After a restful night’s sleep, my eyes open to a new day.
Inner Pessimist (IP): Ugh. Another day. I just want to keep sleeping. Not work again! Let’s snooze the alarm and go back to that delicious dream.
Inner Critic (IC): Get your ass out of bed, you lazy little shit! How are you going to earn a living, take care of your child, and make anything of yourself if you just keep sleeping?!
Inner Choir: Take it easy, guys. Take a moment to feel gratitude. You are alive to experience another beautiful day on this planet. You have so much love and wisdom to offer the world.
Silence. A few seconds later, IP and IC simultaneously burst into laughter.
IP: It’s so cute how Choir keeps trying to inject us with her lame positivity.
IC: I know, right! Save your hippie love for the rest of the world. Don’t waste your breath on us.
Intuition: *&%^$#(*&^%$*^&%#*&^$
IP: What is she even saying? It sounds like static.
IC: No idea. We keep telling you to get lost, Intuition. Why don’t you get the message? No one understands you. Anyway, enough distractions. Get up, Nida! Stop hiding from your life under the covers and stumbling through your days, without even the faintest clue of what you’re doing.
***
The noise in my inner world is never-ending, the voices jarring and contentious. It’s a constant battle, ignoring them to maintain any semblance of sanity. And all that, while still having to deal with the outer world, which is equally exhausting.
Breaking news updates, fresh celebrity gossip, time-saving life hacks, ground-breaking Netflix series - I am bombarded from all sides. When scrolling through Twitter (which I never actually do), I witness the worst of creation in the comments. But on Instagram, everyone seems to be living their best life. There are just never enough hours in the day to consume and critically assess all the information out there.
I try to make sense of it all - both my inner and outer world - in an effort to feel organized and in control, but the truth is, life is messy. Trying to “keep up” is enough to heighten anyone’s anxiety. It’s no wonder the world is experiencing such a rising mental health crisis.
My most peaceful moments are when I sit in silence, let go of my internal clutter and chaos, and reconnect to myself. I close my eyes, enjoy the sweet sound of silence, and release all the heavy and painful emotions that are otherwise burying me alive. I unearth my Self from the mire, and envelop her (or is it she who envelops me?), experiencing the bliss of union. The more I feel a connection, the more I crave it.
I’ve learnt our most important commodity in life is our attention. Where and how we choose to focus it - on connecting to ourselves vs. mindlessly trying to live up to our or others’ expectations - will dictate the direction and quality of our lives.
When I want to escape what feels like a threatening outside world, I travel inwards through the medium of meditation. Meditation has become one of those catch-all terms that conjures different associations for different people. My own meditation journey began in 2019 on the London Underground, during my commute to and from work. Packed between throngs of worker bees, I’d pop in my headphones, turn up the music (contemporary classical), close my eyes, and tune everyone out. I had a gut feeling (which I later realized was my intuition) to not rely on YouTube demos to learn how to meditate, but rather, view it as more of a scientific experiment, using trial and error to find what worked best for me.
Most people think of meditation in terms of what not to do - think. In order to successfully meditate, we must empty our minds. But that never works for me because the moment thinking becomes forbidden, I’m even more tempted to do it. I prefer to think of meditation in terms of what I can do, instead of what I can’t. My version of meditation is to melt. To unclench my muscles and relax into an immersive state, like a block of ice melting into a river of water, ultimately expanding into vapor and becoming one with the air.
So how exactly do we melt? Visualization works best for me. First, I relax into a semi-sleepy state, where the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious realms are blurred. This is generally a state where we feel more expansive and open to suggestion, where ideas come flowing to us in full swing. How often have we had the world’s greatest idea just before falling asleep, only to forget it the next day? The goal is to enter that state while still remaining lucid.
I focus on those areas in my body that feel heavier, where all my burdens pile up, weighing me down like anvils. Some people like to do body scans, starting from the top of their heads and moving down, melting each part in the process. Others focus on clearing their chakras, starting from their root chakras and moving up. While patiently and gently channeling my attention towards these blocked parts of my body, I imagine them as solid masses of melting ice. Over time, and with practice, what starts off as a mental image turns into a more visceral experience where I actually feel my energy dissolving into waves, coursing through my body.
It’s hard to describe this feeling in words, especially to those who have felt numb for so long. To experience your own body in this way feels both heavenly and human, like breathing for the first time. The more we practice experiencing our own energy, the more attuned we become to it, melting deeper and deeper layers of blocked consciousness in our bodies. With each moment of melting, we feel weightless and free.
