Up until recently, I myself followed a guided meditation practice. I found it difficult to sit in silence and keep an eye or a hold on my thoughts. During the times of being silent, my mind would hop from past to present future all over the place, allowing me to call myself wrong in my practice. Since then, I have switched from a guided meditation practice to a completely silent practice for 45 minutes each day. I heard that we have a lot of feelings inside. And we spent a lot of time and energy suppressing most feelings but The reason that they surface the reason that they come out is because they're in us and they want to be released.
What does this have to do with it? Okay, it has a lot to do with it. The thing is the feelings, the thoughts, all the emotions that come up when you're silent. They're coming up because they want to be seen. If you're feeling anxiety, if you keep returning to time with I don't know your dad. That won't go away.
It's because it wants to be seen. It wants to be looked at and it wants to be released. So if you can dedicate your meditation practice to silence, you'll notice that there is a big change in your life. What helps is just to get really comfortable usually sitting up And to allow the thoughts to just come up. It helps to focus on your breathing. When you focus on your breath it brings it gives you an anchor to come back to.
An anchor is something that grounds you in your meditation. If you find that the thoughts are all over the place and you aren't liking the way that you're feeling, just coming back to your breath as an anchor will bring you back to this place, this place of relaxation, this place of silent meditation, and then your mind will wander again. The piece to remember is that when your mind wanders, to notice the thoughts that it wanders to. If you continue to push them down to stuff them to try to get rid of them, they'll never go away. In this following guided meditation Silence seems funny. I don't say a word and I turn off all of the sound.
I start by guiding you into the meditation and I take you out of the meditation. Try it. It's relatively short. It's less than 25 minutes long. And it'll give you a sense of what it's like to be lead. For me to hold space for you, but also for me to not say anything.
Give this one a try and let me know how it works for you.