Being, hyperactive style
What meditation and mindfulness looks like for a brain that doesn’t want to shut up
Before I jump into today’s post – the 10 day procrastination un-challenge kicked off in the subscriber chat yesterday. I’d love to see you there–and have your feedback on whether that format is/isn’t a useful one for this kind of activity in the future. I’m new to the chat feature in substack, so your opinions have a big influence here!
Now, on to today’s topic.
I’ve had a series of ideas hopping around about what this week’s post could be. For example, I could continue on the theme of useful tips and tools for specific common challenge areas, like I did last week on procrastination, on other favorite topics like distractibility, motivation, or decision making. But as my brain buzzed between those and about 35 other things I won’t pain you with listing here, I realized that the topic emerging for me this week is more about what it looks like to “be” with a hyperactive mind.
It was such a revelation to me when I learned that one of the reasons women are less likely to get accurately diagnosed with ADHD is because their hyperactivity may be more likely to show up as mental than physical. As a young kid, I was pretty active, but I lived in an active family and on 40 acres of land, with lots of animals, plus woods to romp through, and it was the early 80s in KY where neurodivergence wasn’t even a teeny bit on the radar.
By the time I hit puberty, however, brutal hormonal changes had sucked almost all the energy from my body and I found it challenging just to get up and do the basic activities of daily living. Rapidly schlepping a backpack around the school between classes was as close to physical hyperactivity as I got. However, that hyperactive tendency didn’t go away–it just went inside. My brain became a 24-7 club spot, always playing a mix of music, memories, imaginings, and worries. The lights were always on, the noise was incessant.
Initially, mantras were the biggest help to being in my hyperactive mind
In retrospect, I think this is part of why I was drawn to the specific Buddhist practices I began exploring when I was 11. I’d told my mom I didn’t want to be Catholic anymore because I was “tired of being told I’m going to hell for asking too many questions” (late 80s Pope wasn’t nearly as cool as recent Popes have been, and the Sunday school teacher at our church definitely wasn’t a fan of my hyper curious and prone-to-challenging questions approach to religion). My mom, to her credit, told me “okay, find a religion you like then” and supported me as I asked to visit a Quaker meeting house, a synagogue, a Hare Krishna ceremony, and eventually a few different Buddhist temples.
The branch of Buddhism I felt the most drawn to was Tibetan Buddhism, specifically Dzog Chen. In the sangha I practiced with and the texts I studied, I loved that in this branch of Buddhism we were not only encouraged to engage in debate about religious precepts, we also had extensive mantra-chanting sessions. In that externalized, repetitive noise of the same syllables over and over, I found the closest thing to mental calm I had experienced since my hyperactivity had gone inward.
In my later teens and twenties, I expanded into other meditation practices (long and unpleasant backstory as to why; I won’t get into that now). As context, this was all happening in places like KY and FL in the 90s and early 2000s – not hot spots or times for meditation research or practice, in other words. I was seen as quirky, at the least, and I didn’t have many people with whom to discuss the experiences I was having. So when I encountered meditation guidance for more open-awareness style meditations–where you are supposed to just sit without any noise or mantra and observe what arises–it felt like torture to me, and I became convinced I was “bad” at meditation and mindfulness. Traditions I read at the time that advocated for this silent, open-awareness style meditations tended to put mantra-based meditations down as not “true” meditation; mantras were portrayed as almost a form of cheating. I felt ashamed of my apparent lack of skill, and alternated between not meditating at all, trying again with a more open awareness meditation (judging myself harshly when it made me feel bonkers), and using mantra-style meditations with a vaguely illicit sense that I was backsliding. This went on for several years and, needless to say, it was not a fun time for me.