This is a much longer term view of meditation because it first requires us to melt all the frozen energy inside of us, energy trapped from unhealed childhood traumas. Healing wounds is a slow and lengthy process, but one that is extremely liberating, too. While we may already be tackling this in other ways, such as through therapy or journalling or talking to friends, meditation allows us to approach the same process from the point of view of the body, rather than the mind.
But meditation is only as effective as our mind’s ability to surrender. Think of the last time you experienced child-like wonder or awe, your breath literally taken away, your heartbeat in flux. Recreating that sense of awe in our mind’s eye, as well as our bodily response to it, can connect us to the present moment, making it easier to let go of everything else.
Sometimes, though, we are our own worst enemy. I’m not going to lie, it has taken me four years to melt away 42 years’ worth of trapped energy (or a large chunk of it, at least). But most of that time was spent overcoming my primary weakness: I was always in my head, too attached to my own thoughts.
As a general rule, the more attached we are to something, the harder it is to let go. That’s why it’s important to practice non-attachment. My thoughts were obstructing me from achieving a fully expansive state. How? A part of me couldn’t stop narrating what I did while meditating. “Now I’m focusing on my head. I can feel it tingle. Now I’m lowering my attention to my neck. This is where so much of my pain resides. The home of my voice, the bridge between my mind and body. Focus, focus…aaaah…there’s the melt.”
The incessant, internal chatter was building a wall between me and what I wanted, which was to temporarily disappear into a state of oneness. To cease to exist, even as I continued to breathe. To die before dying.
Words - one of my favorite things in the whole world - were actually holding me back. So I decided to focus instead on just one word. As a Muslim, I like to choose from amongst the 99 names/characteristics of Allah, but others might prefer to choose a word, personal motto, short affirmation, or verse of scripture in their own language. We can also change the words depending on our mood or what, specifically, our heart is seeking in that moment. Often, in my head, I like to repeat “Ya Wadud” from the name “Al Wadud”, which means The Most Loving.
The single point we choose to focus on doesn’t even need to be a word. It can be an image, perhaps symbolic, of a meaningful person, place, or thing that instantly makes our heart melt. The more we practice, the less time it will take for us to relax. Ultimately, we may not even need a word or image. We can achieve the same results just by focusing on our breath.
The paradox is, by focusing on a minute singularity, we can suddenly feel ourselves expanding to infinite proportions.
Through this process of tuning into a single detail, in order to tune everything else out, we loosen our grip on our thoughts, simultaneously weakening the hold they have over us. We are letting go of one thing in order to make space for another - simple presence. We are softening our inner resistance, that insistence of the ego mind to say, “I am,” and, “I want,” so that the higher self can ask, “Am I?” like an infinite question reverberating through time and space, a question posed in all humility and earnestness. Not “Why am I?” because that would involve too much thinking. Simply “Am I?”, “Do I exist?”, “Am I even here?” And if we’re successfully able to melt into the moment, the answer to our question will be pure silence, because we are no longer a “we” that can hear. We’ve disappeared into oneness.
When we are one, so are the voices in our head - our inner pessimists, inner critics, inner choir, intuition, and others. When we are one, we understand how everything in life provides us with an opportunity to either grow, stagnate, or devolve. The internet, Twitter, Instagram - these things are what we make of them. If we have a strong enough center, no social media troll or swoon-worthy influencer can steer us off course. It’s easier for us to see things as they really are.
My first post was about Unblinding. Melting is what helped to unblind me. It helped me see the world through a different lens, and detach just enough to be both the main character AND the omniscient narrator of my own life. It helped me take ownership of my healing and presence in the world, and opened me up to the innate power and love I never even knew I always had.
To melt with allness of things, the small part of you must cease to exist. The one who mistakenly thinks he or she is separate. ❤️
There is a reason why I was meant to read your post today (much later than I usually do) - and that’s because right now is when I needed these words the most.
I loved how you described visualising blocks in your body as ice melting away, I’m definitely going to try this. To be honest, I’ve been neglecting meditation for a while now but this has reminded me of how much I need it. Thank you 🙏🏽
Khalid and I were chatting last week about meditation, and we were speaking about how people, especially in the western world, view meditation as a form of relaxation. But how it is actually soooo much more than this. To enter a state of true meditation, the relaxation must come first. We don’t meditate to relax; we meditate to ‘be’.
Thank you again for your beautiful words and wisdom, Nida. I loved this post and I love you! Such an amazing human being you are. 💛