Mindfulness and Perimenopause

Mindfulness Basics

Here are the very basics of meditation for those who want to give it a try.

SETTING UP

Sit on the floor or in a chair in an upright position. Think of balancing your head over the center of your body. Sit on your sitting bones. Visualize your ears being in a straight line with your sitting bones. You shouldn’t be leaning forward nor backward. Your eyes can be open or closed. If open, pick a spot on the floor in front of you that leaves your neck in a comfortable upright position. You want to be alert but not looking around. You also don’t want to feel like you are going to sleep. Try both open and closed to see what’s works better for you.

ATTENTION

Mindfulness meditation is really an exercise in strengthening attention. You put your attention on something (e.g. your breath, the image of you sitting or ambient noise) and then notice when it’s not on the chosen object anymore. This will happen very quickly at first. At that point,  you bring it back to the object. Don’t beat yourself up. You aren’t bad at it! Just keep at it. It’s like strengthening a muscle that you haven’t used in a long time. The object most typically used is the breath because it’s always with you. The trick is to notice your breath moving through your body but without starting to control it. Controlling your breath can lead to over-breathing and make you feel lightheaded. Let your breath be as it is, just notice it without changing it.

THE GOAL

The real aha of mindfulness meditation is that while you are bringing your attention back to an object you inadvertently start to see your recurring thought patterns. You soon come to see that your thoughts are habitually generated and often follow similar patterns. They may be true, but they may not be. When you listen to someone else talk about something, do you believe everything they say? No, you listen but think about which things you agree with and which you don’t. Strangely, we often believe all of our own thoughts and it’s often these patterns of thoughts that hold us back or generate negativity for us. By sitting for 10 minutes a day, you’ll become familiar with the patterns of thoughts. This new knowledge might just allow you to call “BS” on your habitual, but untrue thoughts which will free you from the unproductive thinking.

TIME

Start with five minutes. Set a timer and keep at it until the bell goes off. Here are two options to get started. 1) Count your breaths: say “1” on the in-breath, and “1” again on the out breath, then “2” on the next in-breath and out-breath, and so on, counting up to 10 and back down to 1. 2) Silently repeat phrases that resonate for you, such as “breathing in” and “breathing out.”