India Clark (she/her)

English

A guided practice and short talk on mindfulness as truth telling and the need to create internal safety in order to be truthful with ourselves. India shares reflections on her personal experience letting go of ADHD shame, and shares a guided visualization practice to grow self-acceptance by placing all experience inside a ball of loving awareness inside the body.  Warning: includes mild adult language.

Meditation As Truth Telling: Letting Go Of ADHD Shame

I wanted to share a little bit about the idea of mindfulness and meditation practice as a practice of truth-telling and really feeling into what that means. What does truth-telling mean in this moment? What does that mean for me? What does that mean for you? So you're welcome to take this into your body. If you'd like to close your eyes, you're welcome to close your eyes or gaze downwards, just supporting you to go a little bit inwards, finding a posture that's comfortable and maybe that posture includes movement, maybe that includes sound, stretching, or stillness, relative stillness, swaying, just balancing relaxation and alertness in your body posture so that you are able to pay attention with as much ease as possible, with as much dignity as possible with what's true for you and letting yourself notice what the truth is right now in your body, what the truth is in your energy and in your mind. I find that I don't always tell the truth to myself and I have good reason for that. In order to be present for the truth, I needed to be safe enough and sometimes I don't create the conditions inside myself for enough safety that I can be honest with what's actually happening. So for me, one of the ways that shows up as a neurodivergent person with ADHD is I should be more organized, I should be more on time, I should be more put together, I should look better, I should have my shit together and when I don't, I'm not at peace inside myself and sometimes the easiest way for me to be with that is to just tell myself everything's really fine, you know, I don't I don't feel like a mess, I'm not a mess, I'm keeping up. For me to be there with the parts of myself that feel messy and uncomfortable, I need to create inside myself a condition of safety. One way to do it is to imagine that inside the body there is a ball of love, a ball of warm energy and it's deep inside, as deep as the soul and it's so warm and loving that there's nothing that I could possibly do to turn it into anything other than love. It's unconditional in the sense that I could go to it with literally anything and I could say okay here's my messiness, I'm gonna put it inside the ball of love. I'm just gonna take my discomfort with my messiness, with my non-conformity, with my differentness and I'm just gonna put it right inside that warm ball of love and then I might encounter in myself, well I don't think that I deserve to be loved in this place and so what I do there is put that inside the ball of love. I put my non-deserving inside the ball of love because what love knows how to do is pay attention to what's true without looking away, really including all, everything that we are, including the parts that deny the truth because it's easier. That loving awareness capacity that we have is really able to contain and grow big enough to contain whatever we can throw at it. So that ball of warm awareness inside you can get bigger and bigger with whatever it is that comes into your awareness that is true. Maybe you encounter a part of you that says I don't want to do this, I don't want to practice this. So you put that inside the ball of loving awareness and the ball gets a little bit bigger. Just practicing now with noticing whatever's arising in your consciousness in your body, in your energy, in your thoughts. And see if you can create the conditions of enough safety that it can be true. If you find that it's hard to create the conditions for enough safety you place that inside the ball of warm love. This paying attention kindly is maybe the most healing thing that we can do. Practicing trusting this ball of loving awareness is enough that it can contain anything you bring to it. All that does is make it bigger. It grows bigger, bigger, bigger. And the more that we practice this, the more we begin to trust that compassionate awareness is unshakable, always available, right there inside. And then you may find that suddenly things that were hidden can be revealed. My experience has been as I grow my practice of self-compassion I become more aware of my fantasy life, the ways that I'm living in a fantasy some of the time about who I am, what I can do. You know, delusions of grandeur. Sometimes I might notice I have all kinds of ideas that I think I'm going to do but I don't actually want to do them. I don't want to do that work and I can spend a lot of time fantasizing about whatever project before I realize it's not even something that I would ever bring myself to do. I just like thinking about it. And it's safe enough now for me to notice that, you know, I don't have shame about that. It just plunked out there like, oh, this realization. And it helps to practice together because we normalize, we normalize practice, we normalize parts, we normalize discomfort. And the energy between us helps us grow the kindness inside of us so we can trust. When I see you trusting you, it helps me. Anytime I see someone else's kindness towards themselves, their self-acceptance, it gives me permission to be who I am, to love myself more completely with all my quirks and to come out of hiding, which is a good thing for me to practice. So as we bring this meditation to a close, just sense into the body sensation of warmth, if you can find it. Open heart, trust, safety, whatever you might call it, finding yourself, that ball of unconditional love. Maybe at this point, it's so expansive that it encompasses all of you. So now you're inside it, instead of it being just a small thing inside you. Let it fill you and radiate. Let it fill you from your head, down your neck and shoulders, down your back and arms, through your fingers, down your chest, your belly, into your hips and legs, into your calves and ankles, into your feet, into the ground. So that maybe you take it with you everywhere and you offer it to others as well. And when you're ready, you can gently open your eyes.