other things I like to do, like write and code and such, but it's still noise that distracts me from what I'm doing. Everyone has a noisy brain; I'm just much more susceptible to being distracted by it than most people because it's so much more noisy than average.

Most ADHD medications are stimulants. They work not by quieting the noisy part, but by giving the rest of the brain a bit of a kick that enables it to overwhelm and mask the noisemaker. That's exactly what it felt like; within seconds my usually drifty mind went from a noisy place to much quieter. I still drifted from time to time in concentrating on my breath, but it was for much shorter periods of time and I was much more capable of dragging my thoughts back to the task at hand, building up my mindfulness.

It felt a lot like I was cheating. "Doping for meditation" sounds ridiculous, and I should probably figure out just what the differences are. But it was such a profoundly notable effect, it might be worth investigating further.

The other meditations

Someone asked, "What are the other meditations you do?"

Okay, so, here's the most important thing to know: I firmly believe that what you do with your first hour dictates who you will be that day. If I spend that first morning just absorbing social media and miscellany, I'm pretty much a distracted basket case for the rest of the day. If, instead, I set up my morning correctly, I'm going to be productive and happy. The next two meditation practices (they involve more than just sitting and thinking) are part of avoiding the distracted basket case mode:

The Prospective Meditation

My first 30 minutes are spent getting up, dressed, feeding the cats and making breakfast. That includes actually cooking over a stove most mornings, grinding coffee by hand, scrambling eggs and chopping vegetables. I find the physical act of cooking food from raw ingredients very grounding. 15 minutes are then set with what Stoics call the Prospective Meditation. I leave my to-do notebook with my schedule open on the kitchen table when I go to bed. I read it carefully, and then I take a deep breath and calm myself, rehearsing the day ahead in whole, always keeping in mind that the day may have other plans. I contemplate what could go wrong, and rehearse how to deal with hindrances and roadblocks. The last 15 minutes are spent making sure the kid is up and moving before we both head out the door.

This is one I always try to do. It's not always feasible (rarely, Omaha wakes up and she often thinks I'm too dedicated to my rituals), but I do manage almost every weekday.

The Retrospective Meditation

Usually, this Stoic meditation happens around 8:30pm, which means that many nights it may get pushed later as my parental and familiar duties require me to be out and about. I sometimes have to plan around my schedule and break this in two.

The first part of the meditation involves looking through the same notebook and asking myself, What did I accomplish?, What went amiss, and can I correct it?, and What is left unfinished? This often involves going through the day three times, examining the calendar and notes for every detail, trying to sand down the rough edges.

The second part involves writing down tomorrow's schedule, deliberately calendaring in time-blocks to accomplish specific tasks.

The Default Meditation

Okay, this one's a little weird, because literally no one else I know does this. Every meditation has a setting: The Prospective and Retrospective meditations are from Stoicism, and I do them at the dining room table, where I wind down and then set up my day. The breath meditation is the first Samatha meditation of traditional Buddhism, and I do it on a zafu.

The "default meditation" is done in a quiet room with a comfortable chair. I clip a voice recorder to my shirt (my trusty Olympus VP-10) with voice activated mode on. I set a timer for 20 minutes and then I just... think.

The default mode is what your brain is doing when you're not concentrating on something. It's about daydreaming. I find when I'm doing Samatha that many of my distracting thoughts are about accomplishing things and dealing with the undone. Default Meditation is basically an excuse to think about those things, get them into the tape recorder, and process them later, getting them out of my head while accessing them in the order and manner my brain prefers.

The process of giving voice to the thoughts, and then soon thereafter dumping the voice recorder to my laptop and writing down what is actionable or noteworthy, leads to my brain being "emptied" and ready for other things to think about. This one is usually a morning exercise, before I've started dumping too many outsider thoughts (Twitter, Facebook, the radio, whatever) into my head.

Others

In various religious traditions, there are the contemplative meditations, such as Vispassana, Lamrim, and for Christians the Twelve Stages of the Cross.

Stoics practice the Meditation of Tragedy, which is basically staging the worst thing that could happen in your mind and rehearsing how you would react to it meaningfully. Buddhists have a similar meditation. The Lamrim Buddhist tradition spends one week on this sort of thing, then a week on compassion, then a week on wisdom, and then they start over. Vispassana is an exploration of the senses that teaches us to both appreciate them and to understand that they're transient and impermanent. Stoics have the Meditation of Loss, which is similar to Vispassana, in that it teaches us to appreciate the sensations we're experiencing now, the love and affection of our families, the joy in our lives, because fate could take those from us, or us from them, at any moment.

I don't do any of those with any seriousness. Just the three basics, plus the occasional Default Meditation when my brain starts to feel really full.