SSILD Problem: My head is too noisy!

So the title pretty much sums it all up. Whenever I try to do SSild I can't get past the first rotation before having my mind wandering and thinking about something completely irrelevant. Any ideas on how to combat this :whyme:

Practice! SSILD is basically a form of meditation. All meditation and attention/awareness training books I've read say that it is completely natural that your mind wanders. The more you practice relaxing your mind and letting go of / ignoring distracting thoughts, the better you get at it and the quieter your mind becomes over time. The mind is a hyperactive monkey and you need to discipline it through practicing awareness and relaxation exercises. This takes time.

I find that relaxing is (paradoxically) hard work! You have to be really disciplined to continue a form of relaxation in the face of the temptation to lose yourself down random thought chains. However, those times where I succeed in mustering the discipline to relax and only keep relaxing, I find I fall asleep fairly fast.

The first few times I tried SSILD I found myself wired vigorously awake. I found I needed to work in relaxation to the process of SSILD itself.

For one thing, do not "stare hard" with your physical eyes. Try not to make any physical changes while progressing through the SSILD cycles. To move focus from say hearing to vision without physically focusing your eyes on the backs of your eyelids takes practice.

So keep at it, it takes time to get good at anything new!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

Practice! SSILD is basically a form of meditation. All meditation and attention/awareness training books I've read say that it is completely natural that your mind wanders. The more you practice relaxing your mind and letting go of / ignoring distracting thoughts, the better you get at it and the quieter your mind becomes over time. The mind is a hyperactive monkey and you need to discipline it through practicing awareness and relaxation exercises. This takes time.

I find that relaxing is (paradoxically) hard work! You have to be really disciplined to continue a form of relaxation in the face of the temptation to lose yourself down random thought chains. However, those times where I succeed in mustering the discipline to relax and only keep relaxing, I find I fall asleep fairly fast.

The first few times I tried SSILD I found myself wired vigorously awake. I found I needed to work in relaxation to the process of SSILD itself.

For one thing, do not "stare hard" with your physical eyes. Try not to make any physical changes while progressing through the SSILD cycles. To move focus from say hearing to vision without physically focusing your eyes on the backs of your eyelids takes practice.

So keep at it, it takes time to get good at anything new!

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Thanks for the reply FryingMan, enjoyed reading it...
hmm, so just practice huh. So I would assume that practicing other forms of meditation can help out with this problem?

Yes. I had the same problem while practicing MILD. its all about the attention which you can train by meditation :). Simple breathing meditation will train your attention.

You can also practice the rotations during the day, or even sitting up in bed before returning to sleep.