Then an MBSR course helped me reframe the practice of meditation
It wasn’t until I took a wonderful Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course in my early 30s (palousemindfulness has a free, asynchronous version of this for people who, like me, couldn’t fit a live version of this into their schedules; I’m so grateful to the instructor who made this) that things started to shift. In that course, I encountered a wonderful video from Shauna Shapiro where she described going to a meditation retreat where she, also, had felt tormented during meditation. She kept critiquing herself harshly every time she “messed up” by getting sucked into a thought or feeling during her practice. When she explained that her teacher told her that wasn’t practicing meditation, that was practicing anger and judgment, this sharp exhale shot out of my lungs. Her teacher told her practicing the return of attention in a loving way was the whole point; that was the muscle to build during her meditation. It fundamentally shifted how I practiced, and paved the way for me to embrace a wider menu of meditation and mindfulness techniques.
Similarly, when I realized I had a mentally-hyperactive style of ADHD, it also prompted that sharp exhale or recognition and relief. Being able to see the way my mind worked as just a default mode tied to my neurotype, rather than as an indication of something being “wrong” with it, gave me a new perspective on the reasons I found it helpful to have a wider range of options for how I approached meditation and mindfulness. (This is also a reason I'm glad I came to the label as an adult and not a kid, honestly; in contrast, my sensory sensitivities/sensory processing challenges were labeled as a kid and I still work through periodic feelings of guilt and shame about something being wrong with me for having them because of the way they were treated as a childhood problem to be solved.)
So what’s it like now?
Given all that, what does embracing “being” in a given moment, over all the “doing” that fills most of my day, look like now, after decades of various meditation practices combined with learning more about various neurotypes and the strategies that support them?
It’s easier to be gentle with myself. I won’t claim it’s my default now–I don't know that it ever will be–but it’s a quick-to-occur reflex when I realize I’m sucked into a highly critical spiral. Though I remain fundamentally agnostic, I’ve come to deeply resonate with this excerpt from a prayer by Tosha Silver that is an appeal to the divine to “change me into one who can fully love, forgive and accept myself / So I may carry your light without restriction.” Flipping the script from “I must be critical of myself so I can refine into someone who deserves to exist” to “It takes being loving with myself to not get in the way of bringing love and kindness to my interactions with others” was revelatory for me, and useful at redirecting that part of me that wants to justify beating myself up as some form of noble sacrifice.
I can now enjoy, rather than judge, pulling from a wide range of practices to match what’s happening in my body/mind at the moment. I have curated a range of playlists on insight timer and other platforms to make this easier–one of mantras, one for handling difficult emotions, one for “I’m exhausted but I can’t sleep” nighttime use, a different one for “I’m burned out but I can’t nap” daytime use, and still others for various focal points like health, movement-based practices, and purpose/intentionality. I’m deeply grateful to no longer judge myself as some kind of meditation diletante, and instead see this as an expression of my neurotype: variety and options are important to me functioning as my best self in the world. (Incidentally, I’m happy to share my playlists if they’re helpful to you–just ask. That said, the work of discovery and curation was, for me, part of the fun; that doesn’t mean it has to be for you though!)
To my surprise, mental quiet happens more often now that I’m not pursuing it. I feel like a cheesy Lifetime special or something saying that, but it’s true; once I accepted that my mind is a noisy place, and greeted the different kinds of chatter that arise without resenting or resisting them, I’ve discovered that sometimes, seemingly spontaneously, my mind will go quiet when I’m meditating, and a peaceful energy thrums through my whole body. Of course, as soon as I try to hold onto that quietude my mind is engaged again, and the chatter starts back up, but it’s easier to laugh at that now, rather than get frustrated by it. I don’t know when, but I do know another fully peaceful moment will come, and that mix of uncertainty and certainty is actually just the perfect nudge my novelty-seeking side needs to keep coming back to daily practice.
Speaking of that side, my curiosity is kicking in now. If you’ve gotten through my whole journey on this topic, I’d love to hear more about yours. What challenges and appreciations have arisen at various points for you when you, as one friend put it, seek to “mentally arrive where you physically are”?