Meditation Hacks For Quieting Your Mind

Do you have trouble keeping your mind quiet during meditation?

Most meditation systems try to get you to stop thinking during meditation. This is very difficult to do, especially for beginners.

A much better system that I have found to work for me is to instead keep your conscious mind engaged with simple visualizations to keep it occupied during meditation.

Here are some very simple visualizations you can use to keep your conscious mind occupied during meditation:

1. Start Off With The Elevator

   Start off by closing your eyes and imagining yourself being inside an elevator. Imagine standing in an elevator, facing the door and looking up at the digital display up top which shows the current floor as 50. Now imagine feeling the elevator going down, and watch as the digital display starts to count down from 50 down to 49, 48, 47 all the way down to zero.

   Not only does this keep your conscious mind engaged with the exercise of counting backwards from 50 to 0, but it also puts you into a deeper state.

2. Enter The White Room

   Once you go all the way down to zero.  Imagine the elevator doors opening and you now see a white room that seems to go on forever.  You step out of the elevator and you’re in a white room with no walls.  The white glow of the room makes you feel safe and welcome and relaxed.

3. Enter Your Board Room

   Once you’re in the white room, imagine seeing a rather large room ahead of you that has glass walls all around.  It’s a board room with a board room table in the middle and chairs all around.

   Walk into the room, and sit down in the chair at the head of the table.

4. Invite Others In

   If you prefer, you can imagine inviting others to join you in your board room.  You can invite your mentors in, your friends, family, a pet or pets, a fictional character, or anyone you’d like.  It doesn’t matter if they are alive or passed away, if they are a real person or a fictional character like Yoda.  Feel free to invite anyone in that you like.

5. You Can Chat With Them

   If you invited anyone into your boardroom, you can have an imaginary conversation with them, or just simply hang out in their presence.

   You could imagine a caterer coming into the room and bringing a delicious lunch for everyone.  It’s totally up to you.

6. You Can Be Alone

   If you prefer, you could also imagine being in the board room alone.  Just being there quiet with your thoughts, or with some animals. You could make the boardroom table disappear and your chair could become a massaging recliner that gives you a full body massage.  It’s totally up to you.  Just try to make the experience as relaxing and enjoyable as you can.

7. The Simplified Version

   This type of visualization will keep your mind “busy” enough to get you to stop thinking about your TODO list or the things you forgot to do this morning etc.

   However, if you find this type of visualization too difficult for you to imagine, another simple method of keeping your conscious mind quiet is to imagine a symbol, like for example the infinity symbol and just imagine drawing it out in your mind.

   Imagine drawing the symbol with a pen made out of light, going around in one direction and then coming back in the other direction, and then back again.  Just keep mentally drawing that symbol over and over again ,and as you do this, it will keep your mind occupied.

   You could even time the drawing of the symbol with your breathing, such as make it so that it takes one breath in and out to draw the symbol.

   It doesn’t really matter what symbol you choose to use.  You can pick a symbol, a letter, a word, or even just focus on a sound, but the important thing is to just keep your mind occupied with SOMETHING, while you just sit, breathe, and relax.

   Over time, you may find that your conscious mind just kind of “falls asleep” and no longer needs to be occupied and you’ll then enter this state where you’re awake, and aware, but just not really thinking about anything.

Give it a try and see how it works for you. Leave me a comment below and let me know if you enjoyed this post.