Let's review the silent meditation discussion from last session.
When you first start meditating, the guided audio is a valuable teaching tool, offering real-time instruction on how to practice the meditations. It also helps you keep your mind focused, and makes it easier to redirect your attention back to where you want it when your mind does wander.
The longer you’ve been practicing mindfulness meditations, the less important these elements of the guided audio are. By now you’ve probably internalized the instructions to some extent and may find the guided audio has served its purpose and you prefer to meditate in silence. Even when you meditate in silence, you may notice yourself saying the instructions to yourself at times.
A disadvantage with using the guided audio is that your experience usually won’t match what the audio is describing. For example, the instructions may be regarding how to manage a strong feeling or emotion that’s come up, but you may not be experiencing any strong emotions in that moment.
The audio also provides an artificial structure that may not line up with what feels most natural at the time. Instead of following your breath for 5 minutes, tuning in to your body for 5 minutes, noticing your thoughts for 5 minutes, etc., some other progression may flow more easily, and this flow will not be the same every time you meditate: some days you may have a busy mind with lots of thoughts to watch and let go; other days your mind may be relatively still and you spend a lot of meditation following your breath, and noticing as sensations, thoughts or feelings arise fleetingly and pass away.
When meditating in silence or with a bell track, you may experience some more mind wandering than when you use the guided audio, but you may also find you’re able to focus more on your actual experience and deepen your concentration without the audio there to distract you or interrupt what you’re experiencing in that moment.