Today’s meditation session was on observing, noting and not-reacting to distractions.
There were three kinds of stimuli causing distractions – external sounds, body sensations and thoughts.
Chewie made some noise a few times while I was mediating. These sounds were the easiest distraction to recover from.
I felt a bit of a tinge in the lower back, and some funny sensations in fingers. These too were relatively easy and quick to recover from.
There were thoughts. Lots of thoughts, mostly about people and things that I would rather not think about. These were the hardest to recover from. And a few of them recurred during the session.
There was progress made though. By the end of the session, I was able to have longer sustained periods of focus without distractions. I noticed this (does noticing this and feeling happy about it count as a distraction?). And, on this very rare occasion, I wanted the session to go on for longer than it did :)
First thought
Based on today’s observations, ranking of distractions: thoughts >> body sensations > external sounds
Second thought
Perhaps the low reactivity to external sounds was due to training from the hearing related therapy that I have been having with the NHS. A lot of our work there has been in non-reactivity, or using counter-thoughts to disturbing sounds. Perhaps, subconsciously that helped me here too.