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The Best Meditation Techniques for ADHD
Work with your mind, not against it.
“I’m too ADD to meditate.”
“I tried, but I wasn’t good at it.”
“I don’t have the right personality for meditation.”
In nearly ten years of a fascination with meditation that led me from college classes to monasteries in Nepal and ashrams in India to starting my own meditation groups in new cities, I’ve heard those three sentences more times than I care to count. Each one of them is based on a misinterpretation of meditation, 100% of the time.
Meditation is often not about ‘quieting the mind’ or ‘thinking about nothing’. A long attention span is in no way a prerequisite to meditation (although regular meditation practice may lengthen your attention span). Anyone can learn to meditate, and it’s not possible to be ‘bad’ at meditation.
Still, for those of us with ADHD, sitting down and turning inward can seem like a daunting task. Luckily, there are innumerable ways to practice meditation. The Buddha himself said that there are 84,000 paths to reach enlightenment.
Here are three meditation techniques, two of which were taught to me by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, one of the most accomplished meditation masters of our time. I believe these techniques are particularly well-suited to an ADHD brain. All of these can be done with eyes open or closed (try both, see which is more suitable) and in any posture that works well for you, provided you don’t risk falling asleep.
1. Monkey Mind Meditation
This meditation is perfect when you feel like your mind is racing and you have a lot of thoughts.
Instead of choosing one particular object on which to focus, in monkey mind meditation the mind itself is the object. The practice is to simply watch the mind. Watch the way it ebbs and flows, jumping from topic to topic or quietly resting. However, at all times, consider yourself a witness: You’re not getting involved in the storyline of your thoughts…you’re just watching them arise and pass away.
What does it mean to get involved in the storyline? Well, let’s say that in the course of the meditation a thought comes up about a colleague with whom I…
