Now that you've had a week to practice the body scan meditation, we're going to look at some of the common challenges you might experience when you first start to meditate (and will continue to experience regardless of how long you've been meditating for). Following up on the last session's video, How to Meditate in 5 Easy Steps, the video below explores some ways to deal with external distractions that arise when we meditate that pull our mind away from what we're trying to pay attention to.
Next session we'll cover what we can do to when we get distracted by our thoughts and how to manage mind wandering, and in the following sessions we'll look at how we can respond to emotions that arise when we meditate, and how to manage pain and discomfort we may experience.
As we learned last session, whenever we're meditating and notice that our mind is no longer where we want it to be, we simply acknowledge where our mind has gone, and then as best we can, let go of this distraction and redirect our attention back to where we want it. A good way to accomplish this is to make a mental note of what's distracted us, by saying silently to ourselves a word or two, or a short phrase that describes wherever our mind has gone.
This is a technique we'll be using throughout this program for all sorts of distractions, and something that works not just when we meditate, but whenever we find ourselves distracted or our mind wandering throughout the course of our day, regardless of what we're doing at the time.