alsomeditation

Sitting meditation can be challenging for someone who is unable to sit still. It didn’t stop me from doing 100 hours of it in 10 days in a silent retreat and then doing 1-2 hours a day for the year after. But that … that became another goal, another target, another ideal self which I painted and could never live up to, and another thing where I just had to push harder or do more or wasn’t enough. It became the opposite of what the buddha taught, and made me more detached to boot.

Vipassana meditation aims to train equanimity: the detached observing of sensations. But for someone like me, the aim becomes to feel all the sensations, to get better at it, and that defeats the point.

So let’s look at what it is. 

You focus on your breath; a rhythmic motion. 

This is an autistic warp* at the most fundamental level; I find the word ‘stim’ degrading but you can use it if you must. 

This regular motion allows you to have a *gentle* dopamine latch, and regular dopamine signalling, so that you have an anchor to observe your thoughts and not get pulled around by them, thereby lowering phasic dopamine response.

The aim is to train your dopamine system so that:

1 - you have moderate tonic dopamine (gentle focus)

2 - you have low phasic dopamine (releasing thoughts)

My dopamine latch is too strong, and my variability too high. Other forms of meditation work a lot better, and keeping them varied over time seems to be essential.

Triathlon was great in this regard, with cycling being the best. All 3 of the sports are rhythmic motions and you can cycle your focus, but how you approach them is essential. Long-distance was ideal because it kept me in zone-2 and focused on form instead of intensity. Triathlon is also a solo sport and I did all my training alone; I despise group rides because they kill the reason I am out there in the first place. I guess it’s when I started doing intervals and aiming for the world championships that I lost my core meditations.

Zone 2 is where you can hold a conversation, ish. I recommend skipping the data devices (also addictive) and instead just going on feel. This will get you into your body and focused on your breath. Dial in on the motion of your legs, or whatever sensation is strongest, and trying to mentally settle in to the rhythm.

For cycling you set your breathing at a certain pace then set your body at a certain balance and tune into your legs - hands to shoulders to core to hips to thighs to feet - and try to make sure that you have constant equal power through both legs at all phases of the pedal stroke. Focus on pedalling in circles, at a set cadence, totally stable and attuned… and then release the focus for a while and just enjoy the ride. When your mind wanders, pull it back to your legs, tune in for a bit, then enjoy the ride again. You can do this for hours on end in Z2 and it is incredibly pleasurable, plus probably the best possible thing for your overall physical fitness.

People achieve the same thing through running, but it is a lot more taxing on your body. Most can’t hold a steady jog for multiple hours without harming themselves. But it is a very good short-duration option which necessitates minimal gear. The same for swimming. But the key is to keep the intensity low-to-moderate - just enough so you have to focus - and to remember to tune into and enjoy the experience of your body in motion.

Chanting is great, if you can get over your self-consciousness. The vibrations in the body are sublime once you give yourself to them, and they quite literally feel like a massage for the brain. There is growing evidence that deep, slow, resonant humming and chanting increase nitric oxide by up to 15x, which helps increase blood flow to the brain. I have been humming for 10 minutes in the bath in the evenings and it feels like the entire day is flushed from my synapses by the end of the session.

Knives are my favourite for pure meditation. I pick a lump of rust and rub it against a stone until it is a knife. These are all warps, allowing the tangle ball of thought to weave itself into a tapestry. They are all ways of establishing a constant tick-tick-tick which my dopamine system maybe lacks by default. This tick allows memory encoding and emotional release.

And then if you want to get really deep you can write, after a session. Good god can you access and release some deep-rooted shit if you just do your focused cycling or running or walking or knives or whatever and then allow yourself to release and write.

I never knew I was autistic but for the last 5 years, when I was working and training and just killing myself for the cause, I absolutely *needed* my week-long solo bike tours. I did the entire henro in shikoku, which takes 10 days by car, in 7 days. 10-12 hours a day for 7 days; that was too much. But I was following Kobo Daishi and I imagine he also did too much, as did the b-man. These aescetics weren't known for moderation.

Each of these rides would start with 3 days of me breaking down into tears on the bike. I was always solo and always in zone 2 and I never quite knew why. It makes sense now: the longer rides meant I had to be in ‘meditation mode’ and they resulted in the release of whatever slow-trauma I was feeling from my job and the fact we … that I had to maintain a strong moral compass between employers and employees who seemed to have forgotten theirs.

Whatever the cause, those first 30 hours of cycling on my solo trips were how I stayed sane. 30 hours of concentrated moderate cycling. The regular tick tick tick providing a constant drip of dopamine so that my memories could encode and my emotions could release.

So if you struggle with sitting meditation, as most of us do, just don’t do it. Find something else.

Key points:

1 - rhythmic motion which you can softly latch to, resulting in regular dopamine signalling

2 - low to moderate intensity, so you stay focused but don’t lose your rhythm

3 - do it alone and allow for emotional release, and writing afterward if time permits

4 - keep it varied, so you don’t develop to strong of a latch to any single thing

This is what works for me. The b-man was hardcore and I have done sitting meditation vowing not to move a muscle for an hour, 10 hours straight in one day, etc. They all just became targets, which is the antithesis of what he taught.

Meditation is there to remove your karma and your learned behaviour. A way to integrate and release. For me, it was a way of exporting all the greed that I saw in the day to day, and cleaning my mind of the contamination of our world.

It can be whatever you want; choose something you enjoy.

/jb202508110726

*I like the idea of warpiing and weaving, like in textiles. I view the repetitive action as a way of establishing a warp, so your thoughts can naturally spool out. For me, tangled thoughts feel like a tangle ball of steel wool, and the warping helps me to weave them into something more legible. It also warps them out of my brain.