The Varieties of Meditative Distractions

It’s not just your verbal mind…

Listening to a lot of meditators, you’d think that the narrative voice in your head was the only challenge to concentration. Yet while it is a prominent part of meditation — especially early in the process, it’s by no means the only one.

In this article I’m giving descriptions of various distractions, along with a few hypotheses about when they occur — to be experimented with and revised as we go along. I am using my own experience with binaural beats (which create different levels of brain waves). It’s a remarkably small sample set — but case studies are a good way to begin. I’m sure the content in this article has been covered elsewhere, but — surprisingly — I haven’t come across it yet.

The Narrative Voice

This is of course the famous ‘voice in your head’ that is such a persistent part of meditation, especially at the beginning of each sitting, and sometimes throughout the session. Actually, it may not be a narrative, but a dialogue, as you review past interactions or rehearse for the future. While rumination is never good, there’s a practical side to rehearsing, but neither is helpful within meditation.

The narrative/dialogue voice is associated with our usual waking consciousness: left fronto-temporal region, and beta brain waves.

Fantasies and Daydreams

Another type of distraction comes in the form of fantasies and daydreams. Although there can be some speech associated with them, it is often more spontaneous and less propositional than in narrative voice. Auditory images include clips of music, and sometimes repetitive earworms. Visual images are usually an important factor, as well. Generally, there is a fair amount of control over the fantasy, while some auditory and visual content (like earworms) is not under direct conscious control.

I associate fantasies and daydreams with alpha brain waves, and they usually occur deeper into the meditative session. If one were trying to do some problem-solving, this would be a very good opportunity, although that’s not what we’re trying to do in meditation, per se.

Dreams and Non-Conscious Content

Now, you might think that if you’re dreaming, you’re asleep. But within meditation it’s possible to have periods where you are (more or less) awake and yet viewing dreams. Sometimes, these dreams involve personal content, like many (but not all) of our sleeping dreams. Yet I find that the content can also be bizarrely disconnected from anything or anyone in my life.

Snippets of conversations can drift by, or images of unfamiliar people, places, and things. I would guess that these might be psychic impressions, but those tend to have higher emotional charge than the kind of trivialities that sometimes float past (last week, I overheard a conversation between a man and a woman about doing laundry).

I call it non-conscious content to distinguish it from sub- or unconscious material that would be related to personal experience, or supra-conscious material that would have truly transpersonal dimensions. This stuff is just “not-me”, but I can’t say much about what it is. Similar experiences can occur on cannabis and other psychedelics, or in hypnagogic states.

Within the context of meditation, I would associate these distractions with theta brain waves, most common during dream states of sleep. To the extent that images predominate, this may be in part a regression to preverbal stages and subcortical areas of the brain, although the content makes that uncertain, and it doesn’t seem to be a general rule.

Bodily Sensations

Needless to say, bodily sensations, from cramping of the legs to the sound of kishkes grumbling, can appear during any stage of meditation, and they can be very distracting. On the plus side, they can help to keep you awake and aware. Learning to sense the body and return to concentration is a good skill for meditators, and some teachers — like Eckhart Tolle — stress bodily awareness as one of the best ways to maintain awareness. Within that context, a little hunger pang or the need to sneeze isn’t such bad things.

Working With Distractions

When you’re trying to get into some kind of deep concentrative samadhi, all of the above seem to be terrible distractions, and you can feel frustrated by their appearance (assuming you stay awake). Many meditative traditions stress the importance of quieting all distractions, and most of us have at least occasional periods when they disappear for a while.

Yet other traditions point out that it is the nature of the mind to produce thoughts and images, and trying to stop their production is like trying to get the body to stop breathing and circulating blood — which are of course also possible, and encouraged in some meditation traditions.

Recognizing the nature of mind as both the silent witness and the producer of thoughts, images, dreams, is an important part of the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition, among others. Rather than quieting the ‘distractions’, one maintains awareness of them, seeing them as the radiance of the natural mind.

It makes sense to me… but then again, I obviously have a lot of distractions in meditation. ;)