Calling Anybody re: Benefits of Meditation

Obviously it’s not a cure, but I would like to contact any members who do meditation, that find it helpful.

Dave x
Jazzer

 

I have always disliked compromise.
I have always tried to avoid it.

But now my entire life is compromised.
My silence has been destroyed, and my musical creativity has been ripped out of my heart.

Internal head noise is totally unacceptable,
but can anybody think of any alternative to acceptance ??
What a wretched dilemma.

My daily sessions of meditation start with the experience of noise, which lessens as I am able to relax, despite the intrusion.
I drift off into an hypnotic state, often becoming unaware of it for some long time.

This lessening of awareness often benefits me, as it sometimes continues throughout much of the day.

Perhaps we cannot avoid compromise?

 

My therapist wants me to try meditation but i feel like i would just end up concentrating on the noise rather then trying to relax. Maybe i just need to practice it.

 

My therapist suggested the same thing and I mentioned that I may just focus on my tinnitus instead and she said that it does take practice. Mediation in general takes practice. So it's OK if your tinnitus takes your attention away at first. Eventually you will learn with practice to ignore it.

 

Mediation is great even without tinnitus. One book that I really liked was written by a professor of Neuroscience who also happens to be a meditation master called The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. It gave very clear instructions. Not just a bunch of theory.

 

She told me to put like some back ground nature noise on and try and focus on that instead so im not focusing on the tinnitus. Maybe one of my new years resolutions this year should be do meditation.

 

If the act of just sitting down and doing traditional meditation feels daunting because of tinnitus, there are other alternatives. I do mantra meditation mainly from the Kundalini yoga tradition. I use my voice and breath to directly affect the nervous system/chakra system.

I'm also a musician and I have tried many yogic techniques. Using the voice is the fastest way to get results, and to deepen the relationship with my voice in this way has a great effect on my singing.

This is an example of a very gentle meditation that anybody can do safely (best before sleep). Try doing it 31 minutes when in distress over tinnitus.

Meditation Heart Cross Sa Ta Na Ma

Personally, if my tinnitus sticks I think meditation is the only way I will ever be able to accept it.

 

This was one of the first remedies I uses to help break the cycle of an oncoming panic attack. It worked to some degree but supplements helped more. But the touching of fingers is very helpful in taking your mind off of tinnitus when trying to meditate.

 

Thank you for coming back folks.
My lovely misus Sylvie is a retired clinical hypnotherapist, who now just helps friends with anxiety, cancer, ill health etc.... to cope with their emotions.
Knowing me (perhaps too well - better than I know myself, she says) she recorded one live session onto my iPhone.
It runs for 22 minutes and is a beautiful experience for me.
(Incidentally - she is a gem.)
If sits by my bed each night just incase noise wakes me up too early.

But my daily morning meditation I do silently.
I lay quietly, often in a warm bath, close my eyes, ask my tummy to take over my breathing for me.
As my natural rhythmic reflex breathing takes over I am on my way.
Do not listen to your tinnitus.
Just allow it to be there - you will soon learn to relax past all of that.

(As I exhale I ‘think’ the word ‘deep,’
As I inhale I think the word ‘er.’
...deep-er....deep-er....deep-er....deep-er.....)

There is also a nice meditational product you can buy called ‘CALM.’

 

I really want to look more closely into your suggestions on here folks.
At the moment I am on the QM2 cruise ship, and the expensive internet minutes just evaporate.
I’ll be home in a few days.
Thank you again.
Dave x
Jazzer

 

Hi everyone. I just put together a new audio meditation that I am hoping will help some people. I know the audio quality isn't that good so I just ordered a new microphone.

Please don't get turned off by the word meditation, I know I did for a long time. You don't have to be any kind of a meditator to listen, just be you.

Tinnitus Meditaion 1

 

For me, meditation has been the thing that has made the most difference to my tinnitus. After two and a half years of having the ringing, and gradually but surely developing more and more anxiety over it, I decided to give meditation a go. I was pretty doubtful that I'd get any benefit from it - it seemed like sitting in silence would be the last thing I'd want to do. It's about 8 months now since I started a daily meditation practice and (although the ringing is the same volume) I'd say that the emotional effects of my tinnitus are only about 20% of what they used to be.

When I first began meditating, I spent most of my time focusing on the noise (which I'd say varies between a 4 and a 7), and even though I had ambient background sounds playing through my headphones it'd often be hard to break from attention away from the tinnitus and back towards the breath. I used to think about the noise before I began the meditation, how much it would distract me, knowing it'd be an issue, and of course it was. However, as I've developed my meditation practice, it's become easier and easier not to think about the tinnitus. I think this is partly because my attention is much stronger and more under control than it was before. I also think that repeatedly labelling the tinnitus as 'nothing to worry about' and then calmly returning to focusing on the breath helps to train your brain to label the noise as something that it can ignore.

In the past few months I've started meditating without any background sound (or guided voice-over). At first this made me particularly anxious, and I had many sessions where I was particularly distracted. However, bit by bit you start to really take the power away from the noise - just being able to sit in complete silence and be okay with it gives you the confidence to deal with the noise during the rest of the day. It meant I stopped fearing times during the day when I knew I'd be in silence. And when the fear is gone it's so much easier to forget to even check that its even there.

There are loads of great meditation apps out there, and it's definitely worth starting with guided meditations. I used one called Aware to start with which has some good ambient sound options. 'The Mind Illuminated' is a great, secular and no-nonsense manual for mediation if you want to get a book on it

I plan to write up my experience in more detail soon on this forum.

 

Does your tinnitus get louder when you meditate in silence? Can you hear your tinnitus increase when breathing?

 

@Lilah

I wouldn't say it gets objectively louder, but obviously without any other distractions it becomes much more difficult to ignore. The sound of my breathing isn't loud enough to mask the tinnitus, and I'd definitely recommend using some masking sounds (although not so loud that you can't hear the tinnitus at all) when you first start meditating. On a bad day I can still sit and spend most of the meditation session pulling my attention away from the noise and onto the breath, only for it to return a few seconds later. It's just now I've almost completely got rid of my reaction to hearing the noise so even when it's at its worst, the anxiety and suffering it causes is much less.

On a good day, especially when there is some subtle background noise such as the street or birds, I can spend an entire session without my attention drifting to the tinnitus at all